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Hello again Toby,

I knew it! Doing the dishes is always a fertile ground for thought.

I’d done the dishes, and was sorting things for re-cycling. I’d put all the stuff into a plastic bin under the worktop and I was giving thought to what we’d said about the re-thinking of objects as symbols, when at the end I found myself absent-mindedly about to put a plastic bottle top into the bin. I stood there looking at it in my hand for a moment, and asking, ‘Why am I doing this? Am I doing it because I know that it’s going to be re-created (there’s that word again) into some other plastic object, thus saving us having to make new plastic objects. Well of course, that’s what everybody does.  But as I look at this plastic bottle top in my hand, I know that in the scheme of things, we are actually re-creating each other and the things around us, moment by moment. So with that understanding, the plastic bottle top ceases to be an ideal object, and is in this moment, a symbol of our re-creation.’

But then I just threw it in the bin, and started to make the breakfast. (see what a good husband I am!) And it wasn’t until we were having breakfast that I realised what I’d done. Just like everybody else, I’d thrown my sacred plastic bottle top into a bin under the work top.  Ok, it’s logical and practical to chuck a plastic object into the re-cycling bin, and I did it because most of the time I operate in a logical way. I use objects made of plastic, they get re-cycled, and I use them again. Welcome to the real world.

But what would it have been like if I’d been operating in a world where people communicated in a more symbolic fashion (because they realised that every thing is an environment of every other thing)? Then I’d certainly not just be chucking a bit of plastic in a bin. I would view this not as an act of perfunctory re-cycling, but rather as a sacred moment of my own re-creation.

So then, what should I have done?  Inside my house there would have not been a re-cycling bin, but rather and altar of re-creation, where I place things before they go. I arrange them in such a way that seems ‘just right’. I compose them as if writing poetry so that the spaces (around the objects on the altar) seem to reveal our actual thingly state. The state of actual understanding of which reality is but a reflection.

This is the ritual of re-creation that I would go through each day – at the end of which I and others in the street would take our altars to the special greenhouse at the end of the street, and arrange them as our act of re-creation. Only then would they be taken away for re-creation into other things.

Ok, this has been a symbolic flight of fancy, but the point is, that that’s what environmental artists could do – given the opportunity they can, with others, elevate our objects to the status of environmental things – symbols. But people would have to be aware of the sheer preciousness of their actions, and it would have to have special meaning for them as you suggest. I chose to discuss re-cycling as a possible area for further work; but life is made of objects just waiting to be elevated to the status of ’sacred’. Nuts and bolts in a car mechanics workshop for example, (bet you Cunningham’s philosophy of car engines bordered on reverence of the sacred!)


Stan

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