Lost in the Cosmos

(2) The Self as Nought: How the Self Tries to Inform Itself by Possessing Things which do not Look like the Things They’re Used as

IN A RECENT ISSUE of a home-and-garden magazine, an article listed fifty ways to make a coffee table.

One table was made of an old transom of stained glass supported by an antique brass chandelier cut ingeniously to make the legs.

Another was a cypress stump, waxed and highly polished.

Another was a big spool used for telephone cable set on end.

Another was a lobster trap.

Another was a Coca-Cola sign propped on Coke crates.

Another was a stone slab from an old morgue, the blood runnel used as an ash tray.

Another was a hayloft door set on cut-down sawhorses.

Another was the hatch of a sailboat mounted on halves of ships’ wheels.

Another was a cobbler’s bench.^*

Not a single one was a table designed as such, that is, a horizontal member with four legs.

Question: Why was not a single table designed as such rather than being a non-table doing duty as a table?

(a) Because people have gotten tired of ordinary tables.

(b) Because the fifty non-tables converted to use as tables make good conversation pieces.

(c) Because it is a chance to make use of valuable odds and ends which otherwise would gather dust in the attic.

(d) Because the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.

(CHECK ONE)

Thus, ordinary four-legged tables have long since been emptied out and rendered invisible.

Even the cobbler’s bench, which, for a while, resisted the ravenous self and for some years remained a cobbler’s bench upon which one could set drinks and art books, has now disappeared into the vacuole and become as invisible as a Danish modern. The cobbler’s bench has become in fact a table. Tables are now being manufactured which look like cobblers’ benches but are not.

Thought Experiment: Try to imagine the circumstances under which the fifty non-tables converted to use as coffee tables would become less and less desirable until one would actually prefer an ordinary table constructed of four legs and a top. E.g., imagine you are an archeologist of the twenty-first century, exploring the abandoned beach cottages of Martha’s Vineyard and finding all manner of strange artifacts used as tables — pieces of driftwood, capstans, shark jaws— and that you need a good worktable and, not recognizing these objects as tables, you construct a simple and sturdy table from a plank of wood and four lengths of two-by-fours.

Thought Experiment (II): Consider to what extent an “antique” is prized because it is excellently made and beautiful and to what extent it is prized because it is an antique and as such is saturated with another time and another place and is therefore resistant to absorption by the self — just as a pine piling saturated in creosote resists corrosion by the sea — and thus possesses a higher coefficient of informing power for the nought of self.

If you say that a writing table made by Thomas Sheraton is of value because it is excellently made and beautiful, how would you go about making a writing table now that would be similarly prized as an antique two hundred years from now?

The real question of course is whether the twentieth-century self is different from the eighteenth-century self, both in its reliance on “antiques” to inform itself and in its ability to make a writing table which is graceful and useful and for no other reason. Was a well-to-do eighteenth-century Englishman content to buy a Sheraton writing table, or would he have preferred a fifteenth-century “antique”?

^* Yet another article (The New York Times, September 3, 1981) listed the following objects which were offered for sale and specifically for use as coffee tables: walnut clock ($2,200), ventilator duct grills ($300), sandstone mask ($250), ionic column capital ($400), Nigerian chieftain’s stool ($2,500), nineteenth-century English camphor chest ($2,350), trundle pine storage box ($550), nineteenth-century Norman poultry cage ($450), Korean coin chest ($350), fiberboard musical-instrument case ($175), Chinese bamboo trunk ($50).