A World of Strange Things

A world of strange things. E.g., “talking about strange things”; “doing strange things”; (Colombia) “who are those strange people”; “there they have their strange thing.”

Thing. Noun. Names people, animals, plants, stones, clouds, bonfires, parties, and everything we think or imagine has substance.

Strange. Adjective. It’s ‘like’ saying a characteristic of a thing. E.g., “pretty thing”; “Oh, sweet little thing, Mama”; “What a big thing, sir.” An adjective is saying things about things.

So, a thing is a thing, a thing is a noun; a noun is a thing. But, a thing is a thing and another thing is another thing. That is, everything can be a thing, but between one thing and another thing there’s a difference. One thing is one thing and quite different another thing, you say, anything.

Am I right or not?

See also that one thing is a thing alone and another adorned. For example, house and pretty house. They’re two different houses. A house is a thing, a noun, that when you attach a characteristic to it—pretty—then that changes the thing.

A strange thing happens when we talk about all those “strange things” that people talk about out there. Strange, because “thing” is a thing, but when someone says “thing” to you, you don’t imagine any thing; different when someone says: “imagine a soup serving plate”; a plate is a thing and although a soup serving plate is different from a simple plate, a plate is a plate and a plate is a thing. Now: “imagine a thing.”

A thing is a thing, but a thing is anything. A thing is a strange thing, and “strange” is a thing that can be said about a thing, an adjective; “strange” is a characteristic. So, if a thing is a thing—in this case a “strange thing”—and on the other hand, strange is a “strange thing,” then what’s left for one to combine two strange things? When one says: “thing” and “strange.”

Doesn’t that seem strange to you?

Let’s say there are strange people and strange houses, strange music… strange things, but what stranger thing could there be than all those “strange things”? I’ve racked my brain about this thing at night during dreams, in the morning I’ve started thinking about it and began writing; you’ll think it’s the lack of television. You’re absolutely right.

In Colombia, all things that don’t appear on television are strange. Reality is a thing, and when we see it appear out there it becomes a normal thing; if not, it’s a strange thing; look how TV people dress; people dress, clothes are a thing, but people’s clothes aren’t strange, moreover, the strange things that appear on TV, you know they’re strange and won’t appear on TV more than for a while, then everything returns to its normality.

This seems stranger to me than the matter of strange things, because nothing that happens around me ever appears on television; however, around me what appears on TV does happen. As if images were more important than things, appearances than reality, as if what mattered wasn’t being but appearing to be. What a strange thing.