Oregon Humanities

Under a Spell

Our disenchantment with stuff

John Holloran

Fall 1995: My studies had taken me to Germany, to Goettingen, the university town outside of Hanover, midway between Frankfurt and Hamburg. We were planning to invite friends—some German, some American—over for a traditional Thanksgiving meal. I knew I would have to plan ahead—German merchants don’t like surprises—so I checked with the local Frischgefluegel (poultry store) and discovered I could indeed order a six-kilogram turkey—_ein Truthahn_. I then did the rounds from one half-timbered storefront to the next in search of stuffing mix because when I was a child, making stuffing meant buying a crinkly plastic bag full of dried cubes of bread, replete with a packet of seasoning. Within the walls of the old town, I couldn’t find anything close—not even at Ewerts, the swanky imported-foods store where I’d go to buy Thai and Indian spices. Nein, not unless I wanted to buy several boxes of Semmel Knoedel mix. I’d have to start from scratch.

Those were the days before easy Internet searches, so I made my way to an English-language bookstore and found a new and horrendously expensive copy of The Joy of Cooking. Standing in the aisle, feeling conspicuous, I found a simple recipe for stuffing and tried to commit it to memory. For most of the rest of the ingredients here, too, I’d have to improvise. Though the recipe called for dried, bottled herbs, I found fresh sage at the farmers market, bought fresh celery root (celeriac), onions, butter, and a big loaf of freshly baked Italian bread.

Thanksgiving morning I walked into town, to the poultry store with its sternly efficient clerks in their starched whites. “Klein moment, bitte,” one said, and returned with an enormous but oddly shaped tom turkey wrapped in a clear plastic bag. She held it out. I stared at it, crestfallen. I had asked for a six-kilo turkey, and here was six kilos of turkey, freshly butchered as requested. But this was exactly half of a turkey, cut along the back. I contemplated trying to explain to her the American holiday—helping her imagine Norman Rockwell’s apotheosis of a Thanksgiving table—yet how was she supposed to have known I was an American or that it was Thanksgiving today? As the other shoppers crowded in around me, I had to ask myself, do I want it or not? Too stunned to do anything else, I paid her and walked home lugging my disfigured bird. How in the world does one roast half a turkey, let alone stuff it?

I arrived back at the flat and took a quick survey: to my surprise, I discovered that half of a twelve-kilo Truthahn fits nicely on top of a regular enameled turkey-roasting pan—leg and wing up. I melted the butter and sauteed the celery root and onions and sage, cut the fresh bread into relatively large cubes—it was too soft to be cut any smaller. I tossed the ingredients together and arranged them in the base of the roasting pan and covered it, with the turkey serving as a lid. That stuffing, washed down with a bottle of 1994 Chateau Ste. Michelle merlot, was exquisite. I had never had such juice-caramelized, textured stuffing. The turkey, for its part, was perfectly cooked—moist white meat, succulent dark meat.

Accustomed as I was to a culture that anticipated my needs—stuffing mixes next to foil turkey pans, broth, gravy, turkey bags, thermometers, basting brushes—I was shocked to find a world altogether indifferent to my project. The Old World forced me to improvise, to hunt and gather pieces and in the process conjure up a feast that none of us would forget.

I’d embraced progress and convenience in my life thus far, so the only role I’d learned to play was that of a consumer rather than a creator. Cooking had become too easy, too convenient. I saw prepackaged mixes as foolproof, and yet I’d been missing out on the best parts of cooking: the searching, the finding, the imagining and reckoning, the labor, the suspense, the transformation, the work and artistry that goes into making a meal from scratch.

In the fifth century BCE, Democritus famously argued that the material of the world is made from small, indivisible, but undistinguished atoms: stuff. His reduction of all creation down to a single mundane element was precisely what gave “atomists” and “materialists” such a bad name in the post-Platonic world. He had said, in effect, that there is nothing in the universe but accumulations of tiny building blocks—mere matter in motion, nothing ghostlike or ephemeral—billiard balls, action, reaction, nothing more. The Platonist demanded a spark of the divine to accompany Genesis’s reminder: “For dust you are and to dust you will return.” Ancient materialism was, for many, too godless, too fatalistic, too depressing.

My modern materialist’s malaise comes from accumulated experiences of having too much stuff, buying too much stuff, finding too few places to store the stuff and all it’s wrapped in, and then, finally, having to get rid of it all again. Having stuff rapidly becomes all too mundane, and I yearn for something more inspiring, something more rooted and elemental, something more storied and enchanted.

However remarkable the process of creation—and turning sand into silicon and silicon into tiny, lattice-etched, electron-driven microprocessors still seems to me a miraculous process—too many of the products one finds today have undergone a systematic process of disenchantment. This disenchantment occurs because of—not despite—the glitzy advertisements and hype. How, for example, could the premiere of a summer blockbuster ever live up to the excitement generated by its endless drink-cup or cereal-box promotions? The very efforts designed to make a product seem enchanting and desirable leave off after the purchase goes through and the banality and ubiquity of the item becomes apparent—something akin to showing up at the prom and beholding another person wearing the very same dress.

In the Disney film Toy Story, the action figure, Buzz Lightyear (“To infinity … and beyond!”) becomes disenchanted and faces an identity crisis when the toy sheriff insists that Buzz is just a toy, not a real superhero with working wrist-mounted lasers, gadgets, and the ability to fly. The process of disenchantment continues when Buzz enters a toy store only to encounter, stacked to the ceiling, a vast shelf of Buzz Lightyear action figures, all of whom cling to a mass delusion of sorts, believing the advertising copy, thinking the words printed on their boxes translate into real working features.

I, too, find it easy to let myself become the prepackaged action figure, in my market-segment box, waiting for my chance to perform the role that my handlers have outlined for me. Do I want the thing or the image of the thing that Madison Avenue jingles into my consciousness? Does the item in question help me do something, or does it serve only to adorn an image of myself—to infinity and beyond? I know I’ve purchased a pitch rather than a tool when it dawns on me just how ordinary and mundane an item really is. Cell phones used to seem miraculous, if obscenely expensive to use. Now they’re so cheap and ubiquitous, so unremarkable, so taken for granted, that there are recycling bins for them; they are easily tossed aside, disposable.

How does an otherwise extraordinary object transform itself into something so disappointingly ordinary? How does that long dreamt-of, meticulously designed, and microelectronically manufactured gadget lose its status as a piece of art and return to the sum of its parts—how does it return to being stuff? The Luddite in me looks to the factory, the putting-out system, the industrial revolution, when craftsmen and artisans were eclipsed by the piecemeal approach, when the handmade gave way to the mass-produced, when manufactured goods became better and cheaper and more widely available. But the modernist in me admits that industry and marketing are not themselves to blame. Technology is not to blame, either—eliminating machines is not the way to solve the problem of stuff.

The problem arises from an attitude, an attitude reflected in the very language of modern capitalistic society: economic, scientific, technical. While the consumer in me is excited by vague dreams of a future painted in abstract, utopian colors and adorned with the language of Star Trek (transporters, holodecks, tricorders), in the tomorrow-land of the present I find that amazing futuristic gadgets do little to answer my basic questions about existence, which makes me question the Jetsons-like dream of a labor-saving, automated future.

Max Weber, in his early twentieth-century essay “Science as a Vocation,” perceived two processes at work in the modern age: intellectualization and rationalization. Both processes help bring about the exponential increase in knowledge and know-how that accompanies modern science and technological progress. The consequence, however, is that no single person can be expected to keep up with the combined efforts of so many highly trained experts and specialists. The more there is to know, the smaller the proportion that any individual can know of it. Weber grants that modern people may have more knowledge in absolute terms, but medieval people understood a greater proportion of the stuff of their everyday lives—they knew how to make their own food, tools, clothing, housing, toys—even if the rest of creation remained shrouded in divine mystery.

The consolation modern people have is a belief that one can learn how anything works—I might not know how a cell phone works, but I assume that I can figure it out and even, perhaps, like Robinson Crusoe, build my own. Weber’s medieval person assumed that what could be known had to be passed down by tradition or through revelation, and what there was to know about the hidden workings of the world was secret and open only to the initiated; knowledge was mysterious, secretly guarded, hermetic, esoteric, and probably dangerous. The modern mind thinks that the powers of reason are capable of reaching the farthest shores of understanding independently, given enough time and effort. The laws of nature are laid bare in the light of human reason—the scientific method is meant to be an enlightening and open process, collaborative, cumulative, demonstrable, repeatable, and verifiable. What can get lost in our modern confidence, however, according to Weber, is a sense of wonder in the face of “mysterious incalculable forces,” a loss that results in a feeling that the world has become essentially “disenchanted.”

There are profound consequences to this disenchantment of the world. Weber argues that intellectualization gives rise to a sense of the meaninglessness of any given life. The individual, the local, the peculiar is put aside in the search for the ideal, the perfect, and the universal—in reason, one seeks to find transcendence, general laws of nature, and not specific examples: reason seeks to understand the ideal, the species of Ulmus__, not this one grand elm tree that gives shade to our street, this tree whose roots were saved in the nick of time many years ago.

To rationalize something means to render it abstract, intellectual, removed from the messy, emotional, meaning-bound world of the individual life. As George Orwell reminds us, however, the problem with intellectual or abstract generalizations is that they conjure up no clear image or sensation. They exist in an unreal realm: formal, artificial, lifeless. A dissected frog is revealed in all its systems, but such analysis kills it. Leo Tolstoy’s indictment of science, Weber explains, is that science is ultimately meaningless, “because it gives no answer to the question, the only question important for us: What shall we do and how shall we live?” Eventually one returns again to the question our ancestors pondered, the question of meaning.

The problem with stuff (and strangely, the real value of stuff as stuff) is that, for example, it has no story, no history, and no individual identity. Stuff is material, plastic, mutable, malleable, generic—the material one uses to fabricate something. One takes stuff, otherwise useless, and attempts to make a work of art out of it. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger discusses this process of transformation in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” He takes as an example a Van Gogh portrait of a peasant’s pair of shoes. He argues that one needs to look beyond the idea of shoes, beyond a pair of shoes in general to the details of the “worn” and “toilsome tread” from which the “worker stares forth.” He sees the trudge, the furrows, the “raw wind,” and the marks of soil and dampness in the leather itself. When one sees these common items in all their dimensions and contexts—the how and the where, and the who that uses them—these items cease to be mere stuff and instead become the equipment of a life, animated and ennobled by particular associations and deployments.

Heidegger emphasizes a way of seeing from the perspective of the owner of the shoes, of the artist, and of the person viewing the painting: all three share in the common task of infusing the shoes with meaning. Anything that can be viewed and engaged by the imagination can have a story and can be used by someone in a meaningful way. Yet he also acknowledges that, given time, things can lose their meaning: “A single piece of equipment is worn out and used up; but at the same time the use itself also falls into disuse, wears away, and becomes usual. Thus equipmentality wastes away, sinks into mere stuff.” If a person is active, doing something, creating, thinking about or relying on some item, if that item is a meaningful part of life, then it becomes infused with life and, as a result, becomes part of a person’s story. The things a person uses actively speak volumes about what is important, troubling, interesting, and vital to a person’s life. Such a thing is no longer stuff, but synecdoche.

The first step Van Gogh takes in creating his enchanted portrait is to view a pair of shoes as an entrance into the peasant woman’s life. Being enchanted by a thing, in this sense, means to allow it to capture one’s imagination. Thus, if I am to avoid being surrounded by meaningless stuff, I must challenge myself to become a craftsman, a poet, an artist, a storyteller—I cannot rely on a media-savvy, high-tech consumer culture to serve up my life prepackaged and brand-new. I cannot expect the greeting-card writers or marketing departments to know just what I want to say.

In his PBS series Cosmos, which aired in 1980, Carl Sagan recognized the need to rekindle a sense of wonder in an America grown weary and anxiously modern. He looked to astronomy as a way to return us to one of the “greatest of mysteries,” the cosmos, whose size and age remain “beyond understanding.” He offered to take us on a voyage that required both “skepticism and imagination.” Although science might try to replace fantasy, in that “imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were,” Sagan notes that without imagination, “we go nowhere,” and then reminds us of the time, long ago in Alexandrian Egypt, when Eratosthenes speculated that the earth might be only one little world among many. Sagan sets off on a journey to the farthest galaxies, across unimaginable distances, but then, thirteen episodes later, completes his cosmic journey with a return to home, to Earth, “our parent.” By confronting viewers with the awe-inspiring vastness of the universe, by portraying Earth itself as relatively insignificant, a “mote of dust in the morning sky,” he seeks to inspire people to experience wonder again—the ultimate consolation for those grown weary of the all too mundane worries of the modern world. To contemplate the remoteness of our existence is to force the question of destiny—what do I make of the fact that I am placed here, in this particular place and time, and what am I to do with the time and conditions of my existence, my earthbound life?

In this way, the encroachment of stuff says more about me, my ability to see things in their proper light. Stuff remains stuff until I look at it anew. If I give it another thought, it might be transformed by my imagination into a substance full of possibility and can serve to remind me of the mutability of the world. Stuff becomes materials when I am reminded that things are constantly being molded, shaped, and created; a change of perspective gets me to recall my own role as creator.

The effort, thought, care, and deliberation that goes into an event such as a Thanksgiving in Germany—the creation of a meal, the invocation of a prayer, the contemplation of all we are grateful for—are what makes such occasions meaningful. Whether one is preparing a Thanksgiving feast or even just a humble supper, if a meal is to be more than the foodstuffs that clutter the table, the process one goes through to prepare for such a ritual ought not become too routine, too easy. When one knows where the goods are grown and how they reflect the people who grew them and the place from which they sprung, they acquire a story: they cease to be generic. To know the origins of a thing allows one to see it in all its originality—sui generis—individual as a world unto itself: a monad, alive, indivisible.

A work of art, as Heidegger would say, involves work and art—it requires a person to see oneself as an artist, and it requires that a person see work as a necessary component of being an artist. There in Germany, thwarted in my search for readymade fixings, I awoke to the role of the cook, the artist forced to improvise and explore. The unexpected sight of that split turkey stirred me from my dogmatic slumber, forced me to relinquish Norman Rockwell’s ideal spread and take what resources I had and make something of them. By finding ways to make good out of unfamiliar circumstances and foodstuffs, I began to sense something of the spirit that must have infused those first Thanksgivings.