I was made eleven years ago

Lots of people must think that finding oneself next to people in the most intimate moments has lots of advantages. Especially chairs – who think they withstand people in the most boring moments – they keep on insinuating. They imagine that when someone lays on us…

For what I’ve been through, I can tell you that few are the times that it is exciting to be the altar of people’s intimate moments. Of course my life is really short: I was made eleven years ago, out of oak, Louis XVI style. From the carpenter to the shop (where I spent one year at last), and from the shop to a dentist’s house. Widower, as rich as moth-eaten and faulty. Who could find exciting to be this character’s bed?

After six years, the dentist died. I ended up in another home. At the beginning, when I found out my usufructuary was a thirteen-year-old girl, I was anxious not having a clue why somebody had the thought to give such a big bed to a child. After a while, a chair – chairs, sometimes, with the cleaning, they go up and down the house and not always return to the same place – explained to me that the whole house was filled with old furniture, really well cared for. It seems that these people really liked antiques. If they only knew that I, despite the style, had been around for only eleven years…!

[...]

This is the beginning of a short story, where the use of a non-human narrator gives the story an unusual point of view. If objects had thoughts…

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The good and new ideas are really close to the ridiculous

“El hombre de al lado” tells the story of an architect who lives in Le Corbusier’s Curutchet House. The house was designed for a doctor, who visited his patients at home. The architect also opens the doors to his students.

There are two scenes about corrections, each one with a really different atmosphere:

It’s like floating

The Placentero (‘pleasant’) chair, designed by Batti in 2004, is the main character in this scene from “El hombre de al lado”. In the film, Leonardo, the man in the white shirt, is the designer of the chair. While he’s talking with his lawyer to arrange some issues, he describes the chair. Although we do not see the entire object in any moment, we can imagine it by its movements.

Slow dynamite

[The sound of a clock ticking is heard, louder and louder]

chance: No, listen. I didn’t know there was a clock in this room.

princess: I guess there’s a clock in every room people live in…

chance: It goes tick-tick, it’s quieter than your heart-beat, but it’s slow dynamite, a gradual explosion, blasting the world we lived in to burnt-out pieces. …Time – who could beat it, who could defeate it ever? Maybe some saints and heroes, but not Chance Wayne. I lived on something, that – time?

princess: Yes, time.

[act iii]

The presence of clocks in everyday life is really vast. Through the years they have become more silent and small, making them less noticeable, but we know they are still all around.

What is that over there?

In this story, firemans’ work is to find books and burn them. They are considered dangerous, interestless, disturbing, and therefore, they are forbidden. They make people unhappy and antisocial, so they have to be destroyed. “Burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes”.

The fragment shows the first time Montag, a fireman, starts to read a book. What is curious is that he turns on a screen instead of a lamp -even when he has one in the livingroom- showing the change of habits in everyday life.

Further on the movie he asks a friend what is a rocking chair, the paradigm of easy-going life, where people have time to chat and read for pleasure. This should never cease to be.

click on CC for spanish subtitles

This nail doesn’t work

I want to show you the sword I made.
Look how beaut…
This nail doesn’t work.
I should have put one of those that have little twists and combed with the hair parted in the middle. Do you know?

What Miguelito doesn’t know is the word “screw”. And yes: to build that wooden sword he should have used a screw better than a nail. A couple would do a lot better, to avoid the parts spinning.

Point to the players their new stance

You roundness, high in flight, giving away
both hands’ warmth as if it were your own,
carefree; what has not the will to stay
constrained in objects, flying too buoyant for them,

not quite Thing and yet still Thing enough
to have remained, unlooked for and unseen,
beyond us in the organized outside,
slipped, though, into you at the uncertain

fulcrum tilting flight to fall; climbing
you seem to catch the throw and lift it with you,
stealing and freeing it―and now incline,
slide onward, point to the players their new stance,
suddenly from your height ordering them
as though they were a figure of the dance―

until, awaited by them all, wished for,
fast, simple, artless, natural, falling
into the cup of their raised-up hands.

[Tr: s.r. & m.s.]

In some games, a nice dialogue is held between the ball and the players:
The ball is where the players put it, and the players take their positions depending on where the ball is.
Balls are wonderful, not only because their perfect geometry, but for the power they have to mesmerize people: who has not stared at one while waiting for its fall?

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I don’t have my drawing book

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[...] Then she says, “I know you’re an artist, draw a picture of me”
I say, “I would if I could, but
I don’t do sketches from memory”

“Well,” she says, “I’m right here in front of you, or haven’t you looked?”
I say, “All right, I know, but I don’t have my drawing book”
She gives me a napkin, she says, “You can do it on that”
I say, “Yes I could, but
I don’t know where my pencil is at”

She pulls one out from behind her ear
She says, “All right now, go ahead, draw me, I’m standing right here”
I make a few lines and I show it for her to see
Well she takes the napkin and throws it back
And says, “That don’t look a thing like me!”

I said, “Oh, kind Miss, it most certainly does”
She says, “You must be jokin’.”
I say, “I wish I was” [...]

Design and Art are not the same thing, although they have some things in common.
The narrator of this scene could have been a designer: some people think design is immediate: a little drawing and that’s all. But it’s not. It requires a process, where -among other things- the designer has to help make the client see what they want.

Last thing I give your mama before she died

boss: [...] D’you remember the clip I bought your mama? Last thing I give your mama before she died. … I knowed she was dyin’ when I bought her that clip for fifteen thousand dollars mainly to  make her think she was going to get well. … When I pinned it on her on the nightgown she was wearing, taht poor thing started crying. She said, for God’s sake, Boss, what does a dying woman want with such a big diamond? I said to her, honey, look at the price tag on it. What does the price tag say? See them five figures, that one and that five and them three oughts on there? Now, honey, make sense, I told her. If you was dying, if there was any chance of it, would I invest fifteen grand in a diamond clip to pin on the neck of a shroud? Ha, haha. That made the old lady laugh. And she sat up as bright as a little bird in that bed with the diamond clip on, receiving callers all day, and laughing and chatting with them, with that diamond clip on inside and she died before midnight, with that diamond clip on her. And not till the very last minute did she believe that the diamonds wasn’t a proof that she wasn’t dying. [He moves to terrace, takes off robe and starts to put out tuxedo coat.]

heavenly: Did you bury her with it?

boss: Bury her with it? Hell no. I took it back to the jewellery store in the morning.

heavenly: Then it didn’t cost you fifteen grand after all.

boss: Hell, did I care what it cost me? I’m not a small man. I wouldn’t have cared one hoot if it cost me a million … if at any time  had that kind of loot in my pockets. It would have been worth that money to see that one little smile your mama bird give me at noon of the day she was dying.

heavenly: I guess that shows, demonstrates very clearly, that you have got a pretty big heart after all.

boss: Who doubts it then? Who? Who ever? [He laughs]

[act ii, scene i]

This is an example of how objects can change someone’s mood. But is their price directly related to the amount of happiness it provides?

What they truly are

Mirrors: to this day, no expertise can explain
the key to what you truly are;
filling the interstices of time’s plane
with mere holes as from a colander.

Spendthrifts of the vacant foyer –
wide as woods beneath twilight stars…
And the chandelier bounds like a sixteen-pointer
through your impenetrability.

Sometimes you are filled with canvases.
Some even seem absorbed into your depths –
other styles you timidly dismiss.

But the loveliest remains, until appears
Narcissus to press her chaste lips,
fully liberated and crystal clear.

[tr.: r. hunter]

Mirrors are not just objects, as they are also the frame to a part of the environment they’re placed in, repeated in a different point of view. And lots of other things, as Rilke stressed.

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