TOOLBOX-THING MICHAEL M SIMON
Michael Simon
I’m staring at this toolbox. At least it looks like a toolbox. It’s toolbox shaped. It’s almost rectangular, a bit more than a forearm long by a hand wide and tall. The two longest edges on the top are chamfered thirty degrees or so. Without having to pick it up, I can imagine its weight and it gives the sense that it is made of metal. The colour is that bright fire engine red that a lot of metal toolboxes are painted. It has a hinged handle on top and a draw latch on the front - both have shiny nickel plating. It looks a lot like the toolbox that followed my dad around when I was growing up. If it wasn’t on the workbench in the garage, it was in the trunk of the car - wherever we were going. “Just in case” he would say. It looks just like that, except for one small thing. Well, more like, for the absence of one small thing. It is missing a line. The line. There is no line to divide top from bottom, lid from box. On any other toolbox that line is a seam. Really, it’s the absence of a physical line that is important there as well. Maybe it is more importantly a space demarcated, in fact, by two lines – one that defines the top edge of the box and another that defines the bottom edge of the lid. The tiny radius created by the hemmed edge of the metal however further dissolves the line and upon staring it is more of a soft dissolving gradient - from bright red to blackness. Either way, whatever you want to call it, it’s not here, not on this toolbox-ish thing. This toolbox cannot be opened, not physically anyway, not without destroying it. Whatever is in there is never coming out and nothing else is ever going in. Its contents, even if just empty space, are forever cut off from the outside world. I remember, as I laid down that last weld that finalised the division of inside from out, the focus of making was momentarily broken by the feeling of doing something wrong. The contents can now only be contemplated. But is it a toolbox? Was it ever a toolbox? I mean, it looks like a toolbox. I cannot NOT see a toolbox when I look at it. As I write this, it just continues to sit there, quietly, doing whatever it is doing. Is it useless? I would say no. This particular toolbox was never made to open, not literally anyway; it was never intended to contain or store another physical tool. It was made to be made and now it is a point of focus, enabling me to write this paper, and at least in this moment it’s doing that perfectly well. Like a word said too many times – toolbox, toolbox, toolbox, toolbox, toolbox – this object is moving farther and farther away from normative sense the longer I look at it, and in a way it is taking the toolboxes it represents along with it. q
on site review 39: tools
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