CLUTTER
The go-to topic for small-talk for (very) mature people includes personal and second-hand gossip about HEALTH. Then next night be DOWN-SIZING, inextricably intertwined with CLUTTER and the seeming truism that “your kids don’t want your stuff.” (perhaps slipping past the obvious: that of all your stuff they are the most precious and they have already taken charge)
BUT recently a Poetry Foundation post resonated–oddly harmoniously–with my beliefs that clutter is really highly personalized connoisseurship–it’s importance is in being an experience, not a thing (this confusion is probably at the heart of ancient pharaohs and emperors wanting to be buried with their most precious pieces of their collection if not their entire household) … connected also at a deep level to the idea that the journey is the destination:
You’ll find labels describing what is gone:
an empress’s bones, a stolen painting
of a man in a feathered helmet
holding a flag-draped spear.
A vellum gospel, hidden somewhere long ago
forgotten, would have sat on that pedestal;
this glass cabinet could have kept the first
salts carried back from the Levant.
To help us comprehend the magnitude
of absence, huge rooms
lie empty of their wonders—the Colossus,
Babylon’s Hanging Gardens and
in this gallery, empty shelves enough to hold
all the scrolls of Alexandria.
My love, I’ve petitioned the curator
who has acquired an empty chest
representing all the poems you will
now never write. It will be kept with others
in the poet’s gallery. Next door,
a vacant room echoes with the spill
of jewels buried by a pirate who died
before disclosing their whereabouts.
I hope you don’t mind, but I have kept
a few of your pieces
for my private collection. I think
you know the ones I mean.
Rebecca Lindenberg, “In the Museum of Lost Objects” from Love, an Index. Copyright © 2012 by Rebecca Lindenberg. Reprinted by permission of McSweeney’s Publishing. Source: Love, an Index(McSweeney’s Publishing, 2012)
I like the line in a hymn to let every casual corner bloom into a shrine. So what counts as worthy of saving and how does that count as legacy? Is my stuff part of me? Should it be buried with me when I leave? Is my stuff sacred as in the contents of a genzah?
Diary Note 20 July 2021. I read about how the ancient custom of preserving any document on which the name of god is written resembles my extreme reluctance to discard or delete anything with the picture of anyone who means anything to me. In ancient synagogues, any document that referred to god was put away in some unused corner of the Synagogue: the “genizah“. // This applies to what almost everyone seems to regard as my clutter, a burden that impairs my progressive change–presumably for the better. Still, I have a powerful disposition to save anything that hints at transcendence—which means almost everything, all things being connected as they are.* The transcendence is in the connections they make. They are—or they are part of—a path to transcendence, if only I could connect them in just the right way, like a collage or assemblage… (never forgeting that “the journey is the destination”). Sometimes the fragments are (echoing brain functions) bottom-up, sometimes top down–but always evoke a larger construct, the tip of which is barely perceptible and sometimes on the tip of my tongue–like a key if used in just the right way, in just the right lock, would open onto something further, larger, deeper, leading, step-by-step, to something sacred. (Clutter is the key–How do I use these fragments? Perhaps like, as the Jewish sage, Ben Bag-Bag, taught about studying the Torah, “we should continuously turn it and turn it, like a gem with countless facets, looking for new and deeper meanings.”)
So maybe all my bits of stuff are actually landmarks on my journey, pointing in a particular direction that can never (considering that we are mortal beings) be attained. In other words, they are actually scaffolding–support for an inner construction (like my assemblages?) that can be deconstructed or abandoned when that inner structure is closer to completion. [could that be why abandoned structures–ruined castles or cathedrals are so attrcative? symbols of a journey, landmarks in the frear-view mirror]
