The purple fence

At the edge of the village an izba stood out because it had been modernised. It had plastic windows and an ideal-fence-like purple fence around it.

I mentioned the purple fence to my friend Andrei and he smirked. It seemed we both had the same attitude to it. But I found out later it meant quite different things to each of us.

For me it represented the first symptom of a kind of breakdown, of a state where people start to look at each other and compare, and decide they want to be different and show it. To express their difference.

It’s also the first step up in the hierarchy of objects. This hierarchy is like a bizarre pyramid where value is ascribed to objects not because of their ability to perform a function or because of their quality but because of their associations with what is seen as an ideal lifestyle. At the bottom of this pyramid lies the purely functional and the improvised. Those who’s mind is tuned to the hierarchy of objects feel repulsed when they see objects designated for certain functions being used for others. In the hierarchy of objects newness is preferable to oldness. New you can be proud of, old, ashamed of.

The shapes, colours etc of these products correspond to an ideal, but it is a temporary one: conceived by people in an office half way around the world, and will soon be replaced by another, rather than being the result of a native ergonomy. The quality is not great and, for reasons of economies of scale, there always needs to be a tendency towards homogeneity. So that purple fence is a member of a family of purple fences from around the world instead of having any relation to the place where it is planted.

To me the owner has been co-opted, lifted out of the mindset that surrounds them and out of a mindset that responds positively to what surrounds them and become a member of all the purple fence-minded people everywhere who are in fact responding defensively to what surrounds them.

From my point of view, through the owner of the fence, the forces of mediocrity had encroached in this most traditional of places. The reasoning once had been “how do I make this well and make it last?” and now it is “why don’t I try this because it will demonstrate what I aspire to be”.

Anyway there’s something about the purple fence that’s incompatible with just being natural and sitting having a neighbourly chat. You can’t imagine the owner of the purple fence doing that. She was a stout blonde in early middle age who, I learnt, looked down on the others in the village, but was happy to invite them over for drinks and nibbles to reinforce her status amongst them. She'd clearly staked her differences into the ground. They couldn't be momentarily cast aside.

During my stay in the village it was with thoughts like that that I filled the void caused by not understanding much of what anyone was saying.

For Andrei it was something different. The purple fence was just an accident of chance: like what happens when you develop a photograph and through the magnifying glass you see that a few of the pixels are completely the wrong colour. If you take a big enough cross-section of people, there’s no reason, just aberrations happen. Some people have bad taste.