Things and not-things

I love seeing outlets at museums. One thing I’m fond of about the whole thing is that I always get the sense that they’re “not supposed to be there.” That in a perfect world, there wouldn’t be outlets below works of art in museums. That, in this world, they’re an interruption (possibly a minor one) to the contextual blankness and neutral posture of the exhibition rooms. The subtle degree of interruption that the outlets quietly assert is made further exciting by the subtle degree of concealment that's often been imposed on them. Usually (always) this takes place in the form of the outlets being painted over with the same color as the surrounding wall (see the poor-quality photo above).

This brick between two pegs (I think I [one] would call these pegs?) on the ground reminds me of the space between two sentences. The peg on the left is the period that ends one sentence, the brick is the blank space (spacebar click)  that follows, and the peg on the right is the capital letter that begins the next sentence.

Why do I love the idea of calling an object a poem? I've been thinking about this a bit and have come up with two reasons:

This is the first poem that appears in a book of poems called The Matrix Poems: 1960- 1970 by N. H. Pritchard (though I don't want to discount the not-without-sufficient-interest table of contents by referring to this as the first poem.....maybe I'll make a separate post all about the table of contents). On this page, there are three foreground elements: the title, "WREATH"; the page number, "1"; and the "content" of the poem, "O." The sparseness of what's on the page gives each of these elements significant weight--even makes them all pretty similar in value. (They all have the same degree of presence?) Within this close-knit, minimal setup, something that would seem to be as purely functional as a page number has the opportunity to have a relationship to the other text elements, to actually be counted as a considerable text element among them.

I don't know if it's that objects are  quiet, but I think I'd associate quietness and objects. Though, there are also those objects (many of them) that correspond to words or names--i.e., magnet, tortilla chip, platter; these objects are surely a little less quiet than objects that have no corresponding word (i.e., see above image). Magnet, tortilla chip, and platter have a switch between a mute form of being and a verbal form of being, whereas the object in this photo has no switch--just one default, silent setting. It's these single-setting objects whose unresolvable quietness interests me. (So, now, what about this fact of quietness? What does something do or not do because of this?) Can, and how can, silence be unraveled as a territory much larger than the territory of a single word?

-Writing about its relationship to (closeness or farness from?) words