Ancient Jars
November 07, 2024 at 01:20AMA meditation on boxes, borders, pottery, the Container Store, and much more. If you, like me, find solace in organization—hello, fellow Virgos!—this essay will prompt you to take a step back and weigh its true value:
There’s something strange that happens when we try to set up boxes. As soon as we box something in, things start to seep through. Containment is the precondition of rupture and paradox. Russell sensed this. So did Higgins by way of Smith when she noted that to interact with Die is to experience a “fluttering across surface/edge, subject/object, person/thing, now/then boundaries.” And so did the post-structuralists, when they realized that the meaning of a word couldn’t be fixed in place, but was always deferred—pointing to other living and responsive dependencies. Not even atoms are Democritean self-contained unities: physicists suspect that the mass of most protons and neutrons aren’t due to their own quarks, but virtual particles constantly sliding between the gaps of determinate being. Our smallest boxes still leak.
We are bounded, and because of that we are always losing ourselves—one contains the other; necessitates it. It’s a bittersweet state of affairs. Yet it is also this condition that makes relating conceptually possible. As the ethicist Emmanual Levinas intimates, I can only become obligated to another by recognizing their Otherness. It is within the gaps allowed by our boundaries that we find each other. Existence is what the scholar Akira Lippit might call exergual—“from the Greek ex (outside) and ergon (work).” We are works initiated from outside, that demand an outside that “makes possible the work, and remains part of it” while also staying essentially exterior, refusing the “the dialectic of interiority, the privilege of intimacy, and the fantasy of belonging.” Loving a person asks you to fall into the void that sits in between—to leap into the chasmic faith of an outside you cannot know nor hold.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/06/ancient-jars/
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