Amy Sailer

[Vanitas]

Sometime during the long lyric bubble of quarantine, they first caught my eye. A pair of Grainne Morton earrings: asymmetrical chandeliers, or better yet, Calder mobiles holding in suspension a curation of whorled seashells and cameos and chalcedony and Vauxhall glass and mother of pearl. I imagined brushing my finger against each delicate charm, pulling all my hair into a clip to let the little weathervanes sway against my cheek. They’re far too expensive, more than I could or should spend, though now because of cookies and algorithms they follow me around online, beckoning at the margin of every page, reappearing as I scroll, like a recurrent dream. It’s a familiar enough feeling, being caught in this perpetual motion machine of desire. The best cure is to write what I want into a poem. In fact, writing sometimes works better than owning things outright—only through description can I claim these earrings completely.

Of the seventeenth century, art historian Elizabeth Alice Honig writes, “the relationship between the made things of the material world and the social order of the human world needed to be arranged, understood, and articulated in a way useful to its literate inhabitants.” This helps to explain Wen Zhenheng’s work “A Treatise on Superfluous Things” and similar guides written in Ming China, as well as the sudden emergence of still-life painting all over Europe. Everyone needed a new discourse, verbal or visual, to navigate the marketplace of global commodities. In “Making Sense of Things: On the Motives of Dutch Still Life,” Honig writes that Golden Age Dutch still-life painting can tell two different stories. The first story takes place in a mercantilist economy, during the formation of early capitalism, when people wanted to flaunt their lemons and lobsters, nautilus shells and Ming dynasty porcelain, their power and prestige in a new consumer culture, and yet the same material wealth presented a moral dilemma for Dutch Calvinists. So the paintings tell a second story too, a parable filled with bubbles and skulls, candles and music, rotting meat and a dying iris, all reminders that we can’t take this world with us into the next.

While the material world doesn’t hold the same religious censure for me as it held for the Dutch Calvinists, it’s full of other moral conundrums. How do I navigate a marketplace that never ends, where I can buy almost anything from anywhere in the world? How can I contain my desire? When I think about landfills, I’m haunted by things’ permanence, but when I think about my jewelry box, I find strange comfort in the thought, as Colin Bailes writes, that things “will outlive us.” The poems and prose in this feature are haunted and comforted by objects. The writers arrange the wonders we’ve discovered beside the wonders we’ve made, the natural reflecting the artificial and the artificial reflecting the natural. This “placedness,” in Timothy Donnelly’s words, or these “bones posed // in shapes inscrutable / and evidently important,” in Emma Aylor’s, assert meaning through juxtaposition. Vanitas is ars poetica. Even when vanitas acknowledges that collections and their meanings are arbitrary, it takes joy in collecting and arranging all the same. Even though those bubbles are transient, they’re fixed forever in paint. 

[VANITAS]