Post 19: Verbing a noun

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I’ve been thinking generally and specifically about the interactions I have with objects I walk past on the street. Well, “interactions” may be a little too strong of a word; I’d describe these moments as mild forms of interaction at best–maybe “encounters.” (Somehow this term seems to more justly convey the passivity that is coming across a static thing.) Usually, passing by an object is fantastically boring. Here are some things I moved past today: crunchable leaves, a "NO THRU TRAFFIC" sign, squared off hedges, a piece of twine, pots of mums, a blue bench. (How do these items either build or get incorporated into my stream of looking? Do they suspend or extend the continuous process of seeing that I'm carrying out?) In defense of boring, I often think this quality gets attributed to things that are actually just difficult to know how or what to think about them. The boringness in the above examples comes from the complicated simplicity of seeing an everyday street item. I feel like a major source of this complication with perception is the required and incompatible combining of a verb-thing (seeing, thinking) with a noun-thing (a literal thing). Seeing an object seems to be to take in a noun with your only tool being a verb. (I think this is what can make writing, speaking, any form of language that aims to depict or describe objects feel inaccurate–it has to use processes [verbs] to portray a non-process [a noun].) A couple questions that seem to grow out of this: Can there be a more noun-like form of the human side of an encounter with an object? Do verb-processes translate nouns, or are they unable to grasp them entirely? What exactly is the inaccuracy of verbing a noun?


Additional thought-question:

The most basic (the most familiar?) items have the strongest noun-identities, making them the least compatible with an encounter and the verbs that make it up?

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