Anyone else here got a thing for picking up bits of old rubbish, sticks, pieces of broken pottery? Go on, I know you’re as easily distracted by some types of odds and ends as much as the next magpie (whether shiny or otherwise.) 

The notion of the draw of this stuff and the need to want to pocket it is - or rather was - not a thing I’d really given any thought to. Instincts aren’t often something you question. Well, not until someone asks you what hell are doing stooping in the edge of the hedge to reach for that discarded Victorian sauce bottle. 

However, thanks to coming across the thinking and writing of Jane Bennett, and notably her book ‘Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things’, some things have started to fall into place. In a nutshell, her drift is that inanimate objects possess an agency all of thier own. Which is a pretty interesting idea. Actually, it’s much, much more fascinating than that.

A long time ago I read ‘The Geography of Thought’ which was basically a reflection on the difference between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ perceptions of the relationships to things, and insofar as I recall, that ‘Eastern’ philosophy tends to work towards considering the whole; that things never exist in isolation. 

In the thesis this is about ‘events’ but I took it also to heart with associating ‘found things’ as events as well. Happening on something incongruous or unexpected is an excellent way of breaking and rearranging what I’m thinking about. 

But I didn’t stop to think about the ‘draw’ of those things, but rather the result of it - i.e. that it was me that decided. Never that that bit of rubbish might have exercised its influence. Bennett frames the ‘thing’ perfectly; of the thing’s ability to “to make things happen, to produce effects.”

Now, you can’t deny (can you? Really?) the effect some precious things you simply can’t bin, have on you. That thing is always doing some thing to you. How can that thing ever be described as inert? 

Next time you notice some thing, have a listen to what it’s saying to you.

The picture I used, by lovely co-incidence, is some kind of plastic which called out to me as I was walking around outside between starting and finishing this. Just the thing.