I know it's supposed to be a good thing to put yourself in someone else's shoes. As in, have some empathy and try to see the world through another person's point of view. But what about putting yourself in your shoes' shoes? Is my tendency to imagine what it would be like to be an inanimate object a sign of insanity? Consumer culture run horribly amok? Or just a very strange kind of empathy?
I read a book when I was little about the life of a doll and all the different girls who played with her over time. (Can google help me once again? Victory! It's called Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. In case you were wondering.) Alright, a doll at least looks like a person. But I like to think about what it would be like to be a phone and listen to everyone's conversations. Or a house and watch people's lives. Or a pair of shoes, feeling all kinds of different ground, new types of dirt and gravel. Would a person's feet feel like completeness or oppression?
Like a lot of people, my most emotional relationships with inanimate objects are with clothes. Wow. That sounded very weird. I don't talk to my clothes. Not anywhere near as much as I yell at my computer. Although sometimes I dance with them while I'm putting laundry away. But I digress. Actually, I think this is mostly a girl thing (although what do I know? I've never been a guy. Possibly there are hoards of men who know the grief I felt when my pink flare pants went to the secondhand store when I outgrew them in Grade 2). Clothes are some kind of weird embodiment of us. If you (like me) live in a climate with a 6 month winter you can recognize your friends 100 meters away by their winter coats. You think carefully about what to wear to a job interview or a first date because your clothes are supposed to say something about who you are. A piece of clothing can embody a phase of your life (school uniform, all black wardrobe, prom dress). I can think of several scenes in books where women stand in front of their closets pondering their clothing as a reflection of an ended relationship. Clothing sits next to your skin. It absorbs your sweat and your soup spills, blots your tears, and cleans your glasses lenses.
Which brings me to what I actually meant to write about (believe it or not, I didn't really intend to wax poetical about the power of clothing). Glasses. Of all the inanimate objects I imagine the lives of, glasses are my favourite. I was thinking about this because as I was unpacking moving boxes last week, I came across the glasses cases that hold all my old pairs of glasses. I am easily sidetracked. I tried on all the old pairs of glasses: the red wire-framed children's glasses from when I first became bespectacled in Grade 6, the black pair with tiny rhinestones half fallen out, the swirl armed burgundy pair that encircled my eyes up until a year ago.
It looks very strange to see yourself in the mirror in your old glasses. It's like temporarily reverting to whatever age you were when you wore those frames. And then you wonder (if you're me) whether you're seeing the world the way you did when you wore those frames. Just through the power of having put them back on. The reason I'm fascinated by imagining the life of my glasses is that my lenses have seen almost everything that I've seen. Those are the glasses that looked at my first time table in junior high. Those are the glasses that first saw the my high school locker. Those are the glasses that read my high school diploma exams. My sister pointed out that my lenses have steadily got larger - I'd like to see that as a metaphor for a broadening outlook on the world. All of this is, of course, ridiculously whimsical and silly. The size of your glasses means nothing. But physical switches between pairs of glasses as the years run by is a nice metaphor for me about the ever-changing lens through which I see the world. (That's one thing you can say for putting your head inside the heads of objects without heads. It gives you piles of metaphors.)
Wondering whether my flip-flops are smiling at me or grimacing,
Charlotte
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