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July 05, 2006
"Love" is just the name we give to the desire for and pursuit of wholeness//Aristophanes' speech//Plato's Symposium
Over the last few weeks many of us have been confronted with our stuff. When I came back to South Carolina I wanted give away everything I did and would not use any more. I do have a limitation on items that I want to share in the future with the children not yet in our family. In Boston I got rid of two bags worth of stuff.
Why do we keep it? Often I have heard that each trinket helps you remember that time in the third grade when Billy hit you in the head, ect. I've been reading and thinking about stuff and I think this is a better fleshing out.
First, sometimes the memory of a time can be so rich that we need deflection something else to hold. I think this works for big things like death, weddings, births, and real love. I have a Christmas card framed my Aunt Dawn sent my brother from around the time of my birth. I have no memory of this card but it reminds me of a more hopeful time for her and that her loss was not in my head without others.
Second, items that we keep become the memory themselves and do not help us remember anything but what we have made the item represent. I think this is normally the stuff that we want to get rid of but a growl in our tummy says 'stop'. I think these are the items that we really should get rid of because they drag you down. For me the item that I struggle to not keep is shirts. I could have a whole dresser devoted to shirts that I never wear but that I want to keep. I had band, ROTC, student council, drama, and endless volunteer shirts any event I was involved in had a T-shirt that I would not wear in public. In addition to all of these shirts are all the T-shirts that I would wear out of the house or that I got while on vacation. I remember nothing when I look at t-shirts about the event only that I really should keep them.
Third are all items that have institutional meaning or collective. I have a small box that has all the awards from kindergarten to my college graduation. The awards don't mean anything about the intended event now and I can't remember the day I got this or that. Now going through that box is about going through that box to find meaning that I have forgotten and meaning that I have created. My diplomas mean nothing but having them at the top of the box gives my picture of the two pigs poke more meaning. My childhood art has meaning now because it is in that box.
Finally I think we keep things because when we don't they go on without us getting meaning from somebody else. The toys that we love will be played with in not the right way. It is like getting a little taste of death. Even those things that we had control over now mean something to somebody else and we have no control. All the jewelry that I have from my Grandmothers and Aunt are special because were once on their bodies. I don't know my grandmothers special meaning behind each trinket.
We don’t want to die and forgetting is akin to death. When I keep things I keep parts of me that I have created alive. The box that has all my school junk is to the eyes of a stranger useless but to me it is childhood. Created meaning keeps us alive to ourselves and others because when I do die somebody has to go through it all. Maybe in an age when our bodies are chemically enhanced at death we need our stuff to remind the living that we are like them. I manage my stuff because I manage my ego. When I die I want to leave a good impression for the people that will give my stuff meaning. Do you love me enugh to go through my stuff?
How to Parry Direct Questions | By razorback | 11:05 AM
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Here’s one more candidate role for our stuff: occasionally, old items can act as useful signposts to past perspectives and attitudes that we may have held.
Here’s an example. I used to spend summer afternoons looking for antique pottery fragments out in the fields (corn and winter wheat mostly) at my grandparents farm in VA. I still have a few of these fragments (somewhere) and when I run across them I think not only of the hot weather and the green, shady rows of corn where the fragments would show up (you could spot them in the dirt after the rows had been turned) but also of the particular emotional spectrum of the farm, which fostered a distinctive combination of isolation and connection to my family (I think that it did this for all of us).
I can look at the pottery fragments and think about my own context during that period and about specific decisions that I made based on that context and try to draw some useful conclusions from those memories which would not have been triggered had I not picked up the pottery jar, filled with china a dust and dirt et al.
On the flip side, we lose access to this opportunity when we wipe out traces of our own past. Solid objects both trigger and improve the quality of our own memories so that we can look back with enough accuracy to (1) allow us to revisit and retackle very standard life-n-death-n-ethics questions that we confront on a daily or weekly basis throughout our lives (2) prevent our own memories from becoming brittle and severe (3) give us a sense that we have changed (this sense of continuity seems important even if I can’t put my finger on it’s exact value) and that the changes we’ve made have been either good or bad.
All useful things, I think.
Posted by: jb at July 5, 2006 03:28 PM
this gave words to what I have been feeling lately. I've been going through all of my stuff and looking back at deep emotional chasms and oceans of memories... stuff I didn't even realize I had kept. I've started throwing out letters from people I don't remember, lost touch with, hate now, etc. How many books do I need? And seriously, all the freaking t-shirts. I am going to link this post to my xanga. It's wonderful.
Posted by: Natalie at July 8, 2006 04:01 PM