An Ambivalent Coin

A coin leaves the pocket of a man and is placed upon a counter. Another man picks it up; right into the register it goes. There it remains for a month, gathering dust in neglect and isolation, until the register is opened and the coin becomes change for someone's groceries.

A week inside a pocket, another inside a wallet—and then, one evening, its carrier is attacked. The wallet falls. The coin and its peers scatter across the pavement. This one rolls beautifully, almost triumphantly, only to slip between two stones and disappear into the mouth of a sewage drain.

For two years it lies in dirty water. Then comes the flood: water rises, filth stirs, and the coin is dragged out of the sewer and into a river. After a month of travelling, it is abandoned upon a beach. Wind and waves bury it beneath the sand. Another year passes before a metal detector cries out above it. The coin is recovered, cleaned, pocketed, circulated—and—

“I have to stop you. You have been rambling about this coin for half an hour. I have already forgotten half of what you said.”

“Do you not find what it went through interesting?”

“What it might have gone through. We found it on the floor. You invented everything else.”

“Of course I invented it! But it could have happened.”

“Almost anything could have happened. That does not make a random coin on the floor interesting. It is still just a coin on the floor.”

There it is: just a coin.

How efficiently that word murders the world.

“You are wrong,” I tell him. “Something being interesting is not a property of the object. It is an ability of the observer.”

We behave as though interest were a substance distributed unevenly across reality. A ruined temple possesses it; a coin does not. A distant galaxy deserves it; a piece of dust does not. We inherit a standard of attention and then mistake that standard for a property of things. Whatever falls outside it becomes ordinary, and whatever becomes ordinary is permitted to disappear.

But nothing is merely there.

The metal of the coin was extracted somewhere. Its image was chosen, cut, and struck by machines built for a particular economy. Its scratches are small collisions between itself and the world. It has passed through hands whose owners did not know one another, purchased objects now lost, and occupied places which may no longer exist. It sits before us carrying causes in every mark—and you call it empty because it has not performed the labour of opening itself for you.

Must the world seduce us before we agree to see it?

The observer supplies the questions. Where did the metal come from? Why this symbol? Which scratch was born in a register, which upon the pavement, which inside a pocket beside a key? What system made this object possible, and what chain of necessity placed it here, now, between us?

None of this proves my sewer, my flood, or my beach. Perhaps every event I described is false. Curiosity does not give us authority to rename invention as history. The object resists; it permits some stories and destroys others. Without that resistance, curiosity becomes fantasy.

Yet there is an opposite failure—one so common that it disguises itself as sobriety. Afraid of imagining falsely, a person ceases to imagine at all. The coin becomes only a coin, the dust only dust, the pen only a pen. Soon the entire world is composed of closed objects, and the observer congratulates himself for finding nothing within them.

Curiosity without resistance is fantasy.

Resistance without curiosity is blindness.

Not everything is interesting. Everything can be. Interest begins as the observer's refusal to accept the inherited limit of attention; it becomes a relationship as the object answers, refuses, constrains, and opens. To be interested is to become proficient at extracting value without inventing the value one hoped to find.

This proficiency is not a charming personality trait. It is a faculty of the mind. The person who cannot exercise it does not live in a poorer world by accident: they participate in its impoverishment. They pass through reality waiting for importance to announce itself, never noticing that importance often begins in the act of noticing.

I place the coin back upon the floor.

It has not changed. Yet it is no longer merely a piece of metal—not to me.

To him, the story is over.

To me, the object has only just begun to speak.