(abandoned substack draft)
meaningful objects matter because we’re all gonna die
tend to them, attend to them, they are narrative batteries. how you manage your talismans will… function as scaffolding? a graph overlay? like a trade network
What is a talisman and why should anybody care? To me, a talisman is any object that has meaning. This matters because people are drawn to wanting to live meaning lives, because we’re all going to die and we’d like to make it count, whatever that means.
Complication: what is a meaningful object to me might be a meaningless object to you. People have fought vicious wars over this sort of thing.
Flags are talismans. Trophies are talismans, whether we’re talking about the World Cup or an Oscar or a Nobel prize or a Medal of Honor. wedding rings are probably the most universally understood talismans. a wedding is a ceremony where an entire community gathers to charge a talisman with symbolic meaning, often in a house of worship, with a trusted community leader doing the imbuing. even if you’re not religious, even if it’s a purely secular wedding, fact is everyone shows up to spend some of their limited time and energy on this earth to witness and consecrate a symbolic act, a rite of passage. We can debate about whether marriage as an institution is still relevant in 2022, but I don’t think it’s disputable that it’s still a big symbolic act
Every crown is a theatre prop. This is obvious in a production of king lear, it’s less obvious when it’s a production of the British Monarchy
Maybe you don’t technically need talismans in order to have a rich and meaningful life. I find myself inclined to think that, well, you’d probably still have psychological, imagined talismans even if you don’t have physical ones. And as long as we’re still breathing bags of flesh and blood, it makes sense to use physical objects in our environment properly
without using the word talisman, mark twain talked about this a bunch in his 1902 essay “does the race of man love a lord”. He talked about how, apparently when the Prince of Wales visited the USA, people would sell his hair
Biggie’s plastic crown sold for $594,750 at Sotheby’s. notice the theatrics – handling the prop with gloves
Kanye pissed in his grammy. A mark of symbolic disrespect. This in turn reminds me of piss christ, a 1987 photograph by the American artist and photographer Andres Serrano “depicts a small plastic crucifix submerged in a small glass tank of the artist’s urine”. And that in turn also makes me think of Duchamp’s Fountain. I’m not exactly an Art Critic or whatever so my interpretation is just a curious layperson’s.
tattoos can be talismans. I got my own first tattoo to commemorate the completion of my second book, Introspect. It’s a classical labyrinth on my neck. I choose to think of it as a sort of DIY shamanic initiation. It’s partially visible even when I’m wearing a shirt.
Logos are talismans. Ever noticed how upset people get sometimes when a brand changes its logo, if it’s not done well?
jewelry can be talismans
Books can be talismans. I think from time to time about how Carl Sagan autographed a copy of a book for Neil Tyson.
I’m starting to think now of my library as a sort of fractal thread of threads of my engagement with ideas, with representations – my relationship with each book is marked by my notes and scribblings in them
A melody or a song can be a talisman. One of the cool things about growing older is that a song that is meaningful to you can accumulate more meaning over time, as you come to associate it with more experiences, and more reflection. You can then access past emotional states
Someone once asked “how do I get rid of a lucky horseshoe? is it bad luck to throw it away?” My answer was, “the secret to parting with good talismans is to pay it forward into the world. don’t throw it away, give it to someone. or even leave it somewhere for strangers etc with a note. add to the magic in the world rather than subtract.”
Ultimately, every talisman is fleeting, just as life and existence itself is fleeting. There’s a great little story about “the glass is already broken”
When Marie Kondo instructs people to ask, “Does it spark joy?” I believe she is basically asking people to tap into their emotional response to objects
You can make your life more meaningful by investigating meaning. I think this is the real fun and joy of tidying up. It’s not some burdensome chore for you to feel bad and guilty about. Simply look around you with curiosity, and ask, ooh, what’s the story of this? What’s the story here? Every object has a backstory. I once decided to spend a whole day researching the history of the PlayStation 4 controller. I ended up on a fascinating journey about the history of Sony, how the founders were… war… how the transistor was invented, and how the PlayStation was born out of a rivalry with Nintendo. So now when I pick up my PS4 controller to play games, or even when I just look at it sitting on my console, I have this whole story associated with it. It’s meaningful to me. My life is more meaningful as a consequence.
One of the reasons I am drawn to writing, and ~LitErArY pUrSuiTs~, is that I find it to be an exciting, liberating, emboldening way of making sense of the world, of making meaning. It doesn’t even need to be Meaning with a capital M. It’s just about playing with associations. What I mean by that is – writing, tweeting, playing with ideas – these are ways in which I make the world around me more interesting, more meaningful. One simple way to do this is to research the history of every object in your vicinity. Suddenly your boring stuff comes alive.
There’s a bit that I really like in the movie Thor: Ragnarok, where Thor is upset about his hammer Mjolnir having been destroyed. And he says to his dad Odin, “I can’t win, not without my hammer.” “Are you Thor, the God of Hammers?
The word “talisman” itself has been on an interesting journey. Etymologically, it came to English from French (also talisman), via Arabic ṭilasm (طِلَسْم), via ancient Greek telesma (τέλεσμα), meaning “completion, religious rite, payment”, ultimately from the verb teleō (τελέω). That’s the same teleo- in teleology, or teleological.
The wikipedia page describes it as “any object ascribed with religious or magical powers intended to protect, heal, or harm individuals for whom they are made”
Be careful, when competing for a talisman, that you don’t dishonor what the talisman stands for
shamans
2019: for weeks now my mind has been gripped by the surprisingly limited number of powerful symbols in global circulation, and how few people really, deliberately work to contribute to this. Not talking about graphic design; talking about full-stack worldbuilding. I think the conventional sense most people have is that we are simply *overwhelmed* with logos and brands everywhere. I have the opposite feeling: we are symbolically impoverished and don’t quite realize it. The hundreds of brands are all variants of the same handful of ideas. The imagination deficit is the most staggering thing in the human realm – but few people know it… because most people lack imagination!!!
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