Doorknobs

I never installed them. What doors could they have opened?

Katie Kitamura

A pair of weathered wood doors with peeling orange paint — Getty Images

In Objects of Desire, a writer meditates on an everyday item that haunts them.

I found the doorknobs at a street market in one of the less fashionable parts of Paris. They were inside a box amid a jumble of other doorknobs, all in many ways indistinguishable. The vendor said they were going for five euros each, which seemed to me an excellent price, about the same as a cappuccino. The doorknobs were technically bric-a-brac, but with their brass stems and crackled glaze, they looked ostentatious to me. I picked them up and felt their pleasing weight in the palms of my hands. I coveted them, and was also a little ashamed of coveting them. I knew they had no real place in my life. I couldn’t imagine them in my actual home. They were objects that had nothing to do with me.

But how often are we dissuaded from desire on the basis of its absurdity, particularly when the desire is so humble, so small in size? I quickly handed over a ten euro note and took two doorknobs in exchange, selecting the ones that struck me as the most beautiful, although my criteria were haphazard at best. The vendor wrapped the knobs in a scrap of newspaper and handed them to me. I unwrapped them immediately—the way you might unwrap a bit of street food, a kebab or a crêpe—and held them, one in each hand. They seemed molded to my palms, and although this was self-evidently a question of design, and therefore a question of utility, in that moment they felt near talismanic.

When I returned to my hotel, I began packing my suitcase for New York, wrapping the doorknobs back in their paper and shoving them into the toes of my boots. Upon my return, they lived in the shoes for perhaps a month or two, inside my closet, like a secret. Then I had occasion to wear the boots again. I put the knobs on the closet floor, where they sat for another year, still in that newspaper from Paris—Le Figaro, I think. Eventually, I unwrapped them and threw the paper away, and then the doorknobs lived in the dark amid the clutter.

Reality is overturned, and new possibilities are revealed.

Over the years, I would sometimes catch glimpses of the doorknobs beneath a shoe or between the folds of a bag—pale and bone-like, rolling gently as if alive. In those moments of surprising and surreptitious movement, which I never really grew used to, I thought of the films of the surrealist Czech director Jan Švankmajer. In his work, the boundary between the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead, is continually unstitched in jarring and magical ways.

I first came across Švankmajer’s films in my twenties, when I was working as an usher at a repertory cinema in London. The cinema held a Švankmajer retrospective that ran for several weeks and must have comprised a dozen films; the one I remember most vividly now is Little Otik. Based on a Czech folktale, it tells the story of a childless couple who adopt a tree stump. Animated by their longing, the stump comes to life, and is itself soon a monster of insatiable appetite.

Objects have a special place in Švankmajer’s world. His characters become fixated on them, projecting secret hungers that transform the objects into fetishes. A tree stump becomes a child. Pellets of bread become objects of erotic fascination. Reality is overturned, and new possibilities are revealed. When situations veer out of control, things literally start falling apart—limbs detach, objects tumble to the ground. That’s when these objects attain their full power. Removed from context, violently severed from the bodies that fix their meaning, they are finally free.

In Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (here translated by Stephen Mitchell), the fragmented torso—disjoined from “his legendary head / with eyes like ripening fruit”—is transformed, through that severance, into something far stranger and more dazzling: “still suffused with brilliance from inside, / like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, // gleams in all its power.”

I confess, I never got around to installing the doorknobs. If I had, their ordinary beauty could have been part of my daily life, perhaps could have transformed it in some small way. But I’m resistant to change. As it turns out, I prefer the doorknobs as useless objects, tucked into the back corner of a closet. I suppose at some point they’ll no longer speak to me, and I’ll set them out on the stoop for someone else to take. Or maybe I’ll attach them to a door. But for now, they are a reminder of sorts. When I look at them, the final line of Rilke’s poem runs booming through my head: You must change your life.

Katie Kitamura is the author of, most recently, Audition.