the architecture of thought
heidegger and aristotle
After several years of putting it off, I’m moving apartments, just a few blocks over from where I’ve lived for the past five years. Moving is hell, and it’s also the disintegration of thought, at least for me—packing thoughts are swirling, here’s a few.
When I first was trying to teach myself how to study things on my own, without the structure of school around me, the year I spent in between various schools, I became dependent on the tea pot and the kitchen table. Arranging things on a tray, that’s the way it worked: once things were arranged, it became possible to read, and the kitchen table was the center of the world, the place where things were done, practical things, like cutting up vegetables and working on greek.
This dependence on arrangement has a cost, however. How I put things is my memory, as I have often pleaded to roommates and children. If something is moved or taken out of place, then a line of memory is lost; the book has been put down just so, the one on top of it as well. If they can stay put, then it is possible to recover the chain of one’s thinking; the smallest angle of book to desk contains volumes. This is part of why the appeal of the presencing of things, I think, to put it heideggerianly, makes instinct-level sense to me, and why each thing does seem to me to be a gathering between horizons; tilt it to the left, it looks better, but also it comes to be as itself. The cup gathers and pours, and we are surrounded by cups.
But then also, once you stop living in the usual way and start man-handling things into boxes, something of the usual is severed—but not in the fun-uncanny way, alas poor yorick/martin H. These things I dwell with are casually named possessions, but the term is ontologically aspirational. In fact to call them mine is now in media res a misnomer. In the move, both anticipating and anticipating picking up the pieces later, suddenly everything I live with spins apart from me, and the distance and gulf between each thing I’ve been dwelling next to, and my own res is well-nigh apparent, the joke is on me. You can have that. This is going on the curb. I have to keep this?
Yet everything is also all too-much-mine at once. Every book, every loved book, is both a thing and an albatross. Things loom. A house is a concatenation of things you can’t all carry at once, and the gracefulness of property as notion becomes again not just overselling what being is to us, but also comes to light, yes, annoyingly, as a fundamental underselling of my relation to res existans. So which is it then, thing, property, fiction?
An ambiguity is at work, thus two philosophers and not just one, plus corrections.
My son asked me this year, and how did it occur to him to ask, to whom was he talking, whether I was a communist, and I told him no but that the question was whether private property was natural, and if not, what was its effect on the soul. Aristotle writes in Metaphysics Delta that it is the nature of having, as such, to act as though the thing you have is a kind of extension of you, in the way, he explains, a tyrant has a city. It’s a kind of ontological fiction as indeed the example makes plain. (For today, best not to ask on what terms one acquires.) You “have” a cup, you possess it; you treat it as second skin, and for a while it sort of is, maybe. But it is not you; your internal principle of motion and rest, in itself and not incidentally, stops short at the edge of your own skin, and cells you can replace by nature but not broken goblets. It’s the tragedy of property that it is possible to forget about the fiction, and indeed we tend towards it. But you recover it, so heavily, in the process of moving-house. Everything around you is yours, but it is not the snail shell you could peaceably imagine the day before.
This is why, this and the heidegger, when the arrangement of house is permanently disturbed, it feels both that the world is vacuous and too-present, everything in between reduced to the absurd. Each so-called possession looms at once vital and shamefully insufficient, a weight, a remonstrance, and why do you own that one misshapen water glass, it doesn’t fit. It is absurd, the way one treated the things that were not-you, and how will you ever find any of them again, you won’t. Very many small things are now grotesque. All others are impossibly loveable, poignant. You see the fiction you were and are dependent on; not for what it is, quite, but rather that something of the veil of maya has been disturbed. And why didn’t you clean all this before!
There are rooms I go to to recover years’ worth of living. If you sit in the same spot again, many times, it is possible to live there again later on, certain museums, noble rooms, nobler lines, wooden paneling from another century. Thinking isn’t dependent on place, exactly, but it stands in relation to it, the thought’s each-horizon. Thinking is fragile, it lives outwards from what is not-us. And it also has to learn to dwell within, as well, inner life that returns outward in speech. Moving house; it has been done by me, let us say, around twelve times. Possibly this is why I depend upon places that are not my own, or rather, have come to learn that it is possible so to depend.
Of the twelve, to report, the happiest one by far was the strangest, a move south, decided within a day or two, fifteen years ago, me and my first infant, five months old, the two of us leaving nearly all previous possession behind. It was the opposite of moving in the sense I’ve described, and then the snail shell immediately contracted to the edge of necessity, me aged twenty-nine, no boxes just a suitcase or five, my dead grandfather’s car, my dear beloved son.
It was the happiest because it was the most free, for several reasons but also from the anxiety of possession, its weight, its falsity, its present half-reality. Again, this anxiety is not the philosophical kind, and it’s this, that and the larger buildings I do not own that nevertheless are a part of the thing that is me, that keep me from transmuting heidegger into sentiment, or for that matter, from the same for parent-hood. Property, the individual kind, is not exactly the blanket solution to care as half-advertised in the aristotelian book, and neither is, simply, the possession of children.
Rather, it is property itself, itselves, the ousia, that is itself a kind of forgetting, a forgetting of self by farming the self out, extending fictionally through what lives past one’s cells. Original forgetting, a way of hiding nature from one’s self, one proposed solution to desire, chimerical, inabsolute. Fortunately, it is easier to remember this while dwelling on a very specific scale, for it’s there you have things and yet are free of them—but the ratio, even when present, is not fundamentally ever accomplished, not for real. It calls for the vigilance that heidegger counsels but perhaps did not fully understand, given his willful swerve away from the political whence and whither of things. It is not that I have too many things, numerically, although I do have them, too many, pastels ground underfoot, tacks, endless rubberbands, and really that pencil again?, that kind of thing. It was that I was hoping I could hide myself from them, from me, and thus constitute being. It was saltwater; it invites smashing goblets, it invites Anne Bradstreet’s holy fire, and perhaps the nobler room of dreams is never realer than of now, right now, and yet the blue color I wish for it, nothing plainer than that thought.
Moving is hell because things are and are not ours. Making an essay of them is a reverse-architecture, a line pointing to the future, a remembrance for when things are settled, a way of settling in. Perhaps I’ll know more about being on the other side.