“The Great Wall of China’s attractive, but he’s too thick — my husband is sexier.”
— Eija-Riitta Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer, The woman who married the Berlin Wall
Do objects have souls?
A few weeks ago my laptop’s battery was in trouble and I had to bring it in for a checkup. While the computer was being fixed my Blackberry simply stopped operating. I was frantic.
I felt betrayed by the objects I rely on, ‘love’ and care for. “Why is this happening to me?” was my new mantra.
One of my friends suggested that Mercury was in retrograde; another asked if I had done something to offend my favorite objects. We laughed, recalling a Woody Allen routine where his appliances are on the fritz and he hits them, and when he goes into the elevator the elevator asks if he was the one who roughed up the toaster.
We all have a connection to objects. The more contact we have with them, the more intimate our relationship, the more we ascribe to them human feelings and gender attributes. “The car died – she won’t turn over” and “I love my new phone” are common examples.
But where does it end?
I can honestly say I love the earth and mean it. I want to nurture and protect it and save it, and I’m committed. As the saying goes, good planets are hard to find. But I don’t feel there is reciprocity. I don’t think Earth is in love with me. The relationship is one-way. If I thought the earth was being friendly toward me, I would be engaging in animism, the term used for giving human qualities to inanimate objects. Adding sexual arousal and gratification to the dynamic, we have fetishes or paraphilias.
So, I admit I love the earth. But can you love the Berlin Wall? Psychologists are pondering a new classification, called objectophilia or objectum-sexuals. Outside of a few news reports and a few experts weighing in, little has been written about it. I found no clinical studies. But there is an official website for persons with Objectum Sexuality.
What seems unique to Objectum Sexuals is that their desire, arousal, attraction and love for an inanimate object are amplified through a commitment. I certainly may be wrong here, but commitment to an inanimate object, and feeling a reciprocal response, changes things. This may warrant a different classification. It is one thing to love your favorite chair, or have a sexual turn-on to latex, but it is altogether different to marry the Berlin Wall.
Or, for that matter, the Eiffel Tower.
On April 8, 2007, Erika LaBrie became Erika La Tour Eiffel in a commitment ceremony witnessed by 10 of her closest friends. Prior to getting hitched — an interesting mechanical term used to define human-to-human marriages — Erika had two long-term relationships.
One was with a bow, named Lance. During the height of their relationship she became a two-time world champion gold medal archer with Lance in her loving hands. In a moving description of oneness with Lance, her bow (beau?), she describes the sensation of feeling herself one with the bow and a sense that the molecules pass back and forth between Lance and her arm. In her description I was reminded of a quote by Eugen Herrigel’s classic Zen in the Art of Archery:
“(…) The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull’s-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of the art (…)”
Erika is certainly talking about something of quite a different order. Before Lance she had another lover, the F-15. Yes, that F-15. Driven by her affinity, she won a scholarship to the Air Force Academy but was ultimately given a medical discharge.
Some love affairs don’t work out.
But if you think Eija and Erika have difficult relationships, consider the quote by Sister Mary Judith, a nun interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in February 2010. Sister Mary Judith spoke about marrying Jesus, the central figure in Christianity. “He’s a hard husband to be married to because if something goes wrong in the relationship, I know it’s me,” she said.
So as human beings we have the capacity to have deep, committed relationships to objects, and even to entities that lack an object’s tangibility.
So how has Erika’s husband treated her?
3 comments
While I don’t understand this person’s worldview, I do understand animism differently from your description. Animism doesn’t mean you’ve given “human qualities to inanimate objects.” It just means that you view the inanimate as being alive. Something can be alive and have no human qualities at all. After all, how human is a rock? While Erika’s perception is bizarre, it’s no weirder than my relatively recent recognition of my mirror touch synesthesia. Yes, I knew I could feel it when you touched your face, but being rational, I chose not to believe it. Since it’s been proven scientifically, I’ve tuned into it and it is *really* weird. If one can be rational–i.e., not hallucinating–and have an experience that’s so unusual that it doesn’t make sense even though it’s real, then I suppose it’s possible for this person to be in love with the Eiffel Tower.
HORATIO: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
HAMLET: . . . There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
You can find ANYTHING in Shakespeare!
I don’t know if I quite understand the relationship between the bow or Eiffel Tower. But they seem quite different from the nun’s position. I would think the person who married the Eiffel Tower and was “one” with the bow realized that they could not return her affection. Because the nun believes that Jesus was physical(and Catholics believe that the physical body of Jesus enters them at communion) it seems she’s getting a “return” of affection. The same as my grandmother still considers herself married to my grandfather who died 10 years ago, he’s still there in spirit.
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