Cookies and Minimalism

I came back from summer holidays with an overwhelming desire for peace and cuisine. Today for instance, after having fed the creepy blob that lives in my fridge and should replace the yeast (I called it ET, although it recalls more Spielberg’s filmography, as it resembles the aliens of War of the Worlds in growth and belligerency) and after having baked three trays of cookies, I looked with satisfaction at the light entering through the window into my old rented kitchen. I sat on the sofa, a cup of Moka coffee in one hand and a biscuit in the other, with my feet on the colourful rug I brought from Liguria (north of Italy) and which has followed me ever since. I put a Bob Dylan’s vinyl on the turntable. My eyes went from the iPod to the turntable and a bit of discomfort assails me.

For a year I had lived carrying my house on my back: inside my backpack I had everything I needed: computer and smartphone for calls, internet and movies, iPods and over-ear headphones to isolate myself from the world and the Kindle to read. I was sleeping in my sleeping bag, that has a sort of plastic film, so that I could quickly wash it with a cloth. My twin room even offered a wardrobe and chest of drawers, both far too large for my possessions. I used to drink instant coffee with store-bought cookies. In an hour I could have moved to the other side of the world. I was proudly minimalist, and I still feel that way. But am I? When did I unpack my backpack?

As I know few remedies to easy the discomfort and I couldn’t eat all the biscuits, I read again a light booklet, New Philosophy of Small Things by Francesca Rigotti. It tells of the jar (Heideggar’s one); of the puffing succinct dialogue of the iron; of the hunger (of bread and knowledge); of the coffee rituals; of the razor (Ockham’s as well as the one used for shaving); of the thread (Arianna’s, the fabric thread, the thread of life and the thread of the plot). And still it tells of the dirt, the soap, the broom and the colander. It’s a phenomenology of everyday things through the metaphors that describe them. Objects that inhabit kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms but which, for the life of me, I cannot fit into my backpack. Things (res) that you experience not just through sight but with smelling, hearing and tasting. Small things that claim their importance in opposition to the bombastic kingdom of big things, of history, leaders and economy. Things that are essential in the construction of ourselves: without the realm of small things “you would stop talking, and thinking”, or rather you would never have learned to speak and think. Precisely because you learned to speak by approaching the world in its materiality, you cannot separate your language from things and their metaphors, just as you cannot give a cake a different shape from that of the pan you baked it in. A philosophical language like German clearly shows it:

There is no be-greifen (conceiving, form a mental representation of) without greifen (grasping, seizing and holding firmly with you hand), … in fact, thought arises from our relationship with things, namely from the manipulation that we make of them¹.
Francesca Rigotti, New Philosophy of Small Things

The author (who was born in Milan, lives in Switzerland and teaches in Germany) wonders whether the “freedom of the migrant” (non-dramatic migrations in both her and my case) does not make your mind return to small things, destroying “the hierarchy of the universal order and ideologies and images built on it”. Churchill once said:

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
Winston Churchill

Migrants have perhaps more freedom to build and to shape their house anew. That initial lightness, which you earn from the act of moving, may lead migrants to shape light and essential buildings, similar to their backpacks. Each and every object that enters those buildings will be weighed, evaluated, smelled, because the underlying question is: does it make me happier or weigh me down?