“A chair is a place to sit.  It doesn’t take you anywhere.

Anonymous

 

Life itself is a confinement, which, through culture is decorated in such a way as to obscure the other end of the tunnel; the inevitability of death.  

 

Culture as decoration?

 

Adapting to your environment is confining yourself to a set of circumstances. This is crucial to survival.  The adornment of that environment, whether it is a mental construct, a series of actions or the use of materials, creates an atmosphere of belief and a system within which our functioning is acceptable to the world around us.

 

The myriad of ways in which we confine ourselves is endless.  Different cultures approach their confinement by closing themselves down (or opening up) through a series of highly detailed rituals and ornamental decoration.  

 

From the suburbs to hospitals for the mentally ill, we are all in a constant state of adaptation and perhaps all places are the same.  Some of the forms adaptation can take...  the decoration of the home as a means of acceptance and a reflection of whom we are or whom we may wish to identify with....mental constructs; intellectual reasoning that allows us to believe that we are right or wrong....emotional levels that we attach ourselves to perhaps living and re-living events from the past and re-enacting them in the present in a variety of protracted ways

 

The idea of the object as a metaphor for the thought.  Does the thought take you anywhere? Should it take you anywhere?  The chair is the thought.  The chair is a place to sit; it’s not taking you anywhere and yet implies a resting place. However, the resting place becomes a confinement if you cannot or do not get out of it, inertia may set in; chair potato type of behavior encourages a belief that the chair is actually supportive.  The onset of object tom-foolery begins.

 

One of the tenets of meditation is to quiet the mind, to watch the thoughts as they move through. By not attaching yourself to the thought you can be free. Yet, our society, our cultural inheritance is built on a perpetual construction of thoughts, layer upon layer of refined confinement.

 

The attachment to the decorative, to the ritual, to language perhaps reflects the self’s desire for a life everlasting.  And in death the tomb decorates the landscape trying to lend credence to the temporality of eternity.