A sharehouse, that thing which eats.
These walls can talk, they speak to me each day. They greet me coming down the stairs in the morning, the sleep in my eyes snagged like an ice axe. They speak to me in bumps and grumbles late at night when I am searching for my glasses, apologising through thin plaster. They speak to me in the grimace I make spilling wet turmeric on my white counter. They taunt me when I am looking for my ‘misplaced’ lighter.
Conversations nestle themselves in the cracks and contours of these spaces, settling, then spreading like a loving mould. My lumbar buckles over the nosing of two or three stairs and my elbows match the angle of its riser as I stick my face between balusters attempting to remember mundane extremities of last night's party. Vulnerability is exorcised from me here. Like a strangler fig, I am covered and subsumed.
The legs of the coffee table I brought with me in December sunk into the carpet — its threads clasping at the bubbles of oxidising steel. I have begun to forget what is mine, and sometimes it is easier to forget. Pinches and splashes of spices and sauces sneak out of their containers and into my housemate’s food. My clothes button themselves up and walks into my housemate’s closet as his walks into mine. These walls are simmering a master stock of thingyness, everything inside it blending together.
The sharehouse is a special thing. It is an object of attrition. It is a thing that eats, that breathes, that gives, and that takes. It leaves its mark on other objects, on the people that inhabit it, and on the people that pass through it. It is a symbiote. It is an encompassing living bubble that feeds off of you and your things, morphing all it touches. When you enter, you bring objects and experiences that are wholly your own. But when you leave, yourself and your objects will be changed, lovingly scarred. You exit not as you entered — whole and independent — but like meiosis, a whole split into something new.
We have been taught to think of objects as mere things. As tools for the extension of our being and our experience; as inanimate producers of sensory information — entities to be acted upon or to have action extracted from. Objects are clusters of the things we can perceive about them and the things we can do with them. It is a chair because I can sit on it, it is a hammer because I push nails in with it. It is a beer because it’s beautiful and delicious and bubbly and yellow and alcoholic and I have it on Wednesdays. Without our perception or action, objects cease to be, cease to be useful and become ideas, only existing through human action and perception. We have been taught that Schrödinger's cat is waiting for us to decide its fate; that the unobserved tree falls silently, if it falls at all.
We may also have been taught that objects are instruments of power and politics. That there is nothing beneath an object's function under the systems of control and violence placed upon us by the state, capitalism, or language. That the only real role that objects have in the world is their role in these systems. Control of food objects are used to satisfy or perpetuate our hunger. Roads are used to control our movement and our physical experiences. Metal brackets are placed onto concrete to prevent people from sleeping on them.
I think that both of these views are incomplete.
Objects are not merely the sum of their properties, to describe them as such is to neglect what binds these properties together. If this were the case, then we would never mourn the breaking of our favourite mug when we could just buy another one or be able to explain what makes our favourite fork special even though we have a drawer full of them. Objects aren’t just the ideas we have of them or extensions of our own ideas of the world, the hand of a concept or of power. They are merely catalysts for these ideas — an object is an extension of power because it can do the things in the world that power needs it to do. Food objects have power because they can satiate you, roads have power because they can move you. Schrödinger's cat has been in the box the whole time — and really wants to leave.
Objects have properties and are extensions of ideas but that isn’t all that there is. The world is not the world as manifest to humans; to think there is a reality beyond human thinking is not fantastical or exclusively religious. Your glass of water is as much being picked up by you and squeezed by your fingers so it doesn't fall, as much as the glass itself is pushing against your fingers, stemming like a rock-climber. Objects exist in constant tension with each other, pulling, pushing, taking, and providing. The water is looking for a place, somewhere to go, it will move when the glass is tipped or when it breaks. The glass was once sand before it was lit aflame in a crucible, crystalised in water which it now holds. Objects are experiencing, affecting entities like we are. Objects interact with each other as we interact with them — having private and exclusive lives. If a tree falls in a forest, there are things there to hear it and there are things that made it fall.
This view is known as Object-oriented Ontology (OOO). I believe that OOO resolves the tensions between the actions of metaphysics — acts of zooming in — and the actions of materialism — acts of zooming out. We have only ever been able to see either the forest or the trees but OOO can take us on a hike, holding our hand it shows us both.
The sharehouse is the quintessential experiencing agential object. It converses with the things inside of it, morphing them. It is different from a hotel, in which you are a passenger, or your family home where you have a prescribed social role; that of a child, a sibling, or a parent. You enter a sharehouse, an established self with your objects, as established things carrying your experiences, tastes, and habits with them. Then a war of attrition begins.
It begins with furniture and appliances — they become organs of the sharehouse, digesting and exchanging. They become a property of the sharehouse, a part of its shape and experience. Then it swallows more. Pantry items, groceries; becoming used by all inhabitants, spilling, then affixing themselves to the woodwork, the stove, the crockery. Then eventually clothes, unused razor blades, and facial creams follow. Things slowly cease to be yours, but become ours, become the houses’. As much a part of the sharehouse as the plumbing and insulation. Objects come and go as they please just as you do. You leave for work and arrive home later, your old tomatoes suddenly fresher, and the freezer full of fresh passata. There is a can of beans that has been in the pantry longer than you have lived here and it will be there long after you are gone. Its rust is contagious, attaching to fresh cans of tuna placed on top of it and the hinges of the pantry. Your objects will get freckles, bruises, and cuts from your housemate’s things. Sometimes they’ll play well with others, other times they won’t. The heater will trip the fuse, and the rug will be so 2016-frank-ocean-is-the-goat-supreme-box-logo-yeezy that it makes your fingernails beg for your eyeballs. But it will slide under the cupboard so well. Your things will find a niche in this organism.
Once in this harmony, they become a part of your experiences. When shoulder-bound to the frame of a door, conversing the sharehouse holds you interlinked, the walls not a mere vessel. Your relationships are touched by the sharehouse — a friendship in a home is unlike one outside of it. You share a basic means of survival, unbound by familial baggage or expectation, it is one of profound vulnerability of opportunity. Bubbled by the privacy and intimacy of the home, the housemate relationship is the sharehouse in conversation with sociality. Rent will crush you some weeks and you’ll drink Shaoxing wine and coke out of stolen Kmart glasses. In winter, you’ll rejoice that your housemate went to the bathroom first so you don’t have to experience the bite of cold plastic and porcelain on your sleepy cheeks. You’ll lament that your door creaks, and the stairs thud as someone you probably shouldn’t be sleeping with scuttles out. Your housemates know. Objects as they arrive will be in the front of your mind. The sharehouse will pick them up, placing them in its pocket until the only thing left to really look at is the other people in the room. When you go, you have to reach right in it, dig through the lint and gum wrappers and take them back.
Perhaps that explains the euphoria of ridding yourself of a terrible housemate or the very special grief that occurs when a truly good housemate leaves — there is an absence, not just of them but also of all they have touched you with. Of all the stains they have left, of all the drinks they have spilt, of all the small cuttings of thread picked nervously from their shirt that they leave on the floor. No longer can they hold you in their absence while you are under their blanket, no longer are you warmed by their candlelight, satiated by their leftovers, or relaxed by their wine. Your chopping board will still have cuts from their knife but your onions won’t go missing. Your couch will keep the shape of them in its foam and it won’t cradle you like it did with their pillows. Parts of all of your things will be missing, waiting to be filled again.
The sharehouse affixes itself to you, it is held in you as much as you are held in it. It shelters you from rain as much as you shelter it from emptiness. All the objects that have passed through it are connected like a great fungal mind or a coral reef. In constant exchange with you and your housemates, the sharehouse becomes itself. It becomes something we can never really know but something we can really feel.
