Funnels
This is a very special two-part edition of Tools. I sent Rachel Jendrzejewski an essay, and she rearranged it to make a play. Amazingly, she used every word of what I sent without adding a single letter of her own. Below is the essay, and here is Rachel’s play.
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What kind of tool is the funnel? You don’t work it. Don’t wield or heft or operate. You set and put and place. Feed its mechanism, then stand aside. Look: It behaves. Action implicit in its form.
I own a red, plastic Back to Basics 176 Wide Mouth Canning Funnel, purchased for five dollars at Wegman’s on my first trip to New Jersey. It is cheap, unattractive and new—wholly lacking romance—but it works. A well of oil drains into a bottle. A heap of beans rain into a jar. Watching, some store of memory spills out. My body recalls the sensations of loss.
Indeed the funnel was first conceived as an aid to meditation. Paleolithic Shamans convened round a curl of bark and watched rainwater cling and disappear endlessly. Their funnel was a medium—a votive to unknown gravity. Why, they pondered, does loss surprise us, every time? All things disappear as easily; even our disappointment cannot be contained.
The transformation from mandala to kitchen accessory was gradual. Perhaps the ever-resourceful Emperor Liu Hu fashioned a funnel from mulberry paper to measure out his tea. Davy Crockett relied on one made of tinware, and used it to fill his musket moments before his disputed death at the Alamo. The arrival of industrial manufacturing sealed the funnel’s fate in glass, plastic, and stainless steel. The funnel abounds. And it’s precisely this abundance that now makes it, categorically, a tool.
Still, the funnel’s mystical conceptions are not entirely lost. We see them echoed in Gothic paintings, and the Land of Oz: places where inverted funnels are symbols of madness. Robert Creeley—the old poet who died in Odessa—called into the funnel of the dark and found another, resounding inversion: a church bell. And Duchamp gave funnels a figurative association with sex—just see their muscular depiction in “The Passage from Virgin to Bride.”
Stare into the sinking pit of flour, of rice, of popcorn kernels, as you transfer them from bag to jar, and see if your heart isn’t sucked down as well. We’ve all felt the terror of vacant spaces; more terrifying still is the vacancy that moves. The vacancy that wants to be. Look: the funnel makes way.
Of course, most who look will see very little. A mere slip of dull material—it’s hardly there. At any given moment, the funnel performs its supporting role in kitchens and laboratories the world over. Men and women exploit physics and casually take a bow. Nestle its nose in a bottleneck and pour unruly liquid down.
What kind of tool is the funnel? The kind that emerged, fascinating, without invention; Critical in its simplicity, and essential in its abundance. One of the rare few for which passive observation is fundamental to its use. And what of the funnel unobserved? I find some comfort in the thought of them—millions—as they rest in drawers and on shelves. To think of all the space quietly protected, right now, in their open, breathless mouths.
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Now read Fate of Funnels, a play by Rachel Jendrzejewski.
Thank you! Wonderful! Love!
“We’ve all felt the terror of vacant spaces; more terrifying still is the vacancy that moves. The vacancy that wants to be.” This is why I go to the breath so often throughout the day. Both to experience life (as impermanent as it is) but also experiment with vacancy.
Thanks!