Our relationships with inanimate objects

I was prompted to consider what is going on in the 'relationship' between a dog and his/her/its owner. It proved to be surprisingly hard. So I thought I would start with the easier case, namely human relationships with inanimate objects - mere things. But even thinking about this turned out to be both more tricky and more interesting than I had suspected. Some thoughts below.

I am not going to talk about dead bodies: they are inanimate objects, but of an unusual kind and raise their own concerns. Nor am I going to talk about works of art: there is quite enough to say about everyday objects. But let us not forget that quite extravagant claims are often made for the value of inanimate objects - and therefore how we should treat them - on the basis that they are works of art.

Nor even, within the realm of the everyday, do I want to talk about the treatment of inanimate objects in other cultures. We in the West know something of Japanese attitudes, for example, as we have heard about saying goodbye to objects a la Marie Kondo or the Japanese aesthetic of mingei, but I am not sufficiently familiar with these to say anything interesting. But again, perhaps it is worth keeping in the back of our minds that there is more to say than we can yet say, and remembering that there is nothing odd in a sophisticated culture requiring complexity in the relationships between humans and everyday inanimate objects.

Let us start then with bad relationships between people and objects. As a child, I found the concept of 'racket abuse' in tennis to be a strange one: it's just a tennis racket! Perhaps one can try to reduce the concept - to explain it away, if you will - by reference to the safety of players or spectators, sporting conduct, or some such alternative set of moral concerns. But the fact is that the term refers to abusing an inanimate object. And rightly so. What would you think of a man who bought a lot of tennis rackets and, in the privacy of his own home, bashed them around or cut them up? He would be an idiot. But what would be doing? He would be misusing the rackets. Abusing them. Frustrating their function and purpose for strange ends of his own. The tennis player who takes out his anger on the instrument of his skill is, in a real sense, an abuser of the racket.

I think we have clear ideas of the functions of objects and the 'abuse' that is effected by misusing them. Many people feel something akin to revulsion at seeing the stereotypical bachelor pad misuse of objects: tennis rackets used to strain spaghetti (rackets again!), books piled on floors rather than shelves, eating off ironing boards, ironing on tables, and so on.

Books are a particular prompt for this kind of concern. You might have seen the examples of interior designers who arrange books by size or colour or (worst of all) with the spines obscured and the page edges facing out, an arrangement that sparked "howls" (of anguish? horror? shock?). I think any explanation of the reaction to the latter that pretended that one's concern is only for humans would be wholly inadequate. One might try to say, for example, that "that arrangement of books makes it difficult for others to find the book they wanted" (but who are these others? the owner knows where the books are) or that "such an arrangement is disrespectful to the authors and cover designers" (to the spine designers?), but they fail to convince. The injury, we feel, is to the books themselves, which are being misused. Books do furnish a room, but even that worldly phrase surely relies on the nature of the books qua books - their titles, authors, histories, meanings, connotations - and not merely the colour of their pages. 

Apart from abuse or misuse, other bad 'relationships' with inanimate objects come readily to mind. Neglect is one: it is sad to see a lovely old building abandoned, over-grown and crumbling - unloved, we say, as if a mere thing is deserving of love. This is a different injury from that referred to in Prince Charles' most memorable speech, namely the injury of unsympathetic modification: "what is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend". But both are, we feel, wrongs committed to a thing, wrongs to which buildings are particularly susceptible.

Waste is another concept. Wasted food is a sadness. Think of the starving children, we are told, although it makes no difference to them, and we need to be told to think of them precisely because it is not them that we are thinking of at all. Are we instead thinking of the fact that food was once alive and died in vain - especially sad in the case of an animal? I don't think we are, although perhaps we should be. We are, I am sure, thinking of waste in some larger sense: certainly of human effort expended and then spurned, but also of the inherent potentiality in the food itself - its power to do good, to nourish and sustain - and the sadness that results when that potential is not fulfilled.

What do you think of toys that are bought and kept in their original packaging, never to be played with, merely so as to appreciate in value? And what do you think of toys that are unwrapped, played with once and then forgotten? People have emotional reactions to these situations and they are, I would suggest, not wrong to do so. That is true even of those toys that are mass-produced bits of plastic and where there is no relationship between the maker and the owner.

Let us turn now to positive relationships with inanimate objects. There are some obvious cases: items of sentimental value, photographs (particularly irreplaceable ones of people or times now long gone), the art- or craft-works of children. These are valued for reasons closely and obviously connected to humans. Much the same is true of items associated with notable people: autographs, relics, a glass still bearing the lipstick of a famous actress, and so on.

There are other cases that are only one step removed from that. Think of the 'hallowed turf' of such and such football ground: it not just a football pitch, it is the pitch where that amazing game happened. Can you imagine standing on the very same penalty spot that Gareth Southgate kicked from? More seriously, battlefields and graves have obvious sentimental and educational value directly related to real people.

We can also think of items of ceremonial, patriotic or religious significance. There are things that are capable of being desecrated or profaned. Urinating on a war memorial is a bad thing; respectfully placing wreaths on it is a good thing.

All of these cases are, I suspect, readily explicable in terms of human (or perhaps divine) interests, desires and emotions - indeed, much more readily so than the negative cases of waste and abuse I mentioned above. There are however more interesting cases.

Cars, even mass-produced models, often generate strong feelings. I have heard cars likened to children, and they are often given names. Even in the normal case, we would think nothing odd of an adult who rested a hand on the roof of the family car, now sold, and said, out loud, 'goodbye, old girl, and thank you for your service. I hope you will be happy in your new home'. (But there are limits: we would think it odd to break down in tears on that occasion in the manner of the Arab and his steed in the song.)

The tools of one's trade or hobby are another example. I suppose it might be nothing more than a mixture of valuing their proven utility, the feeling of a sentimental attachment because they trigger memories and the feeling that they are extensions of oneself. But even that is a reasonably heady mix of feelings to attach to mere things.

It occurs to me that Alan Hollinghurst has some good examples of the complications of our relationships with inanimate objects. I think of the man in The Swimming Pool Library who fills in crosswords with the wrong answers, or the history of both Corley Court and Two Acres in The Stranger's Child, each of which is a valuable house, in its own way, and each of which is marred, again in its own way.

There is also the example, which I cannot now locate but which I am sure is from Hollinghurst, of the man who has learned how to carry chairs from the antique trade, i.e., carefully and by the seat. In my memory of the incident, he tells the careless owner of an antique chair that that is how best to carry it, only to be met with the retort that that may be how an antique dealer carries a chair, but this is his chair and he can carry by its back if he wants, or perhaps it is simply that he sees that how an owner carries a chair is different from how a tradesman might.

(The story reminds me, to my embarassment, of an occasion when I was a student visiting a smart London clothes shop and took off my own coat, bought for a few pounds from a charity shop, and left it on the floor while I tried on a terribly expensive coat that I could not afford and had no intention of buying. An assistant walked over, picked up my coat and folded it beautifully, saying something charming and polite to the effect that he liked all clothes to be well treated. I used to think of this story as an example of the preciousness, or at least care, that goes into making a beautiful shop, and I thought of the man's concern for my coat as fundamentally insincere or at least misguided. But now I feel that I was in the position of the careless and arrogant chair-owner. It was a good coat, no matter how old it was: I should not have let it fall to the ground any old how.)

Here is one final example from Hollinghurst, this time from The Line of Beauty:

"Nick knew he would never see the picture again, and found it hard to put it back on the table. It gleamed in the rainy light as an emblem of why he'd come here. It wasn't clear with Toby, any more than with Leo and Wani, if fantasy could hold back time, if this sleek second-year with his sportsman's legs and marvellous arse could still excite him when he knew the fat Toby of five years on. Well, not in the mind, perhaps, but in an image, a photo: it took a certain aesthetic nerve to fly in the face of the facts. He did something silly and solemn, and left on the glass the light, blurred imprint of his lips and the tip of his nose."

I think that "silly and solemn" is precisely right. It is just a photo and it is silly to venerate it (and the touch of the nose too! - Hollinghurst knows his craft). But a photo is also an image, a symbol, and it is right to pay symbols an appropriate level of respect.

What should we take away from all this? One thing is that we are well able to talk about good and bad acts without using the language of 'rights': we do not think that tennis rackets have the right to be well-treated even if we are wrong to abuse them, or that food has the right to be eaten even if it is wrong to waste it. It strikes me that that will be useful to bear in mind when we talk about animals.

Another is simply to note that our lives give us opportunities to do good and evil - or at least to act properly or improperly, appropriately or inappropriately - even without coming across any people. How rich life is - and how rich we have made it with the things that we have made.