MOUTH TO MOUTH

From a seven-year-old draft of an essay in pieces:

Yet is Brancusi's table finally functional?  You cannot sit at it comfortably; the dozen flat-seated stone stools provide only a visual, displacing comfort in their hourglass silhouettes.  And it's quite obvious upon arrival that they are dysfunctionally placed with respect to the table—leaving too much blank space between body and would-be board.  Some Arthurian commoning gone awry.  They show how keen Henri Lefebvre is in seeing between objects the “locus of separations and the milieu of prohibitions” (The Production of Space).

This table has in the end been named after discourse—vis-à-vis its lack—rather than after eating.  Harboring domestic echoes, the clock of sculptures is already removed from the household—already elsewhere. But those echoes leave us hungry for the home’s comforts and consummations.

Freud identifies a phrase of Schiller as a point of perplexed departure for the argument of Civilization and its Discontents: “hunger and love are what moves the world.”

I came to sit at the table; the hourglasses were being dug out. I came for home and got the township, came for modernism and got archaeology.