As a prescription for a fresh perspective: practice giving your furniture

flesh. If human flesh is deemed so important, what happens then, if we

distort it?

Regard, regard say — a chair. See how it sits. Squat, straight and bent, in

a way humans can straighten and bend. Now give it flesh, and humanize

it. Now it’s crouched on grotesque stumps. Who gave the chair it’s legs,

but denied it feet? With four legs instead of two, it’s a circus attraction.

“Well, feet weren’t needed, they were deemed unnecessary.” Insists the

Practical Man.

Will yours be deemed unnecessary?

No, of course you are nobody’s chair, humans can’t be furniture, in

any sense of the word.

If held true to human form, a chair is also headless, it has strong

square shoulders yes, but there’s nothing set upon them. So now there, as

you regard, sits a huddled mess. Shoulders hunched, head blown up — or

at very least misplaces — hobbling on the stumps of four awkward legs,

which seems even worse than two.

Let us say the chair has arms, though often they’ve none at all. These

too are bent unnaturally. Perhaps there are stumps for hands, but you

could instead see clenching fists, or arthritically twisting fingers. They

clutch and reach and ask for things, “but a chair needs nothing of its

own.” The Practical Man is quite sincere.

Now that you have given it flesh, on top of its strong skeleton, it’s all

the more pitiable that it cannot move. It’s immobile, locked in place by

non-existent joints. The Practical Man rests upon this piece that has only

the most essential tools and cannot run away.

“Well, it didn’t need to move.”

No. Neither do you.