The grandfather of my French ex used to pick up rubber bands and pieces of string from the ground and put them in his pockets. He called them "des çapeut", as in "ça peut servir (un jour)" ("it might be useful (some day)"). That was the anecdote the family told at least; it vaguely reminds me of some character from a Vonnegut, Barth or Perec novel I can't remember. I should look that up. The book is here somewhere.
Last summer, my friend J. and I participated in a installation/performative art piece by artist Megan Metcalf (http://www.meganmetcalf.com) called "Portraits". I had seen her post on the NY Nonsense listserv, sent it to J. and she convinced me to join her:
* Do you like to file? I know, it's a weird question. But if you do, I
need your help between 22 June and 8 July. My new installation
Portraits investigates the relationship of work to art in a gallery
space uptown. I'll make a portrait of you based on a filing system you
set up! Potential participants should have 2-3 free hours and love to
file and organize things - drop me an email if this is you. Of course
I'll bring beer and music! Contact Megan.
The work involved asking the 13 participants to file a heap of miscellaneous receipts, letters, scraps, images, articles and effluvia (including a crushed soda can & a magnetic picture frame). Each participant had an equivalent stack to organize. Files cabinets, pendaflex, manila folders, label makers: all was provided. Participants were not given any other directions as, say, for whom the filing system was intended (for her? for us?), why these materials had been chosen, or how they might eventually be used. At the end of the process, Megan created wall charts graphically showing each individuals filing system.
The process was actually fun. Sprawled out on the floor, I took each object, analyzed it, put it in a stack as a preliminary step, went to the next object, eventually returned to the stack to see if my overarching principles made sense. Some objects proved recalcitrant; the idea of having a file for one wayward object disturbed me. In the end, I tried to organize my objects into a practical system for an artist; I discarded almost nothing.
My friend J., on the other hand, put nine tenths of the materials in the discard bin; on each item to be thrown away, she wrote her justifications. J. is a believer in leaving the past behind. I admire her for that, even if it scares me. (addendum: this being said, while "leaving the past behind" may be a zen gesture, it may also be as neurotically/psychologically ambivalent as "keeping everything"; how does one know if their "freedom from having" proceeds from existential or zen principles?)
Going through the other participants' files after I had finished was hilarious. Some people's systems were (to me) utterly arbitrary (shades of Borges' Chinese Encyclopedia's division of animals), overly alphabetical (where do you file a soda can?), excessively anal (one system assigned numbers to each object and then used a cross-referenced computer database to keep track of the material properties), but all seemed to reveal deep psychological truth about the individual in question.
Despite my pack-rat-ness, there has always been something seductive about a Sartrian refusal to let "having" (possessing, owning, buying...) stand in for "being" and "doing". For years, Sartre chose to live in hotels, to possess nothing, to constantly slough off any sort of accumulation. His writings: once he was done with a project, he moved on. His manuscripts? Tossed aside; given away.
My professor G. used to tell of gay US army men working at the Pentagon reading porn novels in the 50s: once the book was read, one threw it out (into the Potomac?). The novel was just a trick.
Today's online culture seems to facilitate obsessive collecting. Even Social Networking seems predicated on the list (friends, favorite films, favorite musical artists; curiously not: favorite visual artist, plant or food, but there will probably come facebook apps for that some day soon), and while an online list isn't the same as shelves and shelves of books, cds and vinyl, or megabytes of downloaded images, it still seems to participate strangely in a time-consuming loss-less cataloguing and accumulation of names without the grace and joy of an ephemeral but meaningful contact.
What good is our accumulated history if it doesn't lead to a more satisfying existence or if it straightjackets our soul? Friedrich Nietzsche's "Second Untimely Meditation: On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" (available online at http://nietzsche.classicauthors.net/abuse/ ) can still cut me to the quick like I was 18 again, running on the beach at midnight, repeating to myself Yeats' "I would be - for no knowledge is worth a straw - / ignorant and wanton as the dawn."
How hard though, the zen affirmation, if loss terrifies you.
***
addendum: My friend A. is on a "buying nothing all year" new year's resolution in an effort to focus on essentials in her life. No durable goods are permitted, only experiential and ephemeral things like meals and movies (books from the public library). Strange coincidence: I went online this afternoon and discovered that Megan Metcalf did a similar project in 2007: http://fixproject.squarespace.com .
It's not exactly freeing yourself from history, but it is start on freeing yourself from "having".
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