The ubiquitous lullaby

To posit the world as a question mark implies the adventure of answers. I didn’t seem to find plausible answers to things, I only seemed to find questions, I wasn’t sure they were the right questions or interesting ones. All I knew was how important it was to keep asking questions, to sharpen them up, to breathe life into the world, to x-ray it, scan it, inhale it, taste it, gobble it up, digest it.  As I was walking back home, I looked at the world around me, then thought about the small world that Chris and I had managed to build, when suddenly Mary Jane’s whispering voice appeared melodiously in my head like an intrusive jingle:

Are we good children?

Do we deserve the toys?

Oh yes, we are good children.

Quiet.

Obedient.

Responsive to fear and chocolate bribes.

Mary Jane’s words had been popping in my head for quite a while now. Toys were the trigger. Toys everywhere. That’s why I called the cluster of words here Philosophical Toys, because of Mary Jane, because of the neural web she had drawn in my head, a neural tangle of connections that was now constantly being triggered.

Initially, I had seen this new trend in art, artists using toys in their work, exhibiting beautifully manufactured plastic playhouses where you wished you could get in, where suddenly you were too big and cumbersome, realistic playhouses with roomy interiors including homely furniture and pretend phones, the toy industry was reproducing the whole of empirical reality in vibrant plastic, initially for children, but more and more for adults: extraordinary toy-like Hoovers, computers and robots, the whole western world was becoming a play world, a playful cartography. Advertising used friendlier and friendlier cartoons to represent the world, cutesy graphic design to animate it. Packaging used the same euphoric rhetoric the toy industry used. Car design was becoming more toy like, promising a stylish ride back to our early days. Everyday objects were made more and more from the same substance as toys, the same playful plastic, the same translucent materials, the same rounded appearance. That’s what made me see a toy-like aesthetic at play, the materials, the smooth and curvy lines. Perhaps artists were creating metaphors about a world still in its infancy, they were pointing to an unprecedented regression comparable to the dark ages, but this time a happy one, a regression muffled by a cotton wool world of comfort and safety, where the ride will be smooth, the landing soft.

It was strange seeing so many artists producing work so similar to Mary Jane’s, so many years later. It struck me that maybe she was working under a pseudonym, camouflaged by this new trend. So many artists tuning into the same reality, and then there was one and only one artist elevated as the brainchild who had the brilliant idea of using toys in her work, this artist being given everything she hadn’t been given, even if the work was an unresolved echo of Mary Jane’s.

Mary Jane hadn’t been given a chance, she had got lost, she had lost her sanity, she had decided to defect from the planet knowing that other forces were working on it, she had decided to eclipse herself before she was thrown into the pit with all the others. Perhaps the pain she felt, was close to the pain my mother must have felt at not being given a chance, at becoming a foot extra. Mary Jane. With time, I realised the repercussion of her actions over me, a repercussion that had come in slow motion, slowly insinuating itself in my neural circuits, dancing around them, seducing them, leaving a bittersweet trace. For a long time, every time I saw pale pink, every time I saw pale blue, I saw her face, her large velvety mole, her red hair. And then I saw her in her mad decision. I had been a voyeur to her collapse. I had done nothing but watch. Hypnotised by her presence. By her obsessions. By her idea of abandoning the world. It seemed such a great idea. And then the horror. The horror and the fascination of seeing her doing it. And then the distance. And then the silence. Her collapse? Sometimes I wondered what the difference was between abandoning the world and burying your head in the sand, hiding from everything, becoming an ostrich, other times I thought she had done the right thing, her fragile survival depended on inhabiting her own will, her own fiction.

Bit by bit, her absence thickened as new seductive toys crept all around us. Like so many people my age, Chris and I lived with plastic trinkets, the trinkets from kinder eggs, from film merchandise, miniature toys from cereal packets, red hippopotami and purple ghosts. We certainly couldn’t afford mortgages, so we had turned trinkets into big things. A three eyed monster talking lamp sat in my bedroom, trashy toys lightened up our houses, sweet babies, we loved these small things, they made us smile, they kept us warm, they approved our vulnerabilities giving us eternal youth.

But was it just my reality, were there really toy-like objects everywhere or were my eyes more attuned to them, to the point I had made a social phenomenon out of it? Had my perception gone literal? Too literal? It was a fact that the toy industry had diversified its market with a whole range of toys for all ages, that the amount of objects absorbing the qualities of toys was multiplying. There was no doubt these would be the objects that would sit in future museums, in rooms adjacent to archaeological remains, these toys attested to our needs and disavowals, to our new status as vertiginously lost subjects. On the whole, those fixated on austerity hated the logic of this new landscape. Perhaps, we would end up hating it too. But at the time, we celebrated it with a simulacrum of laughter. There was something about this toy world that we liked, it was playful, it was about cynically accepting where we were, we probably suspected a mischievous unconscious voraciously in need of protection, maybe something had come to the surface under the guise of irony, an irony containing a kernel of despair, somewhere we didn’t know anymore who we were, we had to keep on marching, like an army of docile children asking for nurture, for reassurance, perpetually mesmerised by a sense of powerlessness disguised as play.

Benevolent objects

Consumerist missiles.

Chris kept giving me these toy-like curios, absurd offerings, tokens of love, something genuine was inscribed on their surface, something that made us kind-hearted, that put us in touch with something inextricably human, nostalgia for idiotic times, for the supreme nonsensical, there was empathy in these objects, something ticklish was inscribed in them, there was humour. We started buying whatever brand of cereals gave away free toys, knowing that these trinkets that appeared in your cereal packet, to be consumed in that blurred time, breakfast time, were a kind of cosmic joke that fused juvenile happiness, consumerism and fairy-tale dissolution of contradictions in a single stroke.

Babies? My generation didn’t have babies. We had substituted the experience for the company of friendly bibelots, organic design, thinking toys, plastic trinkets. And yet we knew that the myth of the happy world they embodied, where happiness could be bought even at a modicum price, was precisely that, a myth, and that there came a time when the pretence of innocence was no longer possible.

No longer.

And yet these trinkets were good for the temporary relief of mild pain.

I wrote everything in my red notebook.

I realised that I wouldn’t have met Chris if it wasn’t for my mother’s stilettos. My mother, a failed actress who became a striptease girl, a babbling head who drank and sang the blues, a woman who towards the end of her life wore yellow high heel shoes defiantly against my father without whom she couldn’t live, a woman who loved me and ignored me, Nina Chiavelli, a stranger who had become ninety five pairs of shoes, ninety five stories. Her shoes had taken me round the world, to Amsterdam, to Toronto, to Mexico City, to a convent where an eccentric collector had decided to gather a series of forged mementoes from Buñuel’s films, some strange objects, mostly shoes, but also anthropological objects, objects I had ended up writing about as a ghost-writer, like my mother had been a foot extra, although I had done it my way. The objects in The Museum of Relevant Moments were so serious, so sober, so ritualistic. They were historical objects. They had gravitas. Even if they were of doubtful origin. The toy-like objects now proliferating everywhere belonged to the realm of the light hearted, the disposable joke, tacky optimism. Perhaps we needed this sparkling philosophy, maybe it made things more bearable, since darkness was always there, lurking behind the shadows of toys, unpredictable, real, smothering.

Chris and I worked hard. We worked and worked for peanuts and we struggled and then played and collapsed exhausted. We walked on a precarious rope created by forces we couldn’t control. On weekends, we occasionally got caught up in the traffic jams that proliferated everywhere maliciously blocking the main streets and motorways, everybody was doing it, driving towards supermarkets, DIY centres, furniture stores, driving towards pleasurable encounters with objects, buying things for the house, a space that could be renovated forever, traffic jams that lulled us into dullness, a dullness that might have something to do with us, a bovine will, a collective ritual dullness, as if waiting, queuing, waiting, was always worth the sacrifice, as if by putting ourselves through waiting a trauma was re-enacted where obstacles had to be surmounted before the final reunion with the object of our affection.

Have you realised how more and more people are walking around with lollipops in their mouths? Chris said recently. Look, he said. And looking out of the car window, stuck in the endless wait, I saw a man in his forties sucking a lollipop. Then I saw an old woman sucking a lollipop, then a happy family, then a dustman collecting the endless trail of waste. It’s true, it must be a new fashion, I said while I took out a couple of chocolate kinder eggs from my handbag and peeled the aluminium foil. Then we started building the free toy inside the yellow capsules. I got a tiny green dwarf wearing a long, conical hat and Chris got a spaceship. These small polymer things, these trashy trinkets, there is a kind of spell in them, I said. My father used to call them Hong Kong rubbish, Chris said. Then a fragile adolescent running on stilettos crossed the street majestically.

Stilettos were about to become as ubiquitous as plastic toys. Like everything in this endless recycling of the past where time is choreographed through appearance and contagious tunes, stilettos were back in fashion. You could see teenagers suspended from needles walking awkwardly down the streets, dancing in the dark, they must have rehearsed at home, practiced walking on stilts, following an imaginary line, one step after the other, slowly, gradually building up to a steady pace, turning walking into a performance, learning to be señoritas, like my mother must have done.

I didn’t think about my mother’s stilettos anymore, Nina Chiavelli’s high heel shoes. Sometimes I thought that their comings and goings were a distraction from my father’s slow and irreversible illness, a way of warding off the inevitable, sometimes I saw a fleeting image of my father’s ghost using a stiletto as a telephone, sometimes I dreamt about them, strange dreams. I knew that all these shoes told as many stories as they concealed, I knew that the more I explored the kingdom of things, the larger the parable of the unknown became. What did I really see? Was I a little girl who liked spying on her mum and dad? It was none of my business. I became a philosopher, a minor one. Everyday things were the trigger. There were things proliferating everywhere, multiplying, like a varied vegetation gone out of control.

I continued writing in the red notebook. I wrote about the sex-appeal of the inorganic, the infantilisation of the times we live in and the dark side of plastic fantastic culture. I also wrote a tragicomic story, ‘Dyson DC 04, Mon Amour’ about falling in love with an aloof Hoover, but was shattered when writing about ‘objectum sexuality’, a term coined by Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, the woman who married the Berlin Wall. Eija-Riitta had coined the term to define people who fall in love with objects and are convinced that their love is reciprocated, a conviction that was often a drastic survival strategy set off by abuse, rape, severe cruelty, unimaginable sorrow. Objectum sexuality was another name for damage, a survival ploy adopted by Asperger sufferers and by people so fucked up by other people that they could only engage in passionate sexual romance with objects unrelated to the human body: a woman who secretly copulates with the Eiffel Tower, a woman who has a cosy romantic liaison with a banister, a man who is married to a picture frame.

Some say that the task of the philosopher is to speak about death. But I found that I had nothing to say about death. Except that it should be abolished. So instead of death, I focused on objects. Objects are suffused with life. The life of those who designed them, made them and consumed them. And they are also suffused with the many small deaths that people go through life.

I now write in English, making occasional mistakes with the prepositions, unexpected stupid mistakes. Sometimes I am unsure about the nuance of the new words I use, whether a word really means the thing I am using it for or whether it’s wildly out of tune with all the other words around it. There are so many shades to words, so many undercurrents and layers. I am now aware of the little lies bilingual dictionaries tell. Nuance. Atmosphere. Every word is wrapped up in its own atmosphere. Bilingual dictionaries don’t give you the nuance of words, their atmosphere. They are the first traitors in the traduttore-traditore equation. They are guilty of giving you the illusion of equivalence, of telling you that a word has an equivalent word in other languages, when it just doesn’t. And I now dream of grasping the atmosphere of words. And I know that in most languages words can be angelic but they can also be real rogues.

I also started decorating our nest with stuff from skips, cereal-packets, charity shops and car-boot sales. I tried to tell Chris the full story about my mother’s shoes the night he kidnapped me, but felt that it wasn’t the right time. The kidnap was fully successful, although it was a slightly messy venture. The night he kidnapped me, we went to a Thai restaurant and indulged in swordsmanship with the chopsticks while waiting for the lemon grass rice, the king tiger prawns and the hot hand towels called oshibori. Then we went back to my place and he put all my belongings on his car’s roof rack. I said bye to Pearl, who gave me a smoking piglet as a forget-me-not and then, a key-ring with an oblong, bald-headed silver alien which lies forgotten in a drawer. Then I stayed very still while Chris gagged and blindfolded me with black silk scarves, tied me up with a piece of rough rope and absconded me to his place. But then, he didn’t tie up the knots hard enough, and they became undone while I was on the back seat of the car. He also kept asking me whether I was ok, so in the end I had to remove the gag in order to say: yeah, I’m ok, how can you be so useless as an abductor? He did tie me up to his four poster bed, but not permanently. I also tied him up now and again, blindfolded him with my bra and tortured him a bit, it’s the kind of game the bed suggests, it just hurt a bit on the wrists. Living with him is bliss, it’s smooth, no tension, no crap, no cracks, the only recurrent problem is money, but what is money?

Yesterday, when we went to bed, I finally told him that it was none of my business but that my father was in love with my mother’s stilettos. Undoubtedly, my mother’s shoes were magical objects, enchanted shoes, I said. They had taken over my parents’ lives and even my own life. Her shoes, my father’s sentimental museum, Mary Jane’s toys, they had all merged in my head leading me to muse on the material world. I have been writing about all these things, they all kind of add up to a story, I said. I propped the pillow up against the wall and said that yep, my family was perfectly dysfunctional, perfectly normal, that it wasn’t a big deal but that my mother was a dominatrix married to a submissive shoe-fetishist. That she dominated him through her stilettos and he was a hopeless case.

A shoe-fetishist, your father, no he wasn’t, he said, was he? His eyes beamed back a surprised sparkle. How do you know? he said. I know, I said. But how do you really know? he said. There were so many hints, I said. Did you ask him? he said. How can you ask that? I said. It didn’t surprise him, nothing surprised him these days. There are shoe-fetishists out there, it’s not harmful, just really depraved, he said. It reminded him of the story of emperor Charlemagne, he said. Fetishism, necrophilia, homosexuality and contemplation, condensed in a few lines. Do you know that story? It’s about a magical ring, an object that took over Charlemagne’s life, he said. It rings a bell, but I can’t quite remember it, it’s hazy in my mind, I said. Well, at least your parents were interesting, my parents were so ordinary, he said. You know, sometimes I think my father knew I’d find my mother’s shoes in the loft and become busy with them, he pretended he’d forgotten about them, so I’ll be busy with them, he knew all these shoes would intrigue and challenge me, I said. From what you’ve told me, your father was always really considerate, telling his doctors to keep quiet about his illness, I’d love to have met him, he said. That’s the way he was. Would you tell me Charlemagne’s story as a bed-time story? I said placing my head on his shoulder.

It’s 3:18 a.m., he said pointing at the red light emitting diode alarm-clock. But then he put on a story-telling voice and told me the medieval story in a whisper while yawning now and again: At the end of his life, he said, Charlemagne fell for a young lady so much so that his fervour made him neglect the affairs of state. His courtiers became extremely worried. And when the girl died suddenly, they were greatly relieved. But not for long. Charlemagne's love didn’t die with her. He had the body embalmed and carried to his bedchamber, where he refused to be parted from it. Disturbed by this macabre turn of events, the Archbishop decided to examine the corpse. Hidden under the girl's tongue, a ring was found. An enchanted ring! But as soon as the ring was in the Archbishop’s hands, Charlemagne fell passionately in love with him. It was embarrassing. And the Archbishop flung the ring into Lake Constance. But then Charlemagne fell in love with the lake and remained there in contemplation until the day of his death.

It comes to show that the pull of things goes back a long time, it’s probably innate to the human species, maybe it’s as ancient as the first Neanderthal that shaped a bone into a bead and became hypnotised by its beauty, maybe we carry thing-codes in our genes, I said. Chris nodded and yawned a long, satisfied yawn. He kissed me on the shoulder, pulled down the pillow from behind us and we slid inside the duvet. There was a prolonged silence. Things, and then, there are so many other things besides things, he said with a voice from the land of Zzzzz. True, there is everything else, I sighed, the whole world. Obvious, he said. I’d love to go to the desert, I said, I miss the silence, the horizon line. We’ll go this spring, in Easter, he whispered. He curled up his body and I moulded mine around his. It’s the best time, I whispered. There was a prolonged silence. Can you switch off the lamp, please? … I’m falling into deep time, he whispered. Me too, I sighed.

Sweet Dreams

Sweet REM