Scrapyard // Richard Kelly Kemick

This article is part of our guest edited month exploring the theme "Truth is Stranger than Fiction," which challenges readers to push themselves out of their comfort zones and embrace strangeness.

Last week, my partner, Litia, and I drove our Chevy Trailblazer to the scrapyard. After 300,000 kilometres on the odometer, the entire vehicle—engine, brakes, doors—was tired.

I became a man in that Trailblazer, and I don’t mean in the backseat sense. Rather, in the sense of spending three hours in traffic with nothing good on the radio and the CD player long busted, so I learned how to sit quietly with myself; in the sense of staring at the flickering numbers of a gas pump’s register and counting off the hours of labour that correspond to each one; in the sense of inspecting the balding tires and beginning to understand that you inevitably become one of the things you surround yourself with.

Litia and I signed the scrapyard’s paperwork, accepted our cheque, and exited the garage. The floodlights atop the razor wire had been turned on, and they shone a soft blue glow onto the snow that had fallen across the Trailblazer, covering its hood, roof, and all but two small circles on the windshield. The vehicle had always looked so tough and rugged but now seemed sombre and slow-witted, a bit like Boo Radley.

I used to think I was the only person who got like this—not just attached to inanimate objects but empathetic to their plight. I can still conjure up a pang of sadness at the thought of my old hiking boots beside the garbage basket of the shoe store, the laces stripped, tongues lolling. But I have learned that heartache is never unique. In a 1919 essay, T.S. Eliot popularized the term “objective correlative” to convey “a set of objects … which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.” Eliot argues that Hamlet, for example, “is most certainly an artistic failure” because Shakespeare does not anchor Hamlet’s suffering to any one specific item. In other words, Shakespeare hadn’t yet learned to show, not tell.

Eliot would have been a bigger fan of Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse or William Carlos William’s red wheelbarrow. He would’ve been positively giddy over Timothy Findley’s novella The Wars, which is kind of Canada’s own version of Hamlet. The Wars describes the protagonist’s killing of an injured horse with the lines, “He fired. A chair fell over in his mind.” In these two quick sentences, all of the character’s struggle, loss, and inconsolable anguish is summed up by some upended furniture. A few months ago, I lost my watch while hiking. And what kept interrupting me every time I began to write this essay was the thought of my Casio, the alarm set for 6:29 a.m., chiming beneath the ferns, its indigo face flashing in the dark.

In 2004, the American literary theorist Bill Brown published A Sense of Things, which as its back cover states, “is the story of Americans using things to think about themselves.” Droves of humanities scholars soon established Thing Theory, the study of our relationship to—simply put—stuff. But the focus of Thing Theory is often directed not on object agency but on object ubiquity: that we are so desperate not to be the last person without a Dyson that we spend far too much money on one, over-leveraging ourselves, and thus become indentured to the vacuum like sunburned peasants to a feudal lord. But I think what is more culturally revealing than our enslavement to objects is our endearment to things.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that the difference between objects and things is that an object becomes a thing when it can no longer fulfill its purpose. And it seems to me that it is the things—the discarded, the useless, the unworkable—that possess our hearts. Woolf’s hazy lighthouse, William’s unused wheelbarrow, Findley’s supine chair; then, too, there is the Trailblazer sleeping in the snow, the hiking boots leaning against the garbage basket, the watch making sounds in a forest where no one is around to hear it.

Perhaps it is not so illogical to have a sentimental reaction to things; indeed, it may be the only logical reaction there is. We produce 3.5 tons of waste each day, and that number is only rising. Likewise, the world welcomes 353,000 babies every 24 hours. If we assume that all of those infants are born at a healthy weight of 7.5 pounds (which, of course, they aren’t), we therefore produce a mere 2.6 tons of human daily, meaning the planet’s thing-to-human ratio is expanding by nearly a ton every day.

We surround ourselves with so many things that we can’t help but be altered by their presence. Who hasn’t gazed upon the broken lamp by the dumpster, the frayed sweater in the sewer, the teddy bear with no eyes on the lawn and, in gazing, seen an aspect of themselves, their families, our entire civilization? By sunrise, every jack-o-lantern has become a saggy, all-knowing oracle, who whispers to last night’s trick-or-treaters, “You are next.”

In the scrapyard, there were more cars than I had ever seen. I don’t mean to say there were more cars than I’d ever been around—surely, I was encircled by many more when the Trailblazer and I merged into rush-hour Manhattan with neither rear indicator working—but I never really saw them. Though in the scrapyard, now that the objects had turned into things, they made themselves known.

I once had a writing professor who can best be described as Old Testament in not just her age but pedagogical style. Out of her many, many (many) grievances with our prose, the writerly misstep for which she had the least mercy was when we contravened her Thing Rule. Every time we would use the word “thing”—regardless if it was in our writing or conversation—she would make her voice nasal and pitchy while shouting, “Thing! Thing! Thing!” until the perpetrator was shamed into silence.

She would then glare at us with her cataracting eyes and say, “The thing about ‘thing’ is what thing is not a thing?” A zippy little koan which we would all dutifully write down in case there was a quiz.

The Thing Rule was so far-reaching that students were not allowed to use words with “thing” within them, such as “everything” or “nothing” or “something.” A friend once asked me in a whisper if “bathing” counted—and, when we both agreed that the risk of wrath was too high, used “showering” instead.

In Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel Memoirs of Hadrian, the dying emperor ends his diary with a plea to gaze upon all that exists around him, “which doubtless we shall not see again.” Hadrian concludes: “Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes.”

This ending haunts me. How colourful our world is (doubtless, far more colourful than what Hadrian calls the “pallid places” whereto the soul soon ventures), but that proliferation of colour is brought through the proliferation of stuff. And we never fully appreciate that stuff until it is too late, until the objects—or ourselves—become things.

With this in mind, I can see that the professor’s anger was rooted in more than being five years from retirement. Her age had afforded her a certain omnipotence. She knew that everything eventually becomes Sodom and Gomorrah, burning bright for a moment before dulling into indistinguishable ash. She knew that language comes from Eden itself, and there is an element of paradise in the difference between a fainting couch and chaise lounge. She knew that the only way to enter into death with open eyes is to take in the objects that exist around you, see them with specificity, and say their name.

I remember the first time I went to the dump. My father picked me up from my Catholic junior high and drove us to the landfill on the outskirts of town. We were throwing away old shingles.

After being waved through the front gate, we backed onto the base of a garbage mountain. I emerged from the van to glimpse bowling pins, faux granite countertops, the shrivelled corpse of a deflated inflatable palm tree—all of it tangled through the refuse like miners after a slide. A nearby backhoe delicately pushed around piles of futons, as another pickup parked beside us and the driver exited to toss several 2x4s from the flatbed. And for the fact that each plank had a cord of rope attached to either end, I knew that I was not looking at wood but at swings. How strange, how mythical this world can be—when a sanded-down tree can transform before your eyes into a seat that is still warm from a history of flight.

I felt like Noah as he stood by the arc’s starboard door, watching strange beasts file past, creatures he could not have imagined. Armadillos, iguanas, North American river otters. And as the first drops began to fall, the pallidness of the future must have seized him, the carcasses bobbing in the forthcoming tide, as he already missed what he never knew he had.

Richard Kelly Kemick lives in Rossland, BC. His first non-fiction book, I Am Herod, will be published October 2019 by Goose Lane Editions.