… Are there any more elaborately erotic coverings than the wrappers of sweets, waxy, crackling, filmy-wrinkled?
This is from Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things by Steven Connor (2011). This first segment is from the book’s Introduction:
… Magical things invite a kind of practical rêverie, a kind of floating but intent circling through or playing with possibilities, a following out of their implied reach.
… We can do whatever we like to things, but magical things are things that we allow and expect to do things back to us. Magical things surpass themselves, in allowing us to increment or surpass ourselves with them. They are things, as we say, to be conjured with, though their magic is done on ourselves rather than on others.
… When we put something to work, we use it for a particular purpose. In play, we seek not so much to use things as to use them up. The point of putting things into play may be to play them out, to see how far they go, how far we can go with the open totality of their affordances. And, at the same time, we put ourselves into play, we use these objects to play with ourselves, even to toy with our own play, seeking its possibilities and limits.
… Precisely because they instance the once-new, things can impart the shock of the newly old. Such things inhabit space, but are a kind of temporising with it, a refracting of the white noon of the now into a chronic rainbow of times, with their twilight tints and hues. Such things hum with hint and import because they are there without being fully present; to hand, but not exactly here-and now. Intimate and exotic, such things ‘link us to our losses,’ in Philip Larkin’s phrase. They may be said to be our haunts, because they hang around us so, we are condemned and content, like unquiet ghosts, to frequent them. Untimely things like those on which I meditate in this book are unstopped clocks, miniature time bombs, that, going off at unpredictable times, can pull time itself apart.
… our personal paraphernalia is also what we need for the occupation of being ourselves. As our fund of necessary accessories, that do not have to be ours and yet somehow makes us what we are, our paraphernalia is both anonymous and intimate, arbitrary and intrinsic. It is the kind of stuff that is found, or, just as often, lost, in places like drawers, cupboards and pockets, which, though they often contain very similar and predictable kinds of object — keys, pins, pills, elastic bands — also constitute something like involuntary abstracts or personal archives, that bear our signatures, have our lives in their charge and may one day amount to what we were.
Connor does a chapter, in alphabetical order, on each of his selected “magical things.” Because this post already covers the Introduction, I’ve chosen the shortest of his chapters for our first magical thingie (the longest, if you’re wondering, is on Rubber Bands). This (below) is from the chapter on Sweets:
… ‘Don’t play with your food,’ adults say to children. But sweets are made to be playthings, protests against the sensible good citizenship of eating routines. Perhaps this is also why we treat sweets as playthings. Sweets are things that we do things to. We want to handle them before we commit them to our tongues, where we play with them anew. Are there any more elaborately erotic coverings than the wrappers of sweets, waxy, crackling, filmy-wrinkled?
… The multilayered lolly or lozenge encourages us to keep taking it out to see what colour it has changed to, in a striptease for the taste buds. Chewing gum and bubblegum are never swallowed at all, and are therefore perhaps the most essential kind of sweet. Once we have had the sweetness from it, the substance of the gum is a mere nothing, or nothing but play.
Sweets are beyond words. All sweets are gobstoppers. When we eat sweets, we say ‘mmm,’ the sound of speech’s superseding, the replacing of speaking by sweetness. … Sweet is also, of course, baby talk, an infant and infantilising language, which is on the border between eating and speaking, and lets us hear eating, and eat meaning. The words ‘gum’ and ‘gobstopper’ clog and glue the mouth like the things they name. The words ‘jelly’ and ‘lolly’ and lollipop’ elicit lolling and licking from the tongue that lets them out. Even the grown-up names of sweet makers and sweet owners become suffused with magical nestling comfort. You could never, I think, take a philosopher called Cadbury seriously (I know, I know, saying this in public means I am bound straight away to hear of, or worse, from one), but if a Cadbury should ever run for prime minister in Britain, they would surely be unopposable.
… Sweet-making and sweet-eating are closely and mysteriously associated with the arts of magical picturing and effigy. We eat things we like the look of; teddies, bunnies and gingerbread men. Themed birthday cakes give us the opportunity of eating ourselves: the Arsenal supporter, or the Thomas the Tank Engine fan, eats their loved object, and encounters anew its sweetness. This is as it should be, for sweet things really do not taste of themselves; they taste of our own pleasure in them.
… Why so many explosions, so many bombs bursting in the air in the names of sweets (Starbursts, Fizzers, Sherbert Fountains, the Snap and Crackle, the Wham bar), why so many teasing deceits and promises of amazement and teeming transmogrifications in their manufacture (Curly-Wurlies, Fried Eggs and Live Wires), if you are not really always saying to sweets and they to us: ‘Surprise!’ Sweets will let nothing persist as what it merely, drearily, is.
Perhaps this is part of the reason why eating sweets is not meant entirely to be a pleasure. In the eating of a sweet, the entire being is concentrated around the drawing out of the taste. Look at somebody who has just got the first sour spurt out of a sherbet lemon, or the spreading drowsiness of a lump of milk chocolate. The eyelids are flickering, the eyes misting like a junkie’s after a hit. There is nothing there but ardour, ordeal, and the sweet toil of bliss.
[both pictures from Wikipedia]
-Julie
