on Ponge, Lucretius, Droit and the pocket
"Le parti pris des choses (The voice of things)" by Francis Ponge
19 February
In April 2011 a chap called Scott Joseph got in touch asking if I would write a piece for a new Amsterdam based print magazine entitled "Rong Wrong". By not keeping a diary and possessing a memory where the only reliable thing is its unreliability, I have no idea how he got hold of me after seeing my short story in the online 3am magazine.
An email thread that starts half way through our conversation isn’t much help, but I do recollect talking with Scott in my hut, and along with mutual admiration for Tom McCarthy — that’s how I know it was 3am magazine — we spent a fair degree of time talking about Francis Ponge1 and the voice of things.
Scott wanted me to write a piece for Rong Wrong in the style of Ponge on The Pocket, or more accurately, in the style of a pocket in the manner of Ponge.
The erudite will be saying 'Hold on a minute, isn't Rongwrong a 1917 dadaist magazine by that Marcel Duchamp fellow?', and you'd be right. This was to be an homage to that original magazine, which published just a single issue. Being Dadaists it's hard to know if this was deliberate or not.
Francis Ponge is not a dadaist. He was a prose poet inspired by surrealism. I guess if you're not in the trade of setting fire to giraffes and not peeing in urinals, then these two seem pretty much the same. But they're not. Luckily, that's not important for us. What is important, is that Ponge isn't really a surrealist, but was seen as one because he was really into the idea of writing as if one were a particular object. He was really into language, its meaning, and use. To paraphrase Ludwig Wittgenstein2 he wanted to write lion, so you could understand being one. How would a cigarette write? This is different to writing about a cigarette. Clever people can often be infuriating.
The cigarette is all about its dishevelled setting: dry and hazy — the setting the cigarette creates. In the setting shows the personality, certain pretensions, a pretension to being a tiny torch. In fact it functions just like incense stick – all fragrance and no light. Next it pretends to measure time. It measures time with small mounds of ash. As for its passions, the pathetic drama plays itself out in shedding silver dandruff off the ardent point… to end up as a muff.
“Cigarette” Francis Ponge (translated by Vadim Bystritski)
Scott was delighted that not only did I admire Tom McCarthy but I knew who Ponge was and had read him. I was commissioned to write as a pocket.
But… it turns out I had not read Ponge. Or even heard of him. I had in mind the wrong person completely. I was thinking of Roger-Pol Droit, a modern French philosopher (his philosophy was modern, he wasn't being French in an entirely new way). An easy enough mistake. Both are French. Both are clever. Clever in the sort of way where you wonder if they ever managed to finish the supermarket shopping without becoming unmoored, pondering the semiotics behind the signage in the aisles. Plus, Droit has pictures of everyday things on the front of his book jacket. So you can see how I got them confused. I'm not that sort of clever.
It also turned out that I had failed to understand the brief, and it wasn't really pocket enough. But then I did write it while on a flight to Turkey. Possibly not sober. Or straight. But luckily I was forgiven for not knowing who Ponge was, and for not getting into the pocket deep enough (you must have known that was coming), and the piece was accepted.
Although I never reached the end of all Roger-Pol Droit's "101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life" it has had an impact on my life. Mainly buying friends a copy. Although none I think have thanked me. When I first conceived of this post I wanted to mention my favourite and life altering experiment but this morning it suddenly dawned on me that I had completely the wrong author. Again. It's not Roger-Pol Droit at all, as I have been thinking all last week. It's Jeffrey Steingarten. Who is not French, and although undoubtedly clever given he was a food critic for Vogue, I'm certain he could finish doing his grocery shopping perfectly well.
In his splendid "The Man Who Ate Everything" he philosophises that dislike of a food is a learned behaviour and that we can unlearn it, simply by having the hated dish or drink ten times. Hello Campari. A tale for another time, given there is enough confusion going on here already.
Also, I am capable of realising Jeffrey Steingarten and Oliver Sacks are not the same person, even though both are American Jewish and wrote a book with "The Man Who...' in the title.
Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”
― Michael Shermer
I have been reading up on Epicurus, mainly because he doesn't seem to be a humourless killjoy like every other philosopher. Also with a mind to doing a few posts on him. Although reading up on him is tricky as hardly any of his texts survived. Not surprising I suppose when your raison d'être is talking about how good lentils taste, after a goat's skin or two of red wine in the garden. “Who's taking notes?”, “Oh. No one?”, “Never mind, pass the bota".
What we know of Epicurus mainly comes from Lucretius3, a poet who favoured the dactylic hexameter - or the rather more fantastically named heroic hexameter - and wrote in this non rhyming format his masterwork “The nature of things”. I have a copy on my Kobo. To be honest, Ponge is way easier to read.
Like Duchamp's Rong Wrong, I don't own a copy, or indeed have ever seen Scott's Rong Wrong, and it only ran to a single issue. Best not look for patterns everywhere, this sort of thing could drive one insane. Given 11 years later from 2011 I find myself reading "The nature of things" and being reminded of "The voice of things" it seemed apt to republish the piece here. Illustration by my favourite poet Fatima Fletcher.
The Pocket
Consider the pocket, out of all human kind's inventions - the space shuttle, the thermos flask, the disposable hygienic wipe - the pocket is most representative of its creator, us. It has built-in (if you will), at its core, the most human of characteristics: dishonesty. Lying. Subterfuge.
It has from the outset concealment as its primary purpose. Try to think of another common everyday, non-specialist object whose role is solely to hide. Others may share the aspect of concealment within their remit, the sticky plaster for instance, but it is a secondary nature to the intended aim, that of hygiene.
A differentiation between concealment and camouflage should be drawn. To camouflage is to cloak an object so that its true intent can not be anticipated. It is a veneer lain over a separate purpose, disguising an ulterior goal or merely wishing not to draw attention to its workaday act in life. Obfuscation and confusion. The pocket however, its entire raison d'être, is concealment. To contain without form. Without warning. Without suspicion.
Think of a pocket, it surrounds what? What comes to mind? A knife, a coin, a ticket. Weapons and artefacts of power.
To stand wearing trousers without a pocket is to feel naked. Unprotected. Our secrets not revealed but denied. With this thought we have given the pocket a gender. Skirts too may have pockets but it is not a prerequisite. The skirt is open to the world. Honest. The trouser a closed system, its pocket may be feminine in form, a receptacle, but its agenda is masculine. Gathering, the gains held in a basket: a communal triumph. Withheld in the pocket an act of sabotage. Behind enemy lines.
The word 'pocket' is paramount. It is a noun in most of its usage. Its transformation to a verb stemming from criminal argot, the street lexicon of the thief. The dishonest. To have pocketed something does not refer to the act of transference: an item from one location to another. Nor the ability to transport a requisite object to be supplied at an unanticipated moment: a carrier of possibilities. The verbs 'carrying', 'having', 'taking' do not describe the pocket. Taking perhaps, but we must suffix a modifier: taking without permission. For 'pocketing' is to steal. To conjure away.
Camouflage belongs to the alchemist, disappearance to the sorcerer. The Djinn. The conjurer joins the Lover, the Storyteller, the Warrior, these most elemental of human archetypes. Defining characteristics. But the sorcerer and storyteller walk hand in hand, for only the raconteur and the magician are without counterpart in the animal kingdom.
Consider the pocket's curious topology. By its nature it is hidden, never seen. It is constructed to be that way. The pocket's only visible form seen from the outside consists of an opening. A signpost leading to its source, a symbol of its existence, for it is not the pocket itself. Note when we buy a new suit the pockets are barricaded with cotton, but we do not say the jacket is without pockets even though the slit is sewn shut. The slit (an untrustworthy word, either vulgar or used in the language of battlement) signifies the presence but still colludes in the pockets intent: to smuggle.
A badly constructed pocket is one that spoils the line of the suit. Belies the content within. Reveals. The pocket should remain a spy. Unsuspected, its power reigning hold over all in its clasp. It is deception by design.
Where form overcomes function, novel devices are deployed. Over the bulge of the jacket's cavernous example the flap is instigated. A cover up job.
To say an invisible pocket is not to try and render forth the impossible, no raised eyebrows at fancifulness when uttered. An immediate understanding. A reduction of the object, the purpose mimicking itself. To cloak itself in its own secrecy. The ticket pocket, to make even the act of carriage undetected in the face of (other) thieves, an encoded talisman given subterfuge.
The phrases that accompany the pocket are not terms of use but mistrust. "Empty your pockets" is a declaration of suspicion. The man whose "pockets were emptied" has been defeated, no longer a threat, for those with money in their pocket may still win. The pockets of air a pilot encounters are a peril, to be avoided. Pockets of resistance: insurgents to authority.
The pocket is made inside-out. Back to front. It does not show its true face to the world. Its physical form is only spotted when it is dead. Dormant. Seen hung on the washing line, or discarded upon the bedroom floor, its appearance is that of a roadkill organ distended from its host's body, the lolling tongue of the pocket becomes part of the harmless trouser. It is lifeless. Integrated back into the garment it loses its beguilement. For it to exist - with purpose, with power - it must not be visually explicit. It is duplicitous.
Its true skin is only ever felt by the owner. The outside although wrought from a single sheet of fabric, distorts space like a dysfunctional Klien bottle or Mobieus strip, and the same material transforms into a seemingly separate outer layer. Distinct from within, with no relation to the cocooned inside, the inner, the enclave.
There are other objects that share its form, have mutual purpose. But these can be discarded when admitting the pockets true role (for admittance is a declaration that there is untruth).
A sleeve is part of a garment, it is double sided, this aspect often amplified by a choice of two different fabrics. The outside gaudy, showy, mimicking plumage: evolutions badges for sexual selection. The inside, unseen, soft, comforting, a return to womb, a secret to ourselves of our inner child, slyly seeking comfort.
Curiously the business man may reverse the roles, the exterior drab, conformist. Sheathed by this apparent uniform lies out of sight the flashy, shimmering and shiny, a secret code that he is really a magician, a buccaneer disguised as diplomat. The sleeve then maybe a cousin to the pocket, in its dishonesty.
The bag. The bag does not simply carry, it is made to be carried. A large distinction. It is to inform the pilgrim we met travelling on the road, that we are 'carrying': again the slang of the underworld. It announces we are enhanced, enabled, with wealth.
The bag is decorated, this adornment transforms it to a peacock. The encrustation a detriment to function. The bag itself becomes, through fashion, an object of desire. Its ownership is to announce not conceal.
In studying its closest relative, the pouch, we reveal the true definition of the pocket. Dishonesty. Not simple lying, denial after the fact, "Who ate all the berries?". Premeditated, to move in a surreptitious manner. To bring and leave unannounced.
The pouch adorned around the neck, or waist, is a tool. Their usage being one of the traits we apply to differentiate us from the animal kingdom. The chimpanzee's stick to fish for ants becomes an aid. A haphazard one. By stripping the leaves from the stem the ape fashions a tool. Bequeaths it an intended purpose.
The pouch is fashioned to carry that with can not be contained by the hands, water from the well; to leave the hands free; to ferry surplus. To own. The pouch is property made mobile.
This functional singularity aligns it with the monkey's branch stripped bare, for the animals can be tool bearers too. The pouch a cupped leaf, superficial in distinguishing our species, to define what is truly human, we must travel to the interior world. Not of action but of thought.
The squid too is capable of lying. In sexual conquest, caught with each side of its iridescent skin displaying a different disingenuous rippling, when it sits between genders on the seabed floor. This is cause and effect reaction. Only in the human mind do we find deceit, premeditated. This intention, this preparation to deceive is the dissemination of pouch to pocket. Interior in intent as well as action.
The pocket turns tool bearing to mistrust. Within it is the world of secrecy, guile, cunning. We hold in our pockets the defining aspect of humanity.
Reading
Le parti pris des choses (The voice of things)
Francis Ponge
http://julianbaker.com/Francis-Ponge--The-Voice-of-Things.pdf
It seems freely downloadable as a Pdf from several sites so I have attached it here. Please don't sue.
101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life
Roger-Pol Droit
https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/academic-professional/philosophy/101-Experiments-in-the-Philosophy-of-Everyday-Life-Roger-Pol-Droit-9780571212064
The man who ate everything
Jeffrey Steingarten
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/172642/the-man-who-ate-everything-by-jeffrey-steingarten/
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Oliver Sacks
https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/oliver-sacks/the-man-who-mistook-his-wife-for-a-hat/9781447275404
References
Ludwig Wittgenstein
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/245
Left pocket - handkerchief and phone. Right pocket Wallet and keys. No subterfuge and leaves my hands free to poke numpties in the eyes! You know who you are! Man Who Ate is so good ... must re-read it! Not sure I have the stamina for Ponge ... and FF illustration super as per! K x