The city observed
I never thought of myself as a theorist, but my inability even to assemble a flat-pack bookcase, let alone make a flower box for my mother in the mandatory eighth-grade shop class I took, made theorizing a necessity. Yet I was always attracted to displays of tangibility and even the systems construction or repair revealed. You learn a lot from observation, but this applies only to things. Not that you don’t learn a lot from observing humans, and here too there are revelations, but they only get you so far.
A theory of self is how I’d describe what I’ve put together, but a self that lives in relation to things, objects, and to humans, subjects. This is putting it crudely, lumping a lot of things together and ignoring teeming, organic life and the liminal zone it occupies, the zone I occupy, wearing things reflective of my subjectivity, my unfolding sense of who I am amid the objects and subjects that surround me.
Like Adam, I wander through the zone naming things and acquiring the names of subjects or failing to get them or, owing to the drift of time, forgetting a name or failing to recognize a subject too altered now to be familiar. Things too are adrift, but their alteration differs. Things can be restored, but subjects are on a one-way street to oblivion. It leads a 91-year-old friend to say, “I will die,” as a natural part of our conversation, but my “oblivion” is inaccurate. We pass from subject to object irrevocably, but our objectivity is that of organic matter of our type, despite our monuments.
I mention cities but I really mean that part of the zone we experience more or less regularly, with its familiar things and subjects on which time layers sometimes alarming amounts of transformation. Seeing it may hasten death, my theory holds, as we want some sameness to our part of the zone. We put up with changes elsewhere, like getting word of a new grandchild or someone else’s, the cards that arrive at Christmas, providing a count and visual update. This we accept, but the zone of daily experience wants to unfold slowly in our minds. Our serenity is disturbed when it doesn’t.
Still, we’re here to experience it. Observation is what we do to orient ourselves and stay current with friends and acquaintances. Across the zone, we text. Within it, we meet for coffee. At home, we sit and theorize what it means, this city with its countryside, as the zone appears to us with its constant possibility of disruption. Yet we go to sleep expecting to wake up more or less intact if slightly older, as we live in time, inevitably.
We call it knowing to immerse ourselves in another subject, merge in the several ways available to us. Raw experience teaches us to proceed more carefully, even to abandon knowing as a misnomer despite attendant pleasure and its corollaries. We suffer and have always suffered from these immersions, so they gradually take other forms.
Cities collect these acts of knowing along with the other rituals that subjects carry out for various reasons. Most of them are so habitual and unreflective that we’re not always sure we did it, yet we’re aware that our lives depend on sequences of these actions, their absence disorienting. Travel lets us feel their absence. We struggle to act as we typically do, and only find relief when we arrive home, yet all the while we were observing an enlarged zone, now fixed in memory. Knowing is similar if the subject is unfamiliar. Knowing another subject can be like traveling in space. The return is like it, too, a rougher landing. Heartache is worse than jetlag.
I theorize to relieve this. A theory is a prescription: substitute this for that; live ambiguously or live with ambiguity; realize you will eventually say, “I will die” as naturally as predicting the other typical conditions the zone throws at you, the price of being in it as a subject.
We wish that subjects of certain types could be more like objects. This leads us to concoct things that speak to us artificially and otherwise try to engage us with a compliant pliancy, but it’s not the same, we know, having tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge, sinned and sinned again. Such immersion is “the tragic sense of life” that Unamuno made his book’s title, and yet it’s the zone and we observe it with all our senses, being subjects who are endowed with this ability, whatever we may lack in practicality.
