The Everlasting Universe of Things

An excerpt from my essay just published in the new issue of AGNI (No. 101).

Subscribe to or purchase the most recent issue of AGNI to read the full essay, along with new work by Kazim Ali, Hoa Nguyen, Robert Pinsky, Debra Nystrom, and others.

---

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni”

---

Teddy waits at the dining table for more quinoa salad. His semicircular ears and black button eyes are visible above the horizon of deep cherry, while the lower half of his face is hidden. On the bench, a clothbound dictionary boosts him just high enough to reach his cup. His other paw rests on the folded blue napkin.

He’s been here since last night. Oliver tells me that Teddy loved the quinoa so much, he has decided to remain in the dining room until someone offers him another helping. Unfortunately, this afternoon we ate the leftovers at a picnic to which Teddy was not invited.

I am surrounded by objects who wait for me to move them. Sometimes, these objects must be tidied. Sometimes, washed. I pick them up with my hands and place them elsewhere. Put certain ones in the sink, others in the recycling bin, another on a shelf. Often, I gather up several that belong in the same location and make a small pile on the couch or the hearth where they wait again, coalescing, temporarily, into a new collective shape.

If I ever begin to feel depressed by my constant maintenance of objects around me, I remind myself that when one cares for something—even middling care suffices so long as one can sustain it—that thing becomes a sort of pet, and then it is able to give as well as to receive love.

Oliver keeps a collection of sticks on the front porch, each with a different personality. He also notices if, say, a small piece of rumpled foil goes missing from the floor of his room, or if a coin-sized triangle of cardboard is not where he placed it last week behind a flowerpot. Oliver’s pets are many—sticks, rocks, red berries he fills his pockets with from a neighbor’s bush. Recently, he invited me to visit his “corn store” in the front yard, where I found a dozen or so bare, pink cobs arranged neatly in the grass like infants in a foundling nursery. I purchased two, costing four poplar leaves.

At dinner, Teddy, Oliver, and I lay out a picnic blanket on the living room rug and share a pot filled with poisonous red berries and some large plastic diamonds we snipped from the bodice of the Snow Queen’s gown. We eat with chopsticks.

Sometimes I worry that I’m allowing Oliver to become buried under a heavy mound of stories, an object too large and powerful to move. Like the time we used books as bricks to build a sort of igloo around him in the living room. When he invited me to join him inside, I couldn’t fit, so his small body sat cross-legged in there until he said he was lonely, and I bailed him out. Or perhaps the stories are forming a soup with too many ingredients so that the subtlety is lost in a swirl of powerful flavors. The ninjas are helping the chef season the soup, since he lost his memory. They must climb Lonely Mountain to retrieve the Hobgoblin’s hat, the hat that will bring his memory back so he can find the magic ring his mother left him when she died. Meanwhile, a girl is falling down a rabbit hole right into the wolf’s mouth. A pirate cuts the wolf open with his dagger, spilling the girl with her loaf of bread further down into the center of the Earth, where the Troll King will weigh her heart against a feather.

For Oliver to cooperate in completing daily tasks, objects must be transformed into something else, and we must be transformed into other people. Strewn across the rug, the markers are bad guys that we, the superheroes, must throw into jail. His shoes are alligators that devour his feet. A peach pit passed to me from the back seat is a small cake, and we are bakers preparing for a party. Objects and identities, in Oliver’s world, are kaleidoscopic. When I attempt, in my moments of adult banality, to limit them, Oliver shakes his head in refusal. The furrows on his brow spell how boring in cursive.

The moon is our sister, I tell Oliver. Or she is our puppy, leashed to Earth. We walk her around and around the solar system for exercise. Or the moon is a ball the Earth plays with. Or, she is the goddess Selene, I say. Her eye watches lovingly over us at night.

Oliver is inconsolable, so I am searching for the right story, the story that will take away the fear that another story put there. We watched Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Ponyo, and now he is terrified that the moon could get too close to Earth. What will happen if the moon keeps coming toward us? he asks, pulling the covers up around his hot neck. He can’t sleep. The moon is not coming closer, I tell him. But what if it did? he repeats. The moon would never hurt us, I say. It’s actually drifting a little further away all the time, like a ball being tossed in slow motion. It travels about three inches further every year. Imagine the length of a worm. (I’ve reached back through my forest of memory to grasp this fact, brought it forward through time into the dark bedroom to offer it to him: a small, wriggling creature.)

Look at this worm, I say. The creature glows phosphorescently in my palm, casting pale light in our corner of the bedroom. Not an earthworm, but a whitish grub turning over in its sleep. The glow illuminates Oliver’s tear-sticky face from below, so I can see his expression finally cool as he pokes my hand with his index finger, curiosity vanquishing dread.

He prods it again, gently, then invites Teddy to feel for himself.

Is it right to use the same word, object, for both the moon and, say, a teakettle? They are both “something material that may be perceived by the senses,” as the online dictionary I consulted states as its first definition. The second meaning, “something that when viewed stirs a particular emotion (such as pity),” fits them both as well. These descriptions might apply to anything physical though, including me, you, Oliver, Teddy, the Milky Way, a glass of milk, a car accident, or a cockroach. I would like to confine my use of “object” to nonliving matter with a defined shape, perhaps suffused, in relationship to the living, with energy, feeling, significance.

In my day, I notice the different relational textures of the things I see and touch. The washing machine feels more inert despite its cheerful tinkling when I push the buttons and its almost violent agitation during the spin cycle, when it thrusts all the items that cover its top—pieces of mail, broken toys who want gluing, a craft from Oliver’s summer camp, two plastic tumblers we acquired from God knows where—loudly to the floor. The coffee mug my husband bought from a potter is fragile, and I hold it with extra care, imagining the artist’s fingers tenderly shaping the clay over which I now place my own hands. Its glaze is white and speckled like an egg, while the form seems to reach both up to the heavens and down toward Earth. Oliver’s bamboo toothbrush, with its crazed, orange bristles, raises my blood pressure slightly whenever I retrieve it from the bathroom drawer at seven in the evening, as if I’m arming myself with an insufficient weapon for battle.

Surrounded by objects as so many of us are, should we not have more nuanced language to describe the universe of things, as the Inuit are said to have their many words for snow? I ask the internet about this cliché and find that it is at least partially true, depending on how different linguists count words in agglutinative languages, wherein affixes (such as prefixes and suffixes) are added to a root word to form a wide variety of nuanced vocabulary. Examples of the Inuits’ basic words for snow and ice include:

qanik: snow falling
aputi: snow on the ground
pukak: crystalline snow on the ground
aniu: snow used to make water
siku: ice in general
nilak: freshwater ice, for drinking
qinu: slushy ice by the sea

And so, clumsily, I venture the start of an object lexicon:

earthing: object formed naturally on Earth (such as a mineral or fallen leaf)
starthing: object in space
handthing: object made with care
machinething: mass-produced object
screenthing: object one looks through to elsewhere
fragmenthing: an object more beautiful now that it is broken
meaningthing: object bestowed with significance through care or memory
plaything: object temporarily electrified by a child’s ardor

These words are inadequate, and immediately I want to replace them with other words, other categories. They have an earthy, AngloSaxon ring to them that I like, however. Noun upon noun, like two feet stomping a circle around a fire.

The moon may not be getting closer, but other existential threats are real. For now, the planet’s abrupt warming hovers right outside Oliver’s consciousness. It will face him directly soon enough. Its causes cannot be separated from the piles of toys and clothes on the floor, from the new, miniature smart phone tinkling sweetly from my pocket, or the pack of peanut butter crackers we buy on our way home. The connections between all things have become lightly visible, and I can’t unsee them. They stretch like spider threads, sticky and luminous in the sun, and cling to me when I walk through them. It feels impossible to pull the many strands from my eyes, hair, and fingers.

Teddy is out of fashion this week. I glimpse his overall-clad legs and globular feet peeking out from the basket of stuffed animals piled like plucked chickens in the corner.

Right now, it’s trolls—three of the selfsame ones, nude and smiling, who’ve lurked in my family’s closets since the 1990s—shaken to temporary life and following Oliver everywhere. Beckoning me to kneel beside him, Oliver pulls back the fabric wall of the troll’s fort in the living room to reveal them gathered around a dining table he’s built from blocks, a smooth, brown stone balanced between them on the table. Striking the hushed, keen voice of a documentarian, he divulges that a single mushroom can feed the entire community.

To better understand our relationship, I make a vow to objects. At particular times during the next three days, I will interact with things—especially handthings and machinethings—as though they can feel my touch. I will consider how they might like to be handled, cared for, exist in relationship to myself, notwithstanding their intended purpose. I have no hypothesis, no particular outcome in mind. I’m not even certain this practice makes any sense, since I don’t expect an earring or a dish sponge to notice me, personally. Yet I am determined to proceed.

Day 1: While washing the dishes I hold each one as though it can sense my hands. What kind of touch might feel better or worse to its body? I consider the wholeness of its physicality (the brittleness of the blue, ceramic plates, the cherry-red, plastic measuring cups that, despite their scuffed, machine-molded bellies, retain something of the Platonic form of the ladle), its origins, and what these mean for the way it has been treated up until now. Unsurprisingly, this practice makes dishwashing take much longer. Periodically, my heart begins to wander from its promise, and I have to bring it back to the tenderness of my task.

Despite my daily tidyings, Oliver’s room is flooded ankle deep. The toys are multiplying— rubber balls and plush animals, Lego vehicles and crayons, doll clothes and rainbow blocks, books and costumes, pipe cleaner creations and geometric magnets, glass jewels, antique-looking keys, international coins from his treasure box, and piles and piles of drawings scattered like autumn leaves. Nothing can be thrown out or given away. Every thing is precious.

We must put our heads together and invent a boat that will sail him over these rough waters to bed. This cardboard box will work, we believe. Yes, it must. The interior is marked in crayon with a captain’s wheel and some simple controls. A dowel for a mast and a sail of green silk should do the trick.

Later, the dirty laundry comes when I whistle to it. It drags its long nose—a sweater sleeve—along the floor like Mr. Snuffleupagus. I pick it up gently and arrange it in the hamper that sits atop the clothes dryer, to sleep….

---

-Subscribe to AGNI to read the rest of the essay.

ALSO,
There are still a few spots open in this summer’s Zoom poetry workshop. Learn more by clicking on the post below.