FALL CLEANSE

My controlled collection of "stuff"

In mid-August the texture of the air changes. I find weeds less worrisome at this time of year.  A riot of black eyed susans camouflage my end-of-summer laziness and I can look around with an equal sense of relief and appreciation. Thank you, Husband, for your diligent watering throughout a drought but thank god! it’s nearly over until spring. 

Now through Fall, we’ll be transplanting a few things, eliminating others, re-arranging, filling in, balancing the garden in terms of color, foliage, height.  This is called OBSESSIVE CONTROL! Every gardener has it. No matter how “natural” you lean, what “wide swaths” you cut or leave, you are manipulating your environment and therefore, join my club, you are a control freak. 

But here’s the thing: the obsession - owning, rearranging, controlling - doesn’t end outside my door with plants. It crouches inside with needy objects in every corner, every drawer, every cupboard.  Lee Randal  writes: “I am my things and my things are me.  I don’t want to give them up; they are narrative prompts for the story of my life.”

Whoa!  Had I only read that several years ago before I tried “staging- houses-for-fun-and-profit” or “staging-houses-for-people-even-when-they- didn’t-want-their-house-staged-but-I-thought-it-looked-better-anyway”…I could have saved myself frustration and those poor sods pain!  (“Poor sods” - I’ve been reading a lot of English literature lately.)

I’ve never made the leap from objects I own to some esoteric soul identity (could explain why we’ve moved 9 times in the last 40 years!) but an entire library of books written during the past dozen years by highly creditable psychologists explain it:  “The Comfort of Things” by Daniel Miller, “Why We Need Things for Psychological Stability” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (remember him? he told us how to be happy years ago. It involved work…not things. I wonder when he changed his mind?),”Storage Hoarders” by Aggie MacKenzie.  

In 2001, British artist Michael Landy publicly put all his belongings through a shredder - 7,227 objects - in a performance piece he called “Break Down”. For a year afterward, he didn’t produce a single piece of art.  Randall believes Landy erased himself along with his “markers” and needed time for self-discovery. Obviously, Landy finally "found himself"; he’s still throwing things into the trash. Most recently, he invited artists on line to participate in a piece titled “Art Bin.”  130,000 gallon trash cans were placed around the exhibition hall into which Landy methodically tossed stacks of the“selected art.” So what is the message? that all art ultimately heads for a land fill? that any artist who would participate via the internet is asking for humiliation? that none of it matters and the only thing that survives are the metal containers used to collect this detritus?

 Landy is 53, still throwing things away and obsessed with NOT owning anything which opens up a whole new category of the human=objects dimension.

Jean Paul Sartre wrote that we can know who we are only by observing what we have. (!)    How does this “we are what we own” jibe with the environment?  All those objects that tell us who we are come at some expense - not just to us who bought the junk in the first place, but to the makers, packagers, transporters, sellers, power plants at each and every step of the process. What happened to last year’s Declutter Your Environment- Declutter your Brain? I’m a product of the era when obsolete by design was practiced, exposed and damned. Now are we to feel psychologically nude? 

“I am what I eat.”

“You are known by the company you keep.”

“Shorn of my possessions, I would still be me but not for long.”

No wonder some of us are still searching for our true selves: the  instruction booklet changes every year or two and I can’t read that fast!

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A cartoon from The New Yorker shows a Japanese couple in traditional dress standing in the doorway of their home.  The corner of a tatami is turned up. A rice bowl and chopsticks are askew on the floor.

“Oh no!" says one. " We’ve been ransacked!”