Cleaning House

   That time has come once again, the papers and piles that have rested with comfortable security on my floor now challenging me to clear them out...if I dare.  This has all happened before when I mounted an attack on the clutter that proved Pyrrhic where both sides retreated with smugness; but before long I had to admit that the true victor had emerged and unfortunately it wasn't me.  So why now and why again?  This isn't Marie Kondo or any of the many semi-fanatics (in my mind) which would find my house intolerable as dog and cat hairs float like dust before finding their magnetic attraction to a sleeve of clothing or the arm of a couch.  A slight tap on the dog or cats' bellies and a veritable gasp would emerge from those sterile-lab authors' homes.  Such a summary appeared in a review by Andrew O'Hagan in the London Review of Books, on describing another cluttered (but seemingly typical) home: This was the world I remember very well, the pets, the sofa, the endless gadgets, and the need to clean them or tidy them away.  We had come a long way from William Morris's thinking on household objects that one should keep nothing that is neither useful nor beautiful, and our house, in the middle of our street, was testament to the ugliness of half-arsed consumption, a Bedlam of miniature wants.  Storage solutions.  House extensions.  Outsourcing.  That was the rage for a generation -- giving us Ikea, conservatories, dishwashers and cleaners who come for two hours a week.  In a few months it will be two years since my mother passed away, and indeed my parents would never have considered paying someone to come in a "clean" their house on a regular basis; indeed up until she fell and broke a femur while hanging up her laundry to dry, she lived and maintained her home until the age of 89 (and likely would have continued to do so until the neighbors would have spotted crows circling overhead).

    But what happens to that time...our lives in general?  Is this packing and collecting of tricnkets and tidbits (photos, coins, high school albums, concert DVDs, etc.) a desperate clinging of times long gone, and apparently gone so quickly?  Staring at stapled articles and books on the floor and shelves, each begging to be read, fall ever lower in priority as new magazines and books and podcasts and binge-series continue to arrive at an almost frustrating pace.  And yet so much of the new is so interesting...new ideas, new inventions, new perspectives.  Tim Parks' new book Out of My Mind (unread by me other than reviews but it is on order) seems to want to chop through the psychanalytic jargon and make sense of what our clinging memories and impressions really are.  Certainly, it would seem to him, our wants and memories are not embedded in a "hard drive" pixelated storage brain we so imagine (a dichotomy in itself).  Said the somewhat unflattering review on his page: Parks makes an excellent point about what he calls the “internalist” position (that our picture of reality is just that: a subjective one, concocted by our brains), which is that it flatters our sense of our own importance, making of us creators of our own effectively unique worlds.  Certainly, there has to be some explanation of why it is we’ve clung so doggedly to this view...Parks drily observes: “In general, the logic here is that scientists should be able to recreate, or recall, more or less every experience by stimulating our brains in certain ways.  However, there are not many accounts of this actually occurring.”  Not many?  In fact, none at all – unless you count the sort of commonplace reactions that mice exhibit when you place their skulls in clamps and make them smell stuff. 

    I think I mentioned earlier that I had a dream many months ago where an alien arrived and took me through my house room by room, asking what "things" really mattered to me and that which I wanted to keep; this didn't factor in anything alive such as my wife or the animals of course, but rather just what sat or hung in each room and closet.  Clothes, books, trinkets, old laptops, a collection of felt pads and nuts and bolts, etc.  But generally, even after scanning in the garage, I could only name one or two items, at which point the alien would ask if I was certain and then zap a button and everything  else would vanish...poof, gone.  It was a big reality check for me, perhaps the same vision one has before dying of how very few (if any) material things matter.  But alas, even after awakening with renewed vigor and intention to begin purging all this "unnecessary stuff," I soon sputtered out.  But that pin is rare or could be valuable, I say, or that picture means so much to me, even if I haven't looked at it in years or decades.   Looking objectively, as if the alien were still beside me, I would realize how ridiculous all of my rationales would sound.  But it was in my cleaning that I discovered an old piece I'd written back in late 1987 (gasp, 32 years ago??...how can that be??).  In part, it said: We yearn for success but do we view ourselves as successful?  Are we waiting for life to catch us and perhaps take care of us, trapped in Montaigne's world? -- "I know well what I am fleeing from, but not what I am in search of." ...Things can happen if we make them happen.  As Goethe said, "Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world."  So maybe this is a year to question ourselves -- what do we really want?  What are our patterns?  And is our image of ourselves based more on reality or on imagination?  It's medically accepted that once you stop dreaming during sleep, life ends.  But as one author noted, "Most of us would rather believe in the impossible than attempt the real."  

   So jump to the recent issue of Marie Claire, where writer Liz Moody takes off for a rather wealthy ($5600 per week) therapeutic retreat for, well, the rather wealthy (among others, she meets executives, company owners, etc.).  Termed Onsite, she said this after her experience: I live in a world of subtle but powerful judgements, about stories worth writing and people worth talking to and emails worth answering.  I spend my days building narrative in my own head, whether they're constructed on a page or about a friend's relationship, and those same narratives trap me in the walls of anxiety, a disease based on spinning futures that live only in my brain.  At the facility, she has to role play among the group of 60, what Onsite terms doing "sculpts."  I couldn't relate to the role of a prostitute until I stepped into it and was able to identify with her Ivy League past...My roommate had been a pastor's wife, the of deeply Christian conservative I never encountered in my life.  But she saw the peeled-back, stripped-raw layers of the world --the goodness and chaos of people, the need for a sense of purpose-- in the same way I did...The extreme disconnection from your daily life forces a reckoning with who you are beneath all of that -- and, more important, who you want to be.  The heightened intimacy with people who are strangers to not only you but also every component of your life, from your home state to your politics, cultivates a sense of empathy that's almost impossible to achieve in the churn of the everyday.  In the sculpts, the worst of my stories was held up to the mirror of my group, and I saw how far the world in my head differed from reality.  If the Christian conservative could be my best friend and I could connect with a former prostitute, how could my vision of myself as a person limited by anxiety pass muster?...Being given the opportunity to tell a new story, as strangers silently held my hand, or cradled me in their arms, or whispered in my ear, changed me.  And their reassurances stay with me: "You are enough."  Even if you never get better, you're enough exactly as you are.

    As I toss out and shred my mother's old tax returns and health records and bank statements (friends advised me to keep such things for two years, "just in case"), it was a mixture of feelings, as if some of her own memories (actually mine) were being discarded, the paper copies of her life and all that she was --her grade school photos to graduation to teacher to wife to home owner to elderly widow hanging clothes-- was now being entrusted only to my pixelated storage brain unit...and even that image was being crumpled and mangled.  Will this new round of my "cleaning" prove any easier or any more fruitful?  Probably not, and more than likely I will soon sputter and quickly lose that enthusiasm and ambition.  But I'm older now, and the clock is ticking (it always is, isn't it).  And now my birth year is appearing on the news as political and sports and celebrity fashionistas bite the dust (they were my age, my mind somehow realizes in shock).  Perhaps I cling to such trinkets as comfort, my child-like security blanket.  I am still around, and they --all the people and animals and friends I knew but have passed-- are still around as well, even in that 1926 coin from my dad's early days traveling the world with the Navy.  But this time it's a bit different because while none of us ever really know when our time is up, I have to recognize that I am now more the Rod Laver in the stands at Wimbleton, and not the Rod Laver swinging a tennis racquet with ease.  Without costing me a penny, this sort of renewed reality came not from a treatment center but from a letter to the editor written by Norman Gray at the University of Glasgow: Through photosynthesis, plants of every kind, from grass to redwoods, convert carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into bulk matter: the majority of the mass of any plant is carbon captured from the air.  A plant is however only a temporary store of carbon, since that carbon will be released directly or indirectly into the atmosphere when the plant is consumed by animals, or dies and decays, or it otherwise disposed of.  

    Disposed of?  Really?  Was that what I was doing, shredding lives into pixelated pieces and sending them to a landfill.  But it all seems so real...this life.  Or not.  In the next post, I'll explore this "world" a bit further, a world as difficult to understand as the current remake of The Lion King, a film process that gets rid of cameras and is proving as revolutionary as the transition from silent movies to sound...one as real as life itself (or is it?).