Ziggurat
During the fourth millenium, BC, many peoples around the world built towering monuments of stone because they had not yet created art or language. Instead these huge rocks had to be carved into the shape they wanted by hundreds of expendable men, transported to the site by thousands more, and then constructed at the cost of many lives - thus making the monument even more heavy. Heavy with the ideas of man, not yet able to be formed with sharper tools or better words. Each rock could be thought of as a page, or painting: a worked thing, man's vision impressed upon the world.
The thing itself is a stepped/terraced tower temple made of a pyramidical shape with the topmost peak representing a shrine. A shape.
Van Veen and Ada Veen were children when they defined their undefinable happiness as "Things", thus inventing their own philosophy. She plots the topography of a person's life based on these Things and devised a wonderfully classification system with which one can evaluate their life simply by looking at which thing is in front of them. The first being a Real Thing: an unfrequent and powerful joy, just a Thing: which forms the routine business of life, and lastly a Fog or Ghost Thing: a headache induced dream of delirious proportions, fevers, dreadful disappointments. The rarest of all is to have all three of these things combined at once, this is called a "Tower". To quote the author: "...if they came in immediate succession, they made a 'bridge.' 'Real towers' and 'real bridges' were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral 'thing' might look or even actually become 'real' or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid 'fog.'"
It is natural for two special children to describe their more ethereal feelings in terms of more familiar actualities, and as adults most humans continue to speak in symbols and metaphors. We often need a Thing to call this thing, we need a physical object to represent the nameless in order to better reach its true meaning. More so of the larger unnamed "things" in life: love, death, sex, thought, art -- we simply haven't the vocabulary at such a young age to name all of these. Death is a box you are placed in before being buried. And love? What of love? We haven't defined it yet but we know what it should look like, approximately, from some distance --- we know the shape and shadow of the word but not its details or highlights. In this regard, the naming of the thing itself is a box: a containment of thought, while also simultaneously existing as a boxcutter: a way to remove the contrived artifice of "feeling" by forcing it closer to reality. Vain Van and arduous Ada, two siblings assumed to be cousins but born as lovers, had an even harder time defining their words because they also needed to hide them. A double secret of the very sweetest variety; a chocolate dusted in gold and dipped into platinum; her honey smeared atop a biscuit on a sunny patio outside of Switzerland.
A tower and a ziggurat. Happiness in the form of a building. Again, quote: "The pictorial and architectural details of her metaphysics made her nights easier than Van’s, and that morning—as on most mornings—he had the sensation of returning from a much more remote and grim country than she and her sunlight had come from. Her plump, stickily glistening lips smiled."
(to be expanded upon later)
