the philosopher's stone is a cigarette butt in a puddle

i have never trusted people who know what things mean immediately.

they see a dead bird and say omen. they see two strangers holding hands and say love. they see an old photograph and say nostalgia. they see a cigarette butt floating in a puddle and, if they have spent too much time on the internet, probably say capitalism. or if they have spent too much time in seminar rooms, they say the subversion of the commodity form and then look around to see if anyone was impressed.

i understand the impulse. the human mind dislikes an object that refuses to introduce itself properly. we are constantly asking things to declare their allegiances. good or bad. beautiful or ugly. sacred or ordinary. useful or useless. yours or mine. alive or dead. we are, all of us, secret aristocrats of ontology, demanding that everything present its papers.^*1

the philosopher's stone has always appealed to me for this reason. not the gold. gold is a vulgar detail, the sort of thing you put on a business card. the interesting part is the fantasy of a substance that has escaped ambiguity entirely. the lapis philosophorum, the magnum opus, the great work. something absolute. something that is not merely what it happens to be because of where it came from, what was done to it, who found it, who named it, or what anybody wants from it.

the alchemists called it a stone because apparently even metaphysical certainty requires good branding.

but underneath all that sulphur and mercury and theatrical latin is a remarkably simple desire: to find the thing beneath the thing. the real thing. the thing that does not depend on circumstance.

i have always found this slightly terrifying. because almost nothing survives contact with circumstance.

take a cigarette. before it is smoked, it is a product. after it is smoked, it is waste. while it is being smoked, it is a habit, a pleasure, a pause, a social prop, an excuse to stand outside in the rain like an idiot. depending on who is holding it, it can be rebellion, addiction, sophistication, stupidity, stress, theatre, boredom. the object itself has not changed very much. our description of it has. and then someone drops it. it becomes a cigarette butt. this seems like a minor distinction until you think about how much of the world works this way. a house becomes abandoned. a dress becomes old. a letter becomes evidence. a photograph becomes an heirloom. a body becomes a corpse. a country becomes a former country. the noun remains almost intact while its entire ontological status changes around it. we pretend there are clean boundaries because clean boundaries make the world easier to handle.

then it rains.

and the cigarette butt ends up in a puddle.

i saw one like this recently. it was lying at the edge of the pavement in a shallow pool of rainwater. the filter had become almost translucent. the paper was coming apart. a little tobacco had leaked out and was sitting nearby in the water like something that had escaped during surgery. it was an extremely ugly object. i mention this because ugliness is often useful. beauty encourages interpretation too quickly. we see something beautiful and immediately begin manufacturing reasons for it. the sunset means something. the old building has character. the face is timeless. the ruined statue is poignant. ugliness is less cooperative. nobody looks at a cigarette butt in a puddle and feels compelled to write a sonnet. it has been abandoned by aesthetics. this gives it a certain freedom. you can look at it without having to improve it. it doesn't need to become beautiful before it becomes interesting.^*2

this is probably where i started thinking about the philosopher's stone again. the old fantasy was always concerned with purification. take something common and extract what is essential. remove the impurities. find what is underneath. but what counts as an impurity? this is the question nobody seems to enjoy asking. the cigarette butt is made of tobacco, paper, glue, chemicals, ash, saliva, smoke and water. which part is the real cigarette? the tobacco before it was burned? the tobacco after combustion? the paper? the filter? the smoke? the experience of smoking it? the object sitting in the puddle? at what point did it stop being a cigarette? there is no obvious answer. we could choose one, of course. humans are extremely good at choosing answers when the alternatives become annoying. we call something a cigarette because that description is useful for a while. then we call it a cigarette butt because a different description becomes useful. then we call it litter. then, eventually, nobody calls it anything because it is gone.

there is something unsettling about how provisional all of this is. we speak about essence as though things have a secret inner constitution and our job is simply to uncover it. but perhaps the opposite is true. perhaps things are made out of relations. the cigarette is a cigarette because somebody manufactured it, bought it, lit it, smoked it, and recognised it as one. the puddle exists because it rained on a surface with the particular geometry required to hold water for a few hours. remove any one of those conditions and you have a different object. the puddle is almost embarrassingly contingent. it does not possess a permanent shape. it has no official boundary. it is not even guaranteed to exist tomorrow. and yet, for a brief period, it is there. it contains the sky. it contains dirt. it contains oil. it contains leaves. it contains whatever the street has been shedding. and now it contains a cigarette. the two have become difficult to separate.

this is perhaps what bothers me about the philosopher's stone. the fantasy of an absolute object requires us to imagine that things can be separated from the conditions that produced them. but can they? take a gold ring. gold is supposed to be the great success story of matter. unchanged by ordinary corrosion. rare. beautiful. durable. but the ring isn't simply gold. it is a mine. a geological accident. a labourer. a supply chain. a price. a marriage. a theft, sometimes. a dead relative, occasionally. a particular finger. a particular person who decided that this piece of metal should signify something. remove the history and you do not have the same object. you have gold. which is somehow less interesting. this is the strange thing about essence. the more successfully you remove everything contingent from an object, the less of the object you seem to have left. a person without their history is not a purer person. a photograph without its context is not a purer photograph. a word without its use is not necessarily a truer word. and a cigarette without everything that happened to it is not a more authentic cigarette. it is just tobacco.

perhaps the thing we call essence is often just what remains after we have thrown away everything inconvenient. which would explain why philosophy has always had such an uneasy relationship with ordinary life. ordinary life is inconveniently specific. things happen at 4:17 on a tuesday. someone says something they did not mean. someone else remembers it differently. a cup breaks. a person leaves. rain begins. a cigarette gets dropped. none of these events possesses the dignity of necessity. they could all have happened otherwise. the philosopher's stone is seductive precisely because it promises something that could not have happened otherwise. it is the thing that simply is. no history required. no accident. no explanation. you find it and the argument ends.^*3

i think we want this more often than we admit. we want to know what something really meant. we want the final interpretation of an event. we want to know whether someone loved us. whether we were right. whether the relationship was real. whether the decision mattered. whether the year was wasted. whether the person was good. we keep trying to convert contingency into certainty. it is an understandable habit. certainty is easier to sleep beside. but perhaps the demand itself is strange. why should everything have a final interpretation? why should an event owe us a conclusion? why should an object contain an answer? the cigarette butt in the puddle does not. you can examine it for ten minutes and you will not discover the metaphysical truth of cigarettes. you will discover wet tobacco. perhaps some bacteria. perhaps traces of nicotine. perhaps the particular brand, if you care enough to look. you will not discover why that person smoked it. you will not discover what they were thinking. you will not discover whether they were happy. you will not discover whether they had somewhere to be. you will not even know if they dropped it deliberately. the object refuses biography. and yet it contains one. somewhere, there was a person. somewhere, there was a moment. somewhere, there was a decision so small that nobody thought to record it. the cigarette is what remains after that decision has become inaccessible.

this is perhaps the closest thing to an anti-philosopher's stone. not an object that reveals what everything really is. an object that demonstrates how little we can know about what anything really was. i like that. it seems less triumphant. more accurate.

the cigarette butt is not profound. the puddle is not profound. the person who dropped it was probably not attempting an experiment in phenomenology. nothing here is trying to teach us anything. that may be precisely why it is useful. we spend an extraordinary amount of time converting things into symbols because symbols are easier to keep than things. a dead bird becomes an omen. a photograph becomes nostalgia. a cigarette becomes addiction. a puddle becomes impermanence. and once we have named the thing, we stop looking at it. perhaps the real difficulty is not understanding the world. perhaps it is resisting the urge to understand it too quickly. to leave a few things unresolved. to allow an object to remain embarrassingly literal. a cigarette butt. a puddle. rainwater. pavement. nothing more. and nothing less.

the philosopher's stone may have been a fantasy of finality, a material answer to the oldest and most exhausting human question: what is this, really? the cigarette butt offers a less satisfying answer. it says: it depends. on the rain. on the pavement. on the person. on the cigarette. on the hour. on what happened before. on what happens next. which is not an answer at all. but perhaps that is the closest thing to an honest one.^*4

the cigarette butt is still in the puddle. by tomorrow, it probably won't be. i find this oddly reassuring. not because it means nothing lasts. that is another conclusion people make too quickly. only because, for once, the thing does not have to become anything else before it is allowed to exist. it can remain wet rubbish in dirty water. no secret substance. no final form. no gold. just one accidental arrangement of matter, briefly convincing itself, as everything does, that it has a name.