What can objects teach us about ourselves?
Joshua Jones stumbles across an antique store within an abandoned chapel in his home town of Llanelli, and considers the stories and symbols such places hold
A year into the writing of Local Fires, my then-partner gifted me for Christmas an A4 print of drawings in the style of a tattoo flash sheet. They were motifs and images inspired by his reading of my drafts. The six drawings, inked by hand, consisted of a Bush radio; a potted peace lily; a folded, semi-crumpled note; a wine bottle half-buried in sand; a church on fire; and a hand turning into coins. Objects symbolising both fixedness and mutability but also the use, or potential of, violence. The Bush radio, made of Bakelite plastic, is a product of a bygone era and is interacted with violently in its referent story, but also symbolises change and decay – as does the burning church. The wine bottle and the folded note rely more specifically on human interaction: the bottle is only violent when abused; the paper becomes crumpled within a fist.
Objects, their histories and their context of interaction, can often tell us more about a person than a conversation with them – their subconscious desires, how they experience and navigate their world. I collect – hoard – a lot of things. Things that may be considered junk to some people – I’d consider myself a hoarder of histories. I collect family photos and albums and make up fictions of the people photographed. I collect train tickets, receipts and postcards found between the covers of second-hand books. It feels natural to me, then, to consider how my characters interact with and express themselves through objects. In ‘A Congregation of Cygnets’, the way William throws an apple core shows his frustration, his perceived inertia, while Johnny Radio’s search for his lost radio, despite forgetting it’s broken, speaks to the disintegration of memory, loss and grief, and suggests he lives out this frayed loop every day.
The photographer Nik Roche and I spent a soaking wet day in early January walking Llanelli in hope that a good photo would present itself. I showed Nik the church that suffered a fire some years ago. Near it, we came across another church by accident, this one repurposed as an antiques store. Inside, across two floors, was a graveyard of dead peoples’ belongings. Downstairs there were wrought-iron railings leaning against grand pianos; frilled lampshades; garden tools, an endless supply of them; and nuts and bolts and metal – it was more of a scrapheap than an antiques store. Upstairs was like stumbling into a nest of dead ants. Old wooden chairs in various stages of rot and damp were piled in the middle of the room, on side tables, foot stools and dressers, each with a thick film of dust. Hundreds of stiff wooden legs pointed to the ceiling of the church as if in prayer. In the corner of the room, near a flight of stairs, was a filthy bathtub, its claw feet on a once-red Persian rug, into which water dripped from a crack in the ceiling. It was deathly quiet except for the rhythmic plonk of water hitting the streaked, brown bottom of the tub. It was impossibly bleak – we had an absolute field day. We took pictures of stuffed birds in cages and set-dressed a couple of mannequins that were missing limbs. Nik took a picture of me sitting with them, stylised as a family portrait. I posed in the middle of the nest of chairs, did my best to look solemn.
The truth is I felt at home here, within the melancholic history of these objects. Histories piled on top of each other from floor to dripping ceiling. Not to be dramatic, but I’ve always found solitude within these spaces. Maybe this is what the anthropologist Marc Augé meant when he wrote ‘there will soon be a need … for an ethnology of solitude.’ While places and non-places intertwine and tangle together, so does memory, history. Every chair in this room, piled as if a bonfire waiting to be set alight, has been sat on by someone. It lived in a kitchen with a table, most likely with other chairs; or maybe next to a fireplace, or by a front door. To say these objects ‘lived’ is a contradiction: they are inanimate, but also they were crafted by a person, given purpose, or were aesthetically pleasing. Someone stuffed the birds; another built their cages. Someone removed all these objects from where they were and brought them here. They had meaning, purpose. While they are essentially abandoned here, in this forsaken church masquerading as an antiques store, that doesn’t mean they lack purpose or tangibility; they still occupy physical, historical, anthropological space.
An object is something that may be perceived by the senses. Anything that is visible, tangible. Vocabulary.com says anything that casts a shadow is an object. Is a window an object? You can see through it; a perfect window doesn’t cast a shadow — but you can touch and see your reflection within it. Is each individual dust eddy, dancing within a ray of sunlight an object, or collectively considered a thing? Is the ray of sunlight an object? What is the difference between an object and a thing? According to metaphysicist Kristie Miller, ‘things are ontologically innocent, while objects are not.’ Does that mean an object is a thing (innocent) until it’s given purpose/interacted with (not innocent)? Is every object in this purgatory in some sense guilty?
I’m not sure. But I feel at home here, within past histories and forgotten memories, like a custodian, or perhaps just a storyteller. I see these rooms as charged with endless potential for the unearthing and remembrance of stories, histories. How will the narrative of my own history be told through significant objects – how will my future? What can I learn about myself from these objects and the space they occupy around me? I’ll find out, once I stop looking at the ceiling drips hitting the ceramic.
Joshua Jones (he/him) is a queer, autistic writer from Llanelli, south Wales. He co-founded Dyddiau Du, a NeuroQueer art and literature space in Cardiff. Local Fires is out now.