Material Storytelling: Layered Spatial Narratives and Aesthetic Excess
Rilke thought the whole point of being alive might be to say a few nouns out loud. The Ninth Duino Elegy asks it directly. Are we perhaps here just to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window. He isn't being whimsical. He's proposing that human beings exist as the place where things get registered, that a jug unwitnessed is less than a jug witnessed, and that our job is closer to attention than to production. Heidegger, who read Rilke closely, made the same move philosophically in a 1950 lecture called "The Thing." He takes a jug and refuses to treat it as an object with properties. What the jug does, he argues, is gather. It holds the spring, the rain, the rock the water ran through, the earth the clay came from, the hands that shaped it, the guest it will be poured for. A thing things, in his awkward coinage, meaning it draws a world together into one graspable location. That's the theory of material storytelling, stated more strongly than...
