poliphilo

Haecceitas is the quality in a thing that makes it individual, unique, recognisably itself and not something else that is similar. The word- which tracks back to the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus- usually gets translated as "thisness". It was introduced to me- and it's application to story-telling explained- in a video by someone I cannot now identify. (Sorry, unidentified video-person!)

Every so often I'll take the idea out and polish it on a shirt tail. What is it exactly that distinguishes person A from person B and every other person in the alphabet? How does a mother inerringly pick her own child out of a teeming creche? How when we step off the train in Edinburgh do we know without asking it's not Glasgow? We can feel the thisness of people and places and all manner of other things- but how? Can we identify the markers? Can we explain? Artists have haecceitas at their fingertips. Good artists that is. They can give us the quiddity of a thing in flick of a brush or the turn of a phrase. How do they do it? They just do....

You don't have to understand a power to wield it.

Last night I interrupted my cough, cough, coughing to drink a shot of port and distract myself with a chapter of a detective story that was lying on the desk- and encountered a piece of writing almost entirely lacking in haecceitas. A woman who could be anyone gets on an underground train that could be anywhere and visits a cafe that was every cafe. The author's plotting may be excellent but I'm unlikely to read far enough to find out because the colourlessness of the writing is so uninviting. I don't want to navigate this featureless world full of featureless people. Indulge me with some quirks for pity's sake!

Haeccecity may be impossible to pin down but you miss it like a pulse-beat when it isn't there...