A (less serious) Portrait of the Archaeologist as a Young Woman. The more substantial blog is here: http://middlesavagery.wordpress.com
"It’s all very melancholy, all these little remnants.”
“Why is it melancholy?”
“The abandonment. The abandonment is melancholy. In a way it’s worse than throwing away, much worse. I can understand one family being obliged to flee or run or abandon, but that nobody else cared. That it was so overwhelmingly abandoned by everybody. That nobody had cared to solve something, to resolve something, that was very offensive to me. That was, you know it was like leaving a corpse, you don’t leave corpses, that’s a little bit the feeling that I had. That here was a carcass, a carcass of a house, of a life, of a private, that nobody cared to pick it up and give it a proper burial.”
(…)
I thought that it was important that somebody should care, that somehow somebody was leaning over these words, reading them, unfolding these letters, that somebody had bothered to write and it really didn’t matter that it was an eleven –year-old boy who cared. Objects have lives, they are witness to things. And these objects were like that. So I was in a way glad that you were listening."
“Why is it melancholy?”
“The abandonment. The abandonment is melancholy. In a way it’s worse than throwing away, much worse. I can understand one family being obliged to flee or run or abandon, but that nobody else cared. That it was so overwhelmingly abandoned by everybody. That nobody had cared to solve something, to resolve something, that was very offensive to me. That was, you know it was like leaving a corpse, you don’t leave corpses, that’s a little bit the feeling that I had. That here was a carcass, a carcass of a house, of a life, of a private, that nobody cared to pick it up and give it a proper burial.”
(…)
I thought that it was important that somebody should care, that somehow somebody was leaning over these words, reading them, unfolding these letters, that somebody had bothered to write and it really didn’t matter that it was an eleven –year-old boy who cared. Objects have lives, they are witness to things. And these objects were like that. So I was in a way glad that you were listening."
This American Life, The House on Loon Lake.
this american life
quotes
objects
materiality
"Ordinary objects which have long been used by one master take on a sort of personality, their own face, I could almost say a soul, and the folklore of all nations is full of these beings more human than humans, because they owe their existence to people and, awakened by their contact, take on their own life and autonymous activities, a sort of latent and fantastic willfulness."
Paul Claudel, Meditation on a pair of shoes
materiality
object biography
