Trying to clean the room and failing. Drawer by stuffed drawer, box by shoved-under-bed box, beaten back in each skirmish.
Beforehand the room had a precarious equilibrium, dusty fullness, every nook having been gradually filled past full, things balanced, stacked, compressed and wedged away over years, a slow accumulating, the residues of different periods of me. Fadó fadó here I was a child in a bunk bed, then a teen in a cave built from posters and drawings, later arriving at and gathering speed into adulting and never quite coming to terms with it, with being me or being at all. Such a strange thing, to be a thing.
Every strand of stuff I pull at releases a new plume of disorder. I wade into a treacle of material memory.
Insurance and NCT letters, faded receipts, letters and postcards from friends and loves. I aim to go through a morsel each day.
Some nights I push aside a heap on the duvet to reach the solace of bed. 1 am probably, maybe as deep as 2. The small quiet hours where poetry and curious low tides that leave things uncovered on the sand come from. Where does the night go? Drips down to dawn.
Perhaps it is a comfort, to lie under a cairn like this. Half a dozen pairs of swimming goggles. Cycling shorts with holes on the hips from crashes. Bits of helmets, shoe cleat bolts. Rolls and rolls and rolls and rolls of undeveloped film. Oh shit how will I ever get through all of it? Bags of screws, bits of broken cameras, lenses with stuck shutters or with guts hanging out. Envelopes with my name on them and nothing inside. Notebooks of unfinished sentences, unanswered questions, tangents and trails. Officious letters reminding me how awful I am at the systems of living in systems. Dead watches, torn straps, safety pins, scraps of paper. Batteries and coins and books and books and books. So many unread. My tendency to shove the ones I’ve travelled further out of view.
Two tiny plastic snow-globes of the Taj Mahal that kids sold me on that business trip to New Delhi. They trailed us full of eager gestures, brandishing trinkets, marking us as rich foreigners.
Bottles and cups and medals and tickets and boarding passes and nails and screws and shoelaces and thickets of cables and creams and toothbrushes and florescent golf balls and two baseballs with writing on them- indecipherable. Not mine. Brother’s.
Shaving blades. A shirt that I’d refused to wear again because of a memory, stuffed into a plastic box with no lid. Two packs of out-of-date condoms. Camping gear. Four gas cannisters, all used but none emptied. Expired survival meals. A broken typewriter, a broken Gameboy, broken watches, a whole graveyard of broken cameras. Blue and red boxing gloves. Heart rate monitor straps. A set of postcards so neatly written that they draw tears before they can be put back down. Anxious letters from someone to a brother from two decades ago. Two stopwatches and two whistles. How it all flies by. In between the bank statements and marketing junk and delivery invoices, the river of everything.
Each day I aim to go through a morsel but it feels like fighting an Atlantic tide, thrashing against the unperturbed waves.
A little stack of letters that crossed an ocean and sparkle and glimmer with heart and the holding on to that.
Here’s how we go back over our lives of accumulation, and here’s the stuff from which we’ve erected who we are. I think about the difference between getting, having, and having had.
Through heaps of detritus, I divide the artefacts, aspiring to two pure categories of yay and nay, but inventing labels as I go. Good, not good, don’t know, dump, keep, unsure, dump, keep, good, good, crap, nope, unsure, uncertain, maybe, confounded, need a break, what even is this? From a need for clear binaries come hello-ing more options, various levels of unsureness. Each time after a few ticks of the clock the question “have I done enough for now?”
Assemblies of things I do not know what to do with survey me from somewhere between nostalgia, possible-future-use, how icky it feels to put them to landfill, and the low level need for a clearing in the woods that set this whole thing off. I’m not even sure but perhaps it will feel like an escape from a trappedness, a smotheredness squashedness narrowness compressedness. Caught in a purgatory flapping in the wind of various energies, making fitful efforts to move and clarify, but so randomly that the average from afar is a wobbling kind of silly stillness.
I cannot win, but am slowly shrinking some mounds while cycling many pieces of interest back into boxes and shelves for another time, another discussion. it is getting a fraction neater. Why do I need three bottle openers? Is this bulb ever going to be used? Is it wrong to dump unbroken objects?
I remember helping Jackie clearing out the attic of Nanny’s house, the tiny cottage in Mullaghglass within earshot of the sea’s rumblings. Its stout stony walls had raised two generations but how little now there was left, only vague scraps, nothing worth money. It was good to find no material treasure, good to have only memories, to remember that I am partly made from those ocean sounds and the fuchsia hedges and the many scramblings down and up the grassy cliffsides in search of adventure.
I think of spare contemporary homes, chic modern minimal restrained grey clean, and the landfill needed to curate a path to hallowed hollows, all the once sought-after things binned in favour of the space of their absence, the habitats cleared to make the businesses to make the things that will never be used and be stored away until still in their packaging sent to a mountain of waste.
Is it a moral virtue to use what you buy? I imagine an evening cooking a fine dinner slowly, then chucking it into the bin without eating it, and going to bed hungry instead. Why is this so unjust?
I give up again. Little victories. Our domestic spaces and trailing traces. Our materiality, the fill and crumble of our bodies and the river of stuff that we buy.
A big part of art for me is noticing and reflecting in a less than instrumental way. Listening to the world, letting it dent and imprint, and then asserting something back into it, something that you can’t articulate at all clearly. And this is all tied to honesty. And honesty seems to contain the holding of as many details as possible, witnessing them in a oneness, having them speak in a way through you, skirting around the contradictions. Maybe.
Perhaps I can keep on tidying my room now, the room of me, the physical space but more truthfully the scaffolding of memories and beliefs, desires, principles, urges, wishes that I inhabit as my roving interior.
I feel sometimes that I should pray, not to whatever gods may or may not be, but to the absurd speeding cosmos that refuses to be reduced to an understood entity. Sentences directed not to any other but towards the idea of everything, and some untouchable oneness that might move within it. To accept the clutter and the weight of memory while reaching beyond it, to tidy while knowing about entropy, the dance of order and disorder, to keep returning to the wild world.
From the front pocket of a backpack I fish out a decrepit fossil of a banana skin.
