Before beginning my career as a professional reviewer for Defunct, I spent much time in the field, hunting for objects I might excavate and meditate on, and in that way, pay homage to the past (homage and its big sister elegy being among my earliest inclinations.) But therein lay the complexity at the heart of Defunctness Studies: writing on defunctness means writing on an absence; what you’re studying, really, is the atmosphere hovering around the long-gone thing, and not the thing itself. Eventually, I came to see that trailing an actual object was work best left to weekend antiquers and flea-marketeers (especially since the drive to get rid of stuff and keep my work space clean, clean, clean overrode the desire to collect.) “Absence,” one comes to realize, is the field’s true subject, and it must be treated as a solidity, as if an object itself. I hung up my overalls and put on my thinking cap; took up the stance of conjurer, and turned from that of collector. A reviewer of defunct things must cultivate states of being induced by objects. Not so easy! For this, few guides but Proust exist.
In a moment I shall offer my modest guidelines.
First, some groundwork.
To work with “defunctness” you must train for the task, so that amid the terrible din of leaf blowers, one can, once a master in the field, conjure the scent of burning leaves. Slowly, (then quickly as your faculties strengthen) the whine and stutter, the awful emissions and wrecked peace can be turned to constructive good use, and the lost props, (heavy metal garbage cans ashy from burning, worn wooden rake handles salted with sweat) can be summoned from the garages of elders and spliced into the scene, to root it, to still it, to return it to its former dimensions.
“Being is impounded in objects.” (I’m rather proud of that one.)
Consider, for instance, public restrooms as a training ground: to use a public restroom today you needn’t exert any will at all; indeed, you can reduce your movements to the most basic function(s) you came there to perform. No turning to flush or even stepping on a handle required (in fact, no handle anymore!) – move just a bit and the very sensitive toilet senses your conclusion. No turning on of water: just swish your hands under the faucet (that there remains a faucet might help you tune in to far rumblings: spigot! pet-cock! hand pump! Dear novice, take every opportunity to hone your perceptions!) Sad towels dispense by a mere wave of the hand (a goodbye, it seems, but to what? oh, rolls of thin, cloth towels you’d pull down with a satisfying snap to reveal a clean spot! oh, bee-hive shaped powdered soap dispensers whose granules dissolved so softly when rubbing wet hands together!) If considering the life of a professional Reviewer of Defunctness (brooding’s a gift here, melancholics excel!), in order to calibrate towards yearning, the vanishedness of particular things along with their tint/scent/heft/shape must be conjured specifically. One cannot indulge hazy numinous “loss.” The field can’t abide sloppy mooning about.
How to proceed? What traits, exactly, to strengthen? I realized that to move forward professionally, to secure a position with the field’s leading journal, Defunct, I’d best issue a guide to critical approaches. What follows are synopses of my three basic methodologies, two brief self-assessment tests, and my own humble Review of The Wind Up Alarm Clock, the reprinting of which my editors have graciously allowed in this peerless (alas, pageless) journal.
Methodologies
#1: “In a Flash.” One afternoon an image suddenly appeared. I am tempted to say “for no reason,” but of course it’s that I’m not finely enough calibrated to perceive its origins. (What might have jump started the “flash?” Late afternoon, wet cotton winter light? Scent of apples baking, clove-studded, cinnamon-laced? Upcoming night out and its requisite primpings?) The image was this: the pink, elasticized, showercap-like thing I’d sit under as a kid (from, say, ages 5-10, my grandmother’s house, long afternoon), connected by an accordion-style hose to a base that pumped warm air in to inflate the hood and dry my pinned up, very long hair. Primary characteristics of this method: passive reception. Grateful surprise.
#2: “Sensation.” In a kind of back-door way, “defunctness” inheres and may be located via objects updated for their own good. The girdle gone to shapewear for instance. Or in-line skates . . . ok, they are nice. I’m not arguing that. Streamlined. Adult-sized. Full of compensations for weak ankles. But now, no more skate keys, the kind that came with clamp-on skates so you could tighten the little wheels-on-a-platform to your shoe, reverse sardine-can style. The sensation of the little clamps at the four corners of your thin and insubstantial sneaker: defunct, gone. (And, too, the word “roller” – though my favorite Baltimore team, The Junkyard Dolls, is not playing, thank God, “in-line derby.”) Similarly, the one-touch, speedy, programmable cell phone has replaced the sensation of dialing. One no longer removes her finger and lets the dial return on its own, nor can one choose to allow the finger to enjoy the firm, free ride back around to the starting position.
#3: “Trail it Back.” To study defunctness, one has to let go of the meaning of certain words. “Dial” for example, when operating a cell phone. And “operate” isn’t right either, of course (“operators” were real people who worked the exchanges -- our exchange was LYN for Lynbrook – and you could ask them all your area code questions, and for help when a line went dead or made a low-level buzzy sound and messed up reception; sometimes you could make them laugh, and they’d even interrupt a busy line, if your emergency was convincing enough.) To be in the field, you have to be willing to live with gutted shells of words. To dial means nothing without a dial. When you catch whiff, when you hear yourself using one of the ghost words, though no one bats an eye, you will (if truly cut out for this life.) You’ll feel the slippage, the wrongness, the mistake, as when you nearly speak a previous lover’s name to a current paramour.
The following very brief self-tests are meant to help you assess your fitness for a life in Defunctness, and to help you judge whether, temperamentally, you are aligned with the task.
Self-Assessment Test 1: We begin with my proposition: literal defunct space informs existential defunct space (a widely understudied field, spatial defunctness!) Take, for instance the card catalog and the way one could get lost, so deeply and pleasingly in it – I mean in the far reaches of the wild west of the drawers as you pulled them toward you like long, lonesome highways. Compare this space to the nowheresville of the database, the flat-planed, up-and-down, trapped-behind-glass notion of scrolling (ah, the word “scroll” – how tasty and medieval, like mutton! How emptied and pallid, and utterly like “dial.” And what does the contemporary definition of “scroll” mean to schoolchildren? That knowledge resides in a flat space, not a depth, on some tickertape-like endless loop!)
Depth is old. Depth itself may be defunct.
Depth, however, is exactly what you must be willing to investigate to successfully study and review defunctness.
TEST: Spying a card catalog, put out at the curb, you: a) stop, saddened, and sigh. b) open the drawers. c) drag your kid over and deliver impromptu lessons and stories about working your way through college at the library, you, the very person who typed up all those little cards, all the while demonstrating the true meaning of “browse”, you the echt browser, inserting the little scrap paper markers right between actual cards. d) all of the above.
Self Assessment Test 2: In order to locate one’s area of specialty in the field of defunctness, one must retrieve and reconstitute one’s relationship to once-essential notions: privacy, for example. As illustrated by the phone booth. The general and shared assumption, that privacy was a desired phenomena/state of being: that’s gone. To recapture it, you must allow, while talking on your cell, your anxiety level to rise, as it might have, decades ago, should an entire bus full of people be privy to your conversation. Nourish the inkling. Attend the pang.
TEST: Spying a phone booth, put out at the curb, you: a) stop, saddened, and sigh. b) open the doors. c) drag your kid in and deliver impromptu lessons and stories about the seal of quiet that came over a person on a rainy afternoon, when, on the corner of any city street, slipping a dime into the slot to make a call, the chilly and heedless world rushed past; continue at dinner recounting tales of the phone booths of Europe: the fat, glass-paned, red ones of London, with extra-heavy receivers; the famed broken one in Paris where you could call home, wherever home was, for free, though you had to endure a long, long line and other impatient callers. d) all of the above.
Interestingly, both progress and the elegy require meditating on absence. In the former, you must consider what you want that you don’t yet have, and the space desire clears for invention. In the latter, you must consider what you’ve lost – not just nostalgia for the thing, but the state of being that accompanied it (which of course requires much more delicacy.) I believe my field is a fresh bud on the branch of phenomenalism, the doctrine that phenomena are the only objects of knowledge or only form of reality. Should this be the case, we reviewers of defunctness might quickly hire us a hip philosopher (apologies, Husserl) and get cracking on some bright and shiny manifestos, which are very in these days.
Finally, such study is not without its emotional toll. Defunct things (and by “thing” I mean that phenomenal compounding of object & attendant atmosphere) are, at heart, innocent beings, most readily identified by their lostness, so that, untethered as they are from their original realm, they call up in us an unnerving tenderness. It is not their fault they’ve been dimmed, dissed, discarded–the darning eggs, ice shavers, powdered dentifrices – or that they have been overcome by time and the forces of progress. There they once were, simply being, while all along they were in the process of actively fading . . . a state not unlike the one we, ourselves, seek to avoid in our daily rounds, and by way of our famously American, excessive busyness, attempt to keep at bay.
Brief Review of The Wind-Up Alarm Clock
It is not every day that an object so full of assumptions comes across one’s path. The wind up alarm clock assumes time will stop unless one reanimates it with the twist of a key. It assumes our participation and attentive engagement, and that we play our part in time’s upkeep. This particular alarm clock, the alarm clock under review, its story–which is, at core, the story of all alarm clocks–is powered by just these assumptions about time. It’s particular story begins with a girl growing up on Long Island, who pretends she lives in the country. She bakes bread, wears overalls and workboots, harvests dandelions to make dandelion wine and wishes for a goat. While most of her classmates are mall-crawling, she cares not at all for the latest fashions, but seeks instead chances to roam, independently, as far as she can from home. The girl is given an old, metal wind up alarm clock by her grandmother (an alarm clock that belonged to her mother) and thus begins her infatuation with clocks and watches. We see that she loves, too, her father’s Timex (which he later gives to her and which she wears as an adult) whose broad, slightly convex face reminds her of his fingernails and of the fingernails of his father, which as a very young child, she studied but never spoke of.
The dark blue alarm clock, three and a half inches in circumference and two inches deep is, she thinks to herself, “it’s own completely contained world.” It stood firmly on its two knobby feet and back rim. Before bed, she’d shine a flashlight on its creamy face or hold it close to the bulb of her lamp for a long minute, so the clabbered cream colored numbers absorbed and held the glow, once the room was completely darkened. (Later comes some reckoning with those numbers, as she learned the stories of women in sweatshops, who, filling them in, licked their fine brushes dipped in radium-laced paint to achieve a finer point.) She’d adjust the clock’s hour, its wake up time, and intensity of ringing, by winding the three keys on the back. There was a little lever to set the loudness that ran along an arc from - to + . Then she’d pull the pop-up button on top and fall asleep to the a-tick/a-tick/a-tick/a-tick of the second hand circling in its own little inset dial.
In the morning, the alarm was indeed alarming.
Such alarms did not negotiate. When the alarm went off it was “time to get up.” There wasn’t “snoozing.” You lolled at your own risk. (Ah, what briskness have we lost with our snoozes programmed to ocean, rain, night, waterfall, brook, and sunrise, to the digitalized chirps, sighs, and coos of glade-like gentleness! And what of the ugly digitalized faces, where 8s are 0s minus a bar, all 3s are practically 8s, 5s nearly 6s, everything squared, hacked and uncurvy–is this truly how time moves now, with sharp turns and blunt edges, no longer in cycles, and circles and loops?)
Without a snooze button, one’s internal gauging of time strengthened. The wind up alarm taught direct correspondence; and she enjoyed the hurtling start to the morning. She’d have been up-and-at-‘em had there been pigs to slop, thanks to her blue steel alarm. Slapping down the cold pastille of a button, and throwing back the quilt, she’d “pull on her boots”–a phrase she loved. Waking to an alarm like that was bracing, as was the cold at 5 a.m , when “chores” were to be done. And while I don’t intend to give away the ending of this story (did the girl have actual chores? did she keep her alarm clock into adulthood? did she eventually move to the city?) do know this, reader: that an identical clockface, affixed to a high wall, just above a family of Romanian gypsies eating from cartons of take-out in the train station in Brasov, confirmed that our protagonist (now grown, still restless) had arrived too late (it was one a.m., and she would wait hours for the next train to Sibiu) and caused such a bolt of memory, such an immediate, intimate recognition right there amid the scents of sausage and coal smoke, the wide-awake kids sliding down banisters, as to vault past the intervening years entirely and convince her–and this reviewer–that a life’s work in the mysterious field of Defunctness was indeed a worthy endeavor.
