The special histories of unspecial things
A spiral of thoughts on global supply chains, animism, and the inability to escape tired hands
Today you find a page of thoughts and scraps of ideas around it on my desk. Everything in this study is unfinished, always. I guess that’s why I invite you into these walls — to finish what I start, or at least to respond to it and have a thought that continues the arc.
So — here. Shuffle through the evidence and sources. Take a pen and annotate my thoughts. Scratch things out, add something. I’m off enjoying some winter sun today, so you have the study all to yourself. Pull up a chair, pet the cat, and take all the time you need to read.
Sometimes I look at the stitching in my clothes and thank the tired hands who made those lines — can feel their expertise as they whipped around corners and bent over scraps to make something become shipshape.
I think about every single person who touched this pile of fabric on my body. Strangers, lovers. Memory.
We all say we want a handmade wardrobe. But of course, we already have one. Machines have not yet matched the dexterity of human eye and hand, of pinching pieces together, of eighth-inch seam allowance, of folds tighter and smaller than a fingernail.
If my clothes could talk, they would scream at me the stories of the strangers who made them. I wouldn’t be able to handle the noise.
There is not one second in the day that I am not touching things that come from half a world away made by tired hands. My clothes, my bed, my floor have been crafted and shipped around the world, from around the world. It’s crazy to imagine those journeys — the warehouses, the sheer number of people who touched “my” things and possessions before they came to me. Supply chains bind me and blow my mind.
If you added up the miles that these things travel, like, sum total the mileage of my socks and boots and shirt and hat and the door handle I grasped on the way here and the plastic on the bus seat and the office desk I’m sitting at and the TV remote and my phone and my rings and the paper bag that held my food this morning, all of that would be a billion miles every day I am sure. The paper in this book. The stone tiles under my feet, the carpet. The clock and its springs. Plastic forks. Every piece of the inner workings of my computer, the chips and metal and wires, the silicon, the screen - all have thousands of miles and sweat and human ache packed into the journey of each component even before they came together to form something that is here before me. Every thing has such a history before it comes to any of us, and I’m not talking antiques or art or precious gems. It’s inescapable. It’s vertigo-inducing if you want it to be.
The only way I would not be surrounded by and literally touching things crafted by humans thousands of miles apart from each other would be if I stood naked in the forest. Maybe that’s why people skinny dip - to get away from the overwhelming barrage of things and their global supply chain journeys, to get away from the histories melted into clothes and clocks and plastic. Maybe it can be comforting to know that so many people combined efforts to get things to where they are now, but it’s also disconcerting to so easily forget those people and those steps. And also it is so sad to know, or suppose, or assume, that my clothes were begotten of misery and miserable conditions, not love. How awful to try to live a life of love when everything I touch has misery baked into its creation. My inner awful child optimist hopes I “get a good one.” That the woman who stitched this shirt was happy that day, that maybe she laughed at a friend’s joke as she bent over the buttons, that she paused for just a moment to admire her own work when she was done. My inner child hopes.
What does it say about me that I don’t know who made my clothes? Or rather — that I can’t even imagine the steps along the way, let alone the people involved?
The world forbids ethical consumption. I eat my guilt. I try to pass gratitude back along the supply chains that led my things to me. I remember everything’s borrowed and temporary, anyway. It’s really, really hard to live in this world if you think too hard about any of it. Some choose the path of ignorance. I usually do.
I have a compulsion to end writing (essays, journal entries, whatever) with a turn to optimism — with a “but at least you can do this to feel a bit better” tilde tying it all up like a little bow at the end. The completionist in me wants to simplify as I bring sad or contentious ideas to a close, to end the song in a major key, resolved.
I’m not going to do that this time. It’s just tired hands who made clothes on my body. It’s just my body dragging miles and miles of supply chains — heavy chains — wherever I go. It’s just guilty memories on every object I invite into my home. It’s just the burden of story — if we imbue museum objects with interesting stories and care about the legacy of heirlooms, don’t we also owe the mundane objects that same animism? We think of modern supply chains as soulless, and oh, they really are. But we can’t deny that more different people touch and move and create ordinary objects than ever before. There are so many hands on every little thing. Aren’t those stories worth telling?
In lieu of actually weaving in evidence and or examples throughout this little rant, I’ve got it all paper-clipped to the back — draw your own conclusions from the following sources. Figure out for yourself how these pieces are connected. I trust you’ll make meaning out of it yet, or come up with hot takes that I’d love, hate, or need to hear. What does supply chain mean to you? Give me your practical well actuallys, your wishful thinking, your supply-chain-bound bodies yearning to breathe free. Write me an essay, write me a poem. What’s your favorite thing and why? Who made it? What made it yours?
You can call the following scraps “food for thought”:
The Toaster Project: One guy wrestles with an entire supply chain by himself. He’s got a TED talk but I didn’t listen to it.
A New Coat for Anna by Harriet Ziefert. Ignore Mr. Paul’s perky voiceover but do absorb the story, or maybe seek the book out and read it aloud to yourself. I don’t know if you can find 1980’s kids books at the library anymore, but a lot of them were formative for me. After all, I remembered it well enough from my sunny 2000’s childhood to scrounge it up for here. Cottagecore supply chain, anyone? Post-war cottage industry boom? Who needs grandmother’s old locket anyway? Let’s go make a coat with the power of bartering and a couple skilled neighbors. And lingonberries.
Any How It’s Made kids out there? How many hands have touched your smoked salmon?
I mean there’s this, and then there’s any Shein exposé that you’re willing to stomach. I chose this.
This book fucked me up when I was a kid, but when I came back to it later, it disturbed me again but only in the best way. What if you really could feel the thoughts of tired or sad or angry hands, the hands that make your food? It’s all there.
Closing out with a photo of things. Identical desks, but someone had to fit the pieces together! Tighten the screws! Line them up! Deliver them! Plus all the different butts and thoughts in those chairs every single day! The gum and boogers under the seats! Fingerprints and pen ink, germs. Every thing carries such a different history even if it was made to be identical, uniform, unspecial.
If things could talk, they would scream their stories. The museums would be stuffed because everything has a story. idk, just a thought.
That’s all. Thank you for visiting. Come again, bring a friend. Bring a fellow nosy friend ‘round. I’m sure you’ll all have a ball poking through the study together while I’m away.
beautiful words. thank you for being so transparent, in a world that normally isn’t