SO, just what is a [TING]? A [TING] – square brackets enclosed – finds resonances in 'language', vernacular language, Irish vernacular, creole language, everyday language, sometimes as a noun, other times as a verb, in 'English' and somewhat quirkily in related languages. It is a sound and an object.
In OLDnorse cum Swedish it denotes an 'object' and/or 'a judicial or legislative assembly' while in Caribbean creoles it denotes a 'thing/person/living thing'.
In Tok Pisin creole, or PNG pidgin, it denotes 'thinking' sometimes expressed as [ting] and on others 'tingting'. Somehow, even the German for 'thing' being 'ding' has a resonance here.
Ever present is the 'ting sound' of the word and its audible resonances, and its evocation of a light stroke on a glass goblet or a 'little bell'. It's that sound that can reliably get the attention of a crowd over and above its collective chatter.
Likewise, as a noun, 'tinging' denotes ‘the clatter of cutlery and tinging of glasses’.
[TING] Is a 'word' with presence and seemingly its filled with evocative resonances. It has scale, a kind of human scale and it invokes musing in a kind of a way picked up on in 'pidgin' that somehow makes sense in everyday English.
In musing upon small objects that 'fit the hand', that are 'possesable' in an intimate personal context, that are 'experienced' in tactile and haptic ways, and perhaps more than 'visually' or at least equally so, they have, or adopt, a materiality.
Put another way, they can both possess and be possessed by their MATTERreality – a condition belonging to all materials in each one's unique way. That is, their VISUALweight relative to their ACTUALweight, their conductivity, their innate textural qualities, their elemental sounds and the ways these things feed into, and upon, and in the end somehow supports the VISUALexperience.
It is the MATTERreality, that quality that somehow sets a rock aside in the gravel, where its 'thingness' allows it to be imagined/reimagined as 'other', say as a 'tool' or a 'weapon' or even as a 'treasure'.
Likewise, in the Australian 'bird world' bower birds – the Ptilonorhynchidae family. – understand, acknowledge and celebrate, 'thing's otherness' in the building of their 'bowers'. They build/assemble their structures to house the 'treasury' that gives the male bird his place, his 'palcedness' – indeed his placedness along with the acknowledgement of the thingness of what he collects for his treasury. Indeed, his celebration of 'thingness' is encapsulated in his purpose for being and his need/imperative to procreate.
If a 'thing' is understood as an extension of 'the body' they are no longer 'ordinary'. Such objects are in so many ways 'primordial' in so much as they carry those qualities that grants them 'thingness'. Indeed, it is those things that enable an innate benign object to be imagined as a [TING] or [ting].
Medals are [tings] but from a Eurocentric perspective they tend to come laden with cultural cargo that sets them apart in their [tingness]. Yet [tings] can be medals, tools, treasures, STORYthings, objects of devotion, SACREDthings, souvenirs, memento moiré, objects of contemplation, message carriers, and more still.
When a shell becomes a 'tool' or a 'utensil' it somehow almost always becomes a [ting]. When a river washed rock fits the hand and becomes a 'hammer' or an 'object of a a muse' they become [tings]. Humanity possesses and somehow needs [tings] and it is NONtrivial. Apparently, it has been thus for eons.
In our Eurocentric primordial past where and when it was imagined that vwe all carried our EATINGtools – spoons, knives, forks – with us, somehow they became [tings]. When our primordial ancestors picked up shells and imagined them as 'special things' and as tools or utensils somehow they simultaneously became [tings].
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Likewise, when a spoon is treasured for the stories it has invested in it it becomes a [ting] and something more/other than a 'utensil'.
Similarly, when a 'medal' is imagined as an 'object to muse upon' and/or as 'art' it is a cultural product with [tingness].
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