I thought this week I would turn away from material things, and then I heard splint (the soul of wood), new out with the Brisbane-based ambient label Room 40. splint is perhaps the final recording from Steve Roden, the Los Angeles–based painter, sculptor, and musician known for the genre of music he called “lowercase”, who died last year at fifty-nine, having been diagnosed, six years earlier, with Alzheimer’s disease. He described his method on splint thus:
every sound on this recording was generated by rubbing, bowing, plucking, and scratching a 1943 moulded plywood leg splint designed by charles eames. some of the sounds were recorded directly to tape, others were manipulated and processed electronically. … i used my hands, mallets, brushes, and a violin bow.
The splint in question is one of these. It was intended, I imagine, to facilitate the evacuation of soldiers with fractures of the femur. I was unaware of the Eames splint until I heard Roden’s performance with it. When I then looked it up I made the following note:
to imagine a time when medical appliances were made of mahogany plywood … when you’d want them to be objects of beauty, when the designer gave thought (perhaps I’m projecting) to how the appearance or feel of it would enter into the mindset of a wounded soldier … Look at the chirality of it
(By way of connecting this squib to its predecessor, I note that among the stranger developments in the pen world has been a fashion, recently, for pens made of engineered plastics originally formulated for use in medical appliances — polyetherimide (“Ultem”) and polyether ether ketone (“PEEK”). The Ultem craze began in the pocket knife world — its durability, low heat conductance, and chemical resistance make it good for handles — but it has not spread to flashlights, where you want material with high thermal conductance near the pill, to draw off the heat from the emitter.)
As it happens, this is not the first time in recent memory I’ve expressed a certain longing for the touch mid-century appliances made of wood. Not long ago I was asked to provide a prefatory note for an essay on “signaling games”, and — well, never mind. Here’s the relevant passage:
When did the philosophy of language get squeamish about the historical character of meaning? Meaning is an intentional phenomenon, a phenomenon of aboutness, of directedness, of arrows pointing from gesture to world (including, often, other gestures), and this directedness takes form in a process that unfolds in time: the evolutionary time of innate salience, the historical time of social convention, the developmental time in which broccoli and sriracha acquire meaning for the individual. … In our own day, the most vigorous proponents of the view that convention is all there is to meaning are those who wish to say that Large Language Models are “doing meaning”. I find this view unsatisfactory. ChatGPT, Sydney, and their congeners can infer from corpus analysis that George Nakashima is (+furniture, +expensive). But they cannot infer the way it feels to run your hand over the surface of a Nakashima table. Nor, for that matter, can I — what I can do is borrow from neighboring forms of experience: bodily encounters with other tables. Even so, insofar as I have never run my hand over a Nakashima table, the syntagm George Nakashima table is less meaningful for me than the syntagm the cup I’m drinking from when applied to the cup I am in fact drinking from.
If there’s anything that should strike you amiss in the above, it’s the contention that a phrase might be more or less meaningful in virtue of the degree to which our relationship to that phrase is grounded in a history of (bodily?) experiences with the referents of that phrase. I’ll grant that the strength of the relationship between meaningfulness and “contact” (to offer a metonym for the kinds of relationships I have in mind) might vary over the range of stuff we talk about. Perhaps “contact” contributes less to meaningfulness for things like “ontology” than it does for tables. But I’m convinced there’s something to the relationship — call it a kind of saturation … this too is something we (at least, I) seek from music.