“This is Not a Nature Essay”

by Emily Welty

A new friend approached me after a playwrighting retreat.

“So, you’re a puppeteer.”

 I looked behind me to see if they were talking to someone else.

“Oh, no, I’m not! Sorry!” But that sounded fun, I thought. A puppeteer!

“I wasn’t asking you. I was telling you. You are a puppet person. In your soul,” they clarified.

I shifted my weight from foot to foot. They gestured to my water bottle, to the saltshaker on the picnic table in front of us.

“When you see an object, like these two, here – do you know their personalities?”

I assumed everyone does this? I didn’t need to say the saltshaker listens to music on the subway without headphones as a flex and the water bottle is full of bravado but invents food allergies to call attention to herself. The expression on my face was answer enough.

“See? Puppeteer.”

I don’t make puppets. I don’t write plays for puppets. But it’s obvious to me that every object has a personality, a set of quirks, preferences, requests, aversions if you listen closely enough.

_________________________________

Another writing conference, this one is full of environmental writers. The teacher is kind, earnest. We are supposed to contemplate an object, working our writerly muscles towards lyric essays. We are instructed to choose the first object that comes to mind. I scribble down ‘toaster’. The teacher leads us through a series of prompts to elucidate our awe and wonder, pausing halfway through to hear what object each student picked. I have written with abandon, barely breathing as I transcribe what feels so clear when I listen. It is only when these lovely, generous writers begin naming dewy, lush natural images that the dissonance becomes clear to me. Mossy birdbath. Shy frog under a lettuce leaf. Blossoming radish.

Um. I wrote about how my toaster might be a libertarian hedge fund bro. That, best case scenario, he is a haughty bully subtly undermining the rest of the appliance community in my kitchen. Other students are uncovering birch trees as a gateway for hope and mushrooms as a vehicle for grief. We are encouraged to articulate what our object lends us as metaphor, as simile.

I have written: My toaster is like the annoying Dutch undergraduate student with a perfectly symmetrical face man-splaining American foreign policy to me. My toaster is like the prestige film you finally watch on an airplane just so that you can nod knowingly when other people mention it. My toaster is the sexy guy you want to sleep with but who expresses abhorrent opinions about healthcare reform.

I will not be reading aloud.

My toaster opines about the culinary arts while my inherited hand-me-down plates and silverware from the Brooklyn junk store roll their eyes, sigh with irritation. The cookbooks try to cut the toaster down to size by observing that toast is not a recipe. The toaster is unbothered, toast cannot be reduced to a formula, he sniffs, toast is an art.

I am incapable of writing about an object without giving it a backstory. There is an actual story to this toaster. And, while in that moment I feel wildly at odds with the other writers in my environmental writing workshop, this is also a nature story.

______________________________________

At the height of the pandemic, my spouse and I received a notification that the storage unit that held almost everything we owned in the world had been broken into. We were on a backpacking trip around the globe and enforced quarantine meant there was no way to know if our storage unit was basically fine or whether it had been scraped clean. For several months, I catalogued what I used to own. I lay awake at night trying to remember the items in their individuality, trying to decide whether I would miss them. The sheer volume of what I owned felt enormous even though it had all fit into a 6 feet by 6 feet storage unit. Was it ethical to own so much in the midst of a climate crisis driven by materialism?

As I contemplated not owning anything beyond what I had been carrying in a backpack around the world, I vowed that going forward, nothing would be purchased that would fade into obsolescence. I would not buy anything that was not essential. The sum of my belongings would be intentionality.

A full three months later, we return to the States in the midst of a global pandemic, undergo a strict two-week quarantine and are finally allowed into the storage facility to assess.  I visualized this moment frequently, how I would feel, even what I would say. And then we were standing at the door, rolling it up and looking at a dusty pile of possessions, neatly stacked in the unit as we had left them ten months ago. Relief. A sense of shame or embarrassment that I believed my stuff worthy of robbery. And the crushing weight these possessions exert on me. There were the half-finished projects that I boxed up and promised to finish upon my return. Those projects no longer felt pressing or held much interest but I’d paid in two kinds of currency – money and emotion - to store them, so was I forced to complete them?

The objects overwhelmed me. There were too many to feel gratitude or even differentiate. The floodgates of ownership opened and I emotionally shut down. After vowing for months how much I would love these objects if I were just allowed to keep them, all I felt was numb.  Throughout the backpacking around the world, the sparseness of what I carried meant that everything had enough significance to justify being carried from one country to the next.

We grabbed just two boxes from the storage unit to take home initially. Anything more felt like too much. Over the next several weeks, each morning, I closed my eyes, reached into the box and pulled out one item. I exercised reverence, beholding the object, puzzling through how it came into being and recalling my history with it. I considered its designer and the materials that needed to come together to craft it. I paced around our new apartment, taking 10,000 steps with a pie plate, a bread tin, each wineglass - a different object each day, integrating them back into my life or wishing them well as I resolved to release them back into the world. If I decided to keep it, I thanked the object for its usefulness and I invited it to continue its life with me. I offered a tiny apology for my inattentions in the past.

That’s how I ended up spending a hundred dollars on a toaster. Amid the billion people all trying to reconfigure a life in the wreckage of a global pandemic, all of us imagining how we will be different on the other side, what I decided was that nothing should be owned unnecessarily. I researched the longevity of toasters. I read comparisons of their durability, beauty, adaptability in toasting materials of different widths, bagel toasters vs. bread toasters. And I chose a beauty of a toaster, a sleek sea foam green stunner with rounded edges. The lever smoothly dropping the bread into a precise furnace without the characteristic hitch and jam of ordinary toasters.

We will own this toaster until we die, I proclaimed to my spouse. This is our forever toaster.

There is something simultaneously tragic and satisfying about standing side by side and looking at a machine that you believe will accompany you for the rest of your life.

And that’s why it’s distressing to discover that the toaster has such a toxic personality.

The toaster is not the first citizen of the kitchen to become a problem. My spouse Matthew and I regularly animated our oven mitt as an over-sharing TV host “Mitt”. As his personality crystalized, we eventually drew and taped eyes to the end of the mitt. Unfortunately, this made it harder to take my now-friend, shove his head into an oven and force him to grasp smoldering casserole dishes in his mouth. To make matters worse, a tiny bit of moisture had somehow gotten in Mitt’s eyes which began to look teary as the marker ran. We agreed that we had gone too far and that either we had to stop pretending that the oven mitt was a creature or buy a new oven mitt. Since we were committed to owning less, only one decision could be taken. In a Lear-like moment, I removed Mitt’s eyes and resolved that no one could speak his name again. The character faded. Sort of?

___________________________

In Japan, I learned a mythology of everyday objects turning into ghosts and haunting their owners. Once an object reaches its hundredth year, it becomes sentient and alive - tsukumogami.  Items that have been mistreated or ignored are often vengeful and can play pranks on their owners as well as banding together with other objects to create mayhem. In some cases (like futons apparently) the objects actually try to kill the owners but mostly they just create mischief. People perform ceremonies to ask for forgiveness of the objects they have wronged or neglected each year. Some Japanese people are reluctant to buy secondhand goods because one can’t be sure how the previous owner treated the object and if it might achieve self-awareness when it is with you.  Obviously most Japanese people don’t take these superstitions and folktales to heart, but I loved this concept. I became enamored with the cheese graters that come to life by growing spines and becoming porcupines. Apparently umbrellas are especially prone to tsukumogami which is strange since every umbrella I’ve ever met has either broken or gotten lost, departing my company decades before sentience.

The notion that we can be destroyed by our own possessions seems terrifying and far-fetched and mythically true.  It might not come to pass that my cheese grater unites with my extra mixing bowl and the vacuum cleaner to stage a coup in the night against me. But it feels absolutely true that our souls are destroyed by continuing to amass objects that we neglect.

I’ve been worrying about objects and their impact on us, on the planet, for almost my whole life. I had childhood nightmares about landfills full of pink plastic and massive tires. In the dream I am about to be smothered or crushed by these materials I knew were toxic, unnatural, incapable of decomposition before I had the language to name it.

Maybe enchanting objects is the way I cope with the horror of possessions.

How do a I negotiate sharing life with objects with objectionable politics? How do I resist the urge to trade the toaster in for one with a sunnier personality? In community organizing, we talk about the idea that no one is disposable, that we don’t cast people aside when they fail to meet our high standards for language, knowledge, activist credentials. We refuse to let one another go when we make mistakes, fall short of our ideals.

So maybe then this is a nature essay, a contestation of what is alive and what is dead, of what has a soul and what is sentient, of who we keep and who we throw away and how we live together.