Inanimate Personhood

I recently made a table and two benches out of wood from some old planter boxes that I tore down. For the most part, the tops are made from fir 2x12s and the legs from either redwood 2x4s (in the case of the benches) or 4x4s (in the case of the table). It has given me a case study in the development of inanimate personhood, as over the few days that it took me to dismantle the boxes and clean, sand, cut and assemble the pieces, not to mention the physically idle time spent designing them in my head, I came to regard each one as a person. Not as a human being, of course, nor as an animal, nor as a plant, although of course the last would be the most likely candidate for ascription.

As I moved through the process, making the benches first and then the table, I made some changes so that the benches were not really long enough for the table, unless I were to disassemble them and cut them down so that they could be used on the shorter ends of the table rather than on its longer sides.

Of course, that is now unthinkable. It would cause me real pain to unscrew the legs and cut the bench top to the proper size. I would be killing the old benches and by now they are really a part of the family.

Did I feel a similar twinge of reluctance when dismantling the planter boxes? No, not really, and I am not sure why. Maybe it is a matter of dimension, although I think by now my house is a person to me. Neither could it be the fact that the boxes were made of mixed material, the wood but also of course the soil, not to mention the plants that were growing in them. Maybe it is the fact that they never formed a consolidated whole, being somehow too distended in their dimensions as well as being too integrated into surrounding structures, a fence on one side and a cottage on the other.

Maybe it is just because benches and tables have legs, and being made a misura d'uomo, their candidature to personhood, via the human model, is all but predestined.

There is something about the designing and building process, however, especially the final sanding, that resembles gestation and birth. Think of Geppetto and Pinocchio. I think it is only after the eyes are carved that the little puppet came to life. There is definitely a magical coming together that happens in that final stage, as minor as it is in the overall labor of a project. Countless times I can think of remodeling work that all of a sudden acquires its desired state of beauty only when the last finishing touches are done, when all marks in a wall have been painted over and the final piece of trim is put in place, even if in material terms those little events are barely consequential, hardly substantive.

Drawing on a piece I wrote recently on plant personhood, I introduce here the topic of ships. Ships, as well as other large scale craft, but especially and originally sea-going vessels, are christened when they are completed, including a ritual whereby they are released from the dock onto the water, this particular aspect of the ritual clearly drawing on Christian tradition. At this time, they are given their names as a bottle of champagne (at least in one version of the act) is broken over their bow, clearly a take on the anointing of the forehead of a newborn, only in an inanimate register. The significance of this ritual is not merely symbolic; maritime law of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries records serious court cases over the liability that christened vessels carry while on the water; that is, it is not the actions of the owner, the captain or the crew that were being tried in court, but those of the ship itself.

Although made of wood, these benches and table are no longer trees, although their ontological origins are made clear by their material appearance, their woody nature evident in the deep rings that the thick slabs reveal. I wonder why that is. Why do I not see a plant when I look at those benches and that table. Why do I not necessarily see even wood. But a bench. And a table? I will have to take this up in a future post.