… One must learn how to read with arms spread in the posture assumed by visionaries at the moment of their apotheosis …
This is from Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things by Steven Connor (2011). Today’s paraphernalia (my choice) are Buttons and Newspaper:
… the navel [aka the belly button] is … a permanent reminder that we did not and could not ever have given rise to ourselves, and that, like the buttons in the button tin, we are add-ons, afterthoughts, offcuts, branchings, sprouts. Like the button itself, which is only good as long as there is a buttonhole to answer to it, we are sundered from our other halves, detached from our first attachments, ever at one remove from entirety.
[ ... ]
… the button had to wait until the twentieth century for its real transfiguration to take place. For this was the push-button century, in which, steadily taking over from switches, levers and knobs, buttons, which required only to be pressed, became the means of operating hundreds of machines and devices — doorbells, lights, hoovers, telephones, elevators, washing machines, cameras, cars, cisterns, radios, explosives, rockets. The button became the image of convertibility of scales, the possibility of setting in train or discontinuing a massive, complex and ramifying set of operations by a single elementary motion, one that is almost indistinguishable from pointing. The button was the proof of the new dominion of the miniature, the maximal condensed into the minimal. The button allows the concentration of will and purpose into a single form, a single, simple gesture, and the closing of the gap between intention and action. As the design of buttons developed, there was less and less effort involved in their operation — pressing and pushing buttons gave way to equipment that could be set in motion ‘at the touch of a button.’ The button was uncoupled from its physical matrix, in order that it could be coupled to a set of powerful, remote and invisible effects. Alarm buttons started to be coloured an inflammatory red, reminding us of their physical origins in the skin, in order to warn of the consequences that could be unleashed by an ill-considered push. During the anxious days of the Cold War, the terrifying ease with which a nuclear war could be begun was focused in the fantasy of a button that somewhere would be pressed to launch the missiles and institute the end of the world. Buttons have migrated to the digital world, where their function is no longer to minimise physical effort but to furnish a compensatory hallucination of it, in the animated images that obediently seem to recess into the screen as you click on them.
On to Newspaper:
… I have been suggesting in this book that many material things are liable to embody some kind of untimeliness, some form or other of anachronistic hiccup or syncopation. But newspaper is distinctive because it is temporised matter through and through. Of no other form of matter is it so true that the simple passage of time seems to change its meaning and its substance so swiftly and drastically. … Like the fabled day-fly, the newspaper lives for only one day. ‘Where could we live but days?’ as Philip Larkin wonders. But how could there have been days in quite the sense in which we understand them, before there were newspapers to mark and measure their coming and going? Newspapers are not only contemporary and therefore temporary, they are also metachronic, in that they keep the very beat of time. Newspapers are not just daily, they make for the occurrence of days, turning days into dates. Indeed, for this very reason, newspapers can be used as timepieces, as when victims of kidnappings are photographed holding up a newspaper as proof that they are still alive, or were at the time the photograph was taken.
… The extreme vulnerability to being used up makes the newness of newspapers especially poignant and precious. Men seem to need to be the first in any household to broach a newspaper and many of the men I know, so neglectful of so much, seem to harbour tender and pious feelings for newspapers, especially in relation to their foldings. For such men, and for me among them, I confess, just running your eyes over a newspaper is enough to transform it into something used up, or on the way to being so.
… One must learn how to read with arms spread in the posture assumed by visionaries at the moment of their apotheosis, moving one’s whole head and neck over the expanse of the double page like an animal nuzzling around a nosebag. The mariner’s tact is required to keep a broadsheet readably aslant to the wind when reading outdoors. And, most virtuoso of all, there is the trick of reducing the mainsail folio of the newspaper into quarto- or octavo-sized slabs for reading in crowded trains and aircraft seats, combined with the matchless accomplishment of turning over whole pages, quartile by quartile, in their correct order.
… My first and most lasting acquaintance with the architectural powers of newspaper came from watching my father light a fire. This was an exquisite loving art. Everything depended upon the latticework of sticks and lumps of coal, built up in such a way as both to provide a mass of fuel and enough in the way of cavities and channels to allow the flames through. The essential mediator between mass and vacancy was newspaper, scrunched into slightly springy balls and rolled into toffee-like twists. Once this edifice had been raised, with the same kind of care to the ordering of actions and the disposition of elements as that enjoyed by the first four chapters of Leviticus, which specify the ways in which one should prepare burnt offerings of bullocks, goats and turtledoves to provide ‘a sweet savour unto the Lord’ (Leviticus 1:13), my father would lean back in his chair, light up a cigarette and nonchalantly, and if possible without even a glance, toss the match into the fire, which would instantly catch and spread.
My most recent post from Connor’s book is here.
-Julie
