Stuff

I have stuff all over the house. In boxes, corners, closets, on shelves. Everywhere. Like most people in this culture. We define ourselves by our stuff. George Carlin once did a brilliant bit about stuff, that everything we do is in service to our stuff.

I look at it now and wonder why. Why so much? And occasionally I’ll unbury some long forgotten cache and it strikes me that at one time I thought this collection of things was important enough to keep. Now?

I have many books. I’m reaching the point where I feel I should cull. More than cull, just get rid of them. Especially the old mass market paperbacks. There are a couple of sets I’ll keep, sure, but I have these poor, broken things on shelves that I will likely never read again (or at all, for that matter). Why am I keeping them?

The same with the music. I have nearly a thousand vinyl records. Many of these I now have the CDs, so keeping the vinyl is…redundant at best. I tell myself it’s for the glorious jacket art, but I never pull them out to appreciate them.

Music, books…what else? Photographs. Ah, well, that’s different. These are my photographs. I have intentions, if not plans…

We keep these things past utility because they are proof of who we were…and my still be. Reminders. When I do go through them, I never feel bad. On the contrary. I gathered all this as evidence of who I was and how I got here. It is the external architecture of myself.

It does not reduce to mere property.

At the moment, I am reading Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren for my reading group. I have a nice, clean Wesleyen Press edition, trade paperback. Easier on the eyes. But I still have a first edition of it, a mass market paperback from 1975, the one I read back in the 1980s (which had been on my shelf unread since I acquired it when it came out). Why am I not reading that copy? Why did I acquire a new one? Notions of preservation seem silly. I am not a serious collector. I don’t have the obsession for that, even though I appreciate the practice and am quite proud of those things I do have that I consider valuable parts of my “collection.” I am not thorough about it.

I’ve done this same thing several times. I have an old Ballantine copy of Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar, but when we chose it for a reading group selection, I acquired a newer trade edition…

Having new things is pleasant. I enjoy it. Especially newer versions of old favorites.

But then I keep it all.

My shelves are bursting. The question, though, is: will I be diminished if I get rid of all this?

There’s a posture some people take, a kind of anti-materialist pseudo-spirituality, that likes to dismiss the importance of stuff. And while I agree that an obsession with stuff can be destructive of a certain balance with regards to human values, I’ve always felt the scolding of such folks shallow in the same way what they’re condemning can be. Things do not matter, they say, and yet when one turns to, say, archaeology, we define entire civilizations by the things they left behind. And not in a facile way. That which we embrace tells a story about us and knowing how to read the residue is a talent that opens the minds of those long dead. Stuff matters.

But it can, in sufficient quantity, muddy our vision. Too much stuff is like static. 

How to clear away what is no longer helpful, though…

And what does it mean when suddenly, one day, you decide it’s okay to do that? To divest yourself of all the things that yesterday helped tell you who you are?

Sometimes you just have to realize that you need the space, both mentally and physically. 

Important things, though, like books and music and movies (oh, I didn’t even mention my DVD collection!) are not the moat intractable things. There’s that junk drawer filled with old shoelaces, twist-ties, old utensils you never use anymore. If you’re like me, you also have a junk drawer filled with old pencils and pens, many of which don’t work anymore, and ancient bookmarks. Probably more than one. And then there are the notes. Old notes, notes about things you cannot recall, pertaining to matters long forgotten. But you might remember! Better keep them, just in case.

Let us not even start on the boxes. Empty boxes. 

How often (he asks semi-rhetorically) have you ever need any of the things you have forgotten you’ve stored “just in case”? Why is it so onerous to throw it out? Nay, not only that, but even consider throwing it out?

For most of us, it is manageable. Manageable in the sense that it doesn’t spill into the pathways we use daily. The closet doors still close, the drawers are not packed to bursting, we can, with a little effort, make our living space appear unoccupied by mounds of stuff. Which is one of the reasons we delay actual culls. 

I also have boxes of old photographs. And I don’t mean snapshots of the family history variety, but stacks of art that I will never do anything with.

A huge amount of this is paper.

I face a question now pertaining to that above-noted question of identity. Will I, should I divest of most of the unused stuff, still be Me? Or is it possible that sufficient processing space is taken up by the (usually unacknowledged) bulk of all this stuff that ridding myself of it might actually allow me to more Myself?

Is this not a silly matter? Perhaps. But it becomes nontrivial because we put it off constantly and allow it to consume living space. Not just physically but the unconscious attention it requires even to ignore it.

I’m sure there are people you can hire to do this for you, professional “personal curators” who will for a fee come in and throw things out. 

It could even be a lucrative business.

But I wonder…how much stuff do they have that might need exactly the service they offer?