Detritus
Lost keys have their own peculiar kind of sadness.
I’m almost never without my keys, and when I am, I feel somewhat naked and helpless. That’s only moderately practical; I could easily get my neighbors to let me into my building; my girlfriend, of course, has her own keys to our place; and the locksmith could let us in easily if both of us somehow lost ours. In any event, the place is hardly a bank vault.
The fear of losing my keys has little to do with the practical inconvenience it might cause me; it's more that my keys are tokens of myself. They are signs that I have a home and thus a legitimate place in society. I used to have a cardkey at the office, but the connotations were not very strong. A cardkey is just a pass, a thing that can be rendered inert in the same way an expired college ID ceases to mean anything.
But a physical, metal key always carries around its sheer weightiness: it is one of the few icons we carry that connects us to the industrial world; we get keys “cut” by a man with a machine which is closer to the technology of the 19th century than to the 21st, and it happens at the hardware store, a place full of objects from the world of physical labor. Its symbolic value – the familiar sign of access, of power and sometimes of privilege, even honor (the “Keys to the City” is an image with which we are all familiar, even though none of us live any longer in cities which are locked up at night, and “gated communities” don’t generally give out access passes to honorees) – stems from this; the key is a sign, however muted, of the ancient and involved craft of civil defense. I think of the city-states of Tuscany, of medieval moats and portcullises, of Robinson Crusoe and his palisaded cave.
Most of all I think of the lock that this key once fit, was cut to fit. Does that lock still exist? That strange little involuted cave that requires its inverse partner in order to function? Of course there are copies, sometimes many copies, of the same key. So it doesn’t matter to the lock, which (although it balks a bit at some of the replicas) will shake hands with any key that presents the right shape. So, this key, this particular key, whether an unused spare or the regular key on someone’s chain, doesn’t really matter.
Which makes it, in the end, even sadder.
Posted by B T at October 15, 2001 10:50 PM