The Body of Evidence

So this post is coming from a lot of different places, but the two sources that are easiest for you to access (and that I highly recommend) are the phenomenally creative and thought provoking novel The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt and the unprecedentedly engaging and entrancing podcast "Serial." These 2 projects came in to my life within a week of each other, just after Thanksgiving. They are...completely different. Like based on every superficial metric they have nothing in common, and I can't even imagine that the audience overlap is significant, but they do share this one important premise: Let's sit down and take everything, all the documents, and half-truths, and records, and opinions and articles and lay it out and see what story emerges, see which story is true. Which, when you think about it, is not so different than the way we live and edit our own lives. So as I've been devouring both of these projects and witnessing the accumulation of crap and subsequent purge that carries us from Christmas and through New Year's, I can't help but wonder...what kind of trace am I leaving? Am I leaving one? What do my objects say about me, and why does whatever they say seem to be so loud?

So. Here we are. Meditations on consumerism, capitalism, and the illusion of self-growth, in short,  the importance of stuff. How we accumulate it. How we let it go. How it becomes important. (Note: I will not answer all of these questions, at least not today. For today, the questions are enough.)

Monday night, actually on my way home from my book club discussion of The Blazing World, I lost my class ring. I have been wearing it on my left index finger, and even there it was a little loose. But I've been wearing it nearly every day since graduation, and especially during my year of underemployment it was a totem, a touchstone, a reminder that I had once been well, and with a little time, I could be well again. I have a, I guess you'd call it a tick, where I twist my ring by dragging my thumb through the space between my middle and pointer fingers. So as i was setting down my stuff on my desk and I was absently mangling my fingers, I quickly realized that my ring was gone.

My mind actually jumped almost immediately to Serial, because in one of the early episodes Sarah discusses our inability to recount details from our day. A pain stabbed my chest and I thought to myself, could I retrace my steps? could I remember exactly which bridges I had crossed and allys I had taken? My instinct was "nearly," but slowly pacing cobblestones in the dark of half midnight was not a proposition that particularly interested me, especially considering the futility of such an undertaking. I called the bar. I told my landlord. I tried to move on.

I tell this story mostly because I was surprised at how upset I was. Having so little going on right now I feel pretty centered, but losing that ring was like a stabbing. And maybe it was because I've been investing less in worldly possessions (emotionally and economically) that the loss of that petite scrap of metal hurt. Before I had cared for everything a little bit, and here I was left with a hole in my heart because I had transferred that interest to a very few objects, without losing any passion in the transfer. But, self criticism aside, everywhere I went and everything I read I was receiving the same message: Stuff matters!
Money might not buy happiness, but it does buy something, lots of things actually, and all those big and little things add up to something significant.

At the British Museum there is a piece entitled "Cradle to Grave" on display near the American tapestries by Susie Freeman, Dr. Liz Lee, and David Critchley, a trio otherwise known as Pharmacopoeia. It's a burlap quilt of sorts, really a blister pack that runs the length of a gallery, fashioned of a loose mesh and protected by a glass box. And upon closer inspection there are actually two streamers, side by side, loaded in a gridded and orderly fashion with pills. A man's and a woman's medical history. On display is not only every pill they've required over the course of their life, for reasons ranging from hay fever to birth control to pre-natal vitamins to heart attacks, but also personal trinkets, including family photos and 3rd place canoeing medals and etc etc. The idea being, there's more to wellness than the medicine, there's the personal stuff too. And to represent that sphere, there are actual objects, which on their own mean very little but hold the wight of very much.

In fact, it's not just this installation. The entire museum, all museums really, are glorified warehouses. We're looking at things, collections of objects that once meant so much that by extension they still meant something today. We don't save the coffins of every culture, partly because so many of them have disappeared or disintegrated, but also because sometimes we don't care. But the sarcophagi hanging out in the British Museum tell a different story. It was an empire with the means to preserve its own history, it was a rise and fall that the British were interested in, that they felt was somehow part of their legacy, and by means of archaeological work did actually become part of Britain's identity. And now tourists from the entire world can come to put finger prints on glass boxes that protect these incredibly old objects.

Now for contrast, cut to my room: desk with a Pisa-esque pile of folders and notebooks; 1-3 item receipts litter my desk; water glasses and half full mugs; a stack of one pound coins; paper flowers falling out of reused wine bottles. Swivel to my book shelf: piles of acquired souvenirs for family and friends, soaps shaped and scented like macrons, prints from boquanistas; books from expats who have already moved on to their next exotic locale; french children's books; my very own Larousse; and the notebooks, both completely empty and completely full, from courses finished and trips completed. And swivel, tight shot on that closet, undoubtedly the fewest pairs of shoes I've lived with since infancy, and I doubt that even as a newborn I had so few articles of clothing in my possession.

So here I am, amid my objects. No placquards or glass cases for tourists to mark with fingerprints. There are some bangles from Jaipur, and a postcard of Georgia O'Keefe on the back of a motor-cycle. There are colored pencils and a brand new pair of brown boots that I'm in love with. And all these things mean nothing. And everything. If the building burned down tonight in a fire, what would I miss? My journal. I could never replace that. But otherwise...

And yet, my sense of permanence is attributed almost fully to this...stuff. My very own piles of papers and projects in progress. That, and getting to fill out my french phone number and address on forms, that's when I feel like "wow, I actually live her. I have a life here." So it all means essentially nothing, but at the same time it means essentially everything. Is it my capitalist upbringing? Do communists feel less defined by their possessions, I wonder? Hard to say. But regardless of how important or impermanent my suitcase sized life is, it's here. And right now, it feels like my Larousse and my Petit Marseillais soap say everything you need to know about me. Oh, well that and my class ring, which in the end was found by a neighbor in the foyer and was graciously returned to my landlady who graciously returned it to an ecstatic American. So, maybe it's ok to be loosely defined by our possessions. To be honest, I don't hate the story my stuff is telling right now. That can't be a bad sign.