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Things and language have a tricky relationship. Protagoras said: “Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are that they are, and of the things that are not that they are not.” For sophists like him, language measures things and gives shape to their qualities. All things are mutable and need to be shaped. Cato the Elder, on the other hand, said, “Seize the thing, the words will follow.” For Platonists, things carry immutable truths independent of language. It takes someone in touch with truth to access the right words for things. Both Protagoras and Cato pit things against words—they just root for different sides in the fight. Do writers have to pick a side on the things or words debate? Is it even a choice?
On my desk are things: two plants, three notebooks, a fake hundred-dollar bill, a plastic yogurt container stuffed with writing supplies, a brass banker’s lamp, a syllabus, a mug, a glass, three books, a receipt, a pen, a to-do list. These things are indifferent to the words I write, and my words are usually indifferent to them, too, unless I’m writing about them. Then the words and the things become antagonists—or at the very least, respectful opponents.
Without their surface appearance, things become ideas—abstract and ungraspable. Haecceity, the notion of “thisness” was a Scholastic concern. Scotus and Aquinas asked: How can we differentiate one thing from another thing? Is it possible for two things to be the same in every single way, while still being two different things? If things have haecceities they differ in non-qualitative, non-relational, that is to say, essential ways. Leibniz took up the theory of haecceities in his definition of substance. Things and their substance are so guilty of linguistic indescribability that he had to invent calculus to deal with them.
The things on my desk can be specified—without math. I can make them evocative: The receipt is for a Wegman’s trip dated June 30th, with the year rubbed off. Ah, the fleeting nature of time! The banker lamp’s green glass shade is cracked. Bankers and writers have different standards when it comes to lamps! By selecting certain details, I control how these things appear to you, the reader.
Georges Perec, author of the 1965 novel Les choses (Things. A Story of the Sixties), was interested in things’ power over words. As a member of the OuLiPo group in the mid-Sixties with Italo Calvino, Perec was fascinated by systems that order thinking. He employed extreme formal constraint, eliminating all instances of the letter “e” in La Disparition (A Void)—to mimic language’s ordered system. Extreme formal constraint takes the shape of a list in the essay “Notes Concerning The Objects Which Are On My Work Desk.” He begins with the oldest thing: his pen. But there are many other things on the work desk to list besides: an ashtray, a stamp, a flower vase, a cigar box containing trinkets. And there are things that are not always on his desk, though perhaps they should be: an inkwell, a stapler, glue. In fact, as he lists, he keeps adding and subtracting the things, as the list takes shape before him as an essay. Brian Dillon sees in the listing of writers like Perec a tension between “pure pleasure in the descriptive act of noting in series, and a darker sense that the list will never be done with” or that it might be evasive in some way.
Specifying the things on my desk means differentiating them, which is easy: One plant is a snake plant and the other is a dracaena. The three books are Tristes Tropiques, White Noise, and On Writers and Writing by Henry James. Two of the three notebooks are diaries. Well, okay. These things were on my desk during draft one of this intro. Now, I must subtract the water glass and add a textbook called The Rhetorical Tradition, Underworld, one more mug, one more notebook, and Brian Dillon’s Essayism. The more forcefully my language tries to capture things, the more those things strain against their captivity.
Juleigh Howard Hobson’s “Things” suggests systems of decay. George Yatchiskin’s “Cost” suggests systems of beauty. Each reaches further than you might expect. Russell McConnell’s “81, 92, 212” describes a thing so vast and subtle that “conspiracy” doesn’t even come close to naming it. “Things that Can’t Buy Love,” by James Mathis, notes with wry humor that things are sometimes more easily defined by what they cannot do. Daniel Stokes’ “The Second Wife” shows things’ meanings persisting long past their point of usefulness. John Howell’s “Object Lessons” explores a world where things take on human roles. Charles Tarlton’s “sense/fact” glosses Hobbes’ Leviathan as things that the eye sees and that the mind recognizes—but where does that leave knowing? Hila Ratzabi’s “Landscaping” explores the rooted nature of the things that make up our lives.
Do we use things, or do things use us?
Do we use language, or does language use us?
Even if these questions cannot be answered, at least they can be asked.
But…do we ask questions, or do questions ask us?
Things are not as they seem…or so it seems!
George Yatchinsin is the author of the chapbook Feast Days (Flutter Press 2016) and the full length The First Night We Thought the World Would End (Brandenburg Press 2019). His poems have been published in journals including Antioch Reviewa, Askew, Lily Review, and Zocalo Public Square. I am co-editor of the anthology Rare Feathers: Poems on Birds & Art (Gunpowder Press 2015), and my poetry appears in anthologies including Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies (Everyman’s Library 2019), Clash by Night (City Lit Press 2015) and Buzz (Gunpowder Press 2014).
Hila Ratzabi is the author of a full-length book of poetry, There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022), which won a 2023 gold Nautilus Award. She was a finalist for the North American Review’s 2021 Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction, for the Fourth Genre Steinberg Essay Prize (2019), and for the Fifth Annual Narrative Magazine Poetry Contest (2013). Her essays have appeared in the Ten Percent Happier blog, the Wisdom Daily, the Jewish Daily Forward, Kveller, Alma, Mutha Magazine, and others. Her poetry has been published in Narrative, Linebreak, Drunken Boat, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and other journals. Her poetry also appears in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She has received scholarships and fellowships to the Willapa Bay AiR residency, the Vermont Studio Center, the Crater Lake National Park residency, and the Arctic Circle Residency. Ratzabi is the former editor-in-chief and poetry editor of Storyscape and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Oak Park, Illinois.
Charles Tarlton was, for more than 50 years, writing and publishing scholarly articles on such philosophers as Locke, Machiavelli, Bentham, Nietzsche, but most importantly on Thomas Hobbes. In the years since his retirement in 2006 he has written only poetry (publishing in 84 journals, including Ekphrastic Review, Rattle, Blackbox Manifold (UK), Ilanot Review (Israel), London Grip (UK), The Journal (UK), Innisfree Poetry Journal,(Eire), Thick Jam, Spinoza Blue, Bookends, and elsewhere. In addition, he has published six print collections of poetry and ekphrasis.
Juleigh Howard Hobson’s work can be found in Think Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Great Weather for Media & other venues. She has been nominated for “The Best of the Net”, Pushcart, Elgin & Rhysling Awards. Her latest book is Curses, Black Spells & Hexes (Alien Buddha).
Russell McConnell is a Full Member of the SFWA, and has published stories in the anthologies Dragonesque (2023), Familiars (2024), and Last-Ditch (2024); he has stories forthcoming in Achilles and Pulp Literature (both 2025). he has been a Semi-Finalist and repeated Silver Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, and a 2024 finalist for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award.
John Howell is an actor and retired elementary school drama teacher living in Jackson, Mississippi. The situation in the story “Object Lesson” started out as an early-morning dream that stayed with him for some time until he finally felt compelled to write it out as a kind of surrealistic fable.
Book XI: A Journal of Literary Philosophy
