I was lighting
the stove for tea
this morning.
Match-head broke off
with bright red
in its gray.
Fell on the newspaper:
black-white turned to
all sorts of color;
started flaming, then
ashing away...
Which would have been
fine, if it had been one on the table,
not one on a stack—
Sunday Times, magazines—
the closest pile, with
a horde behind it:
each taller, yellower,
longer unseen
(less touched,
more permanent,
the further down
they go).
I threw water—
so exciting, I had to
catch my breath, remembering
child-hood; the fresh income of play—
on Everything: years of “To-do”
with
nothing done, except shift and reorganize
the tops on piles
that never got smaller,
and weighed.
That little fire
made the. dent
I never would.
(Always was
a good frugal boy,
but in
that
instant...
“God! I am done
saving! I am done
owning! I am done
being for these things
of mine! I am not my
rubble's keeper; I want
no stores built up for me
in heaven. Just this skin.”
).
So I began: Not to sort,
nor to pack. No labels, no
values, no 'saving' pile;
just one type of thing,
in one direction:
rubbish.
*
My stores got smaller,
smaller; my space
bigger, bigger.
Until I was all.
I read an online article from the New York Times {19 August 2015} called “A Hoarder's Tale of Redemption,” about a man named Barry Yourgrau—who calls himself a “subcollector.” He explains his problematic mindset quite aptly: “What happens is I buy something, and it slides out of use. I immediately turn it into an art object and then it looks so good I don’t want to use it.” One of the many-many sticky-notes on his wall reads “Everything a delayed decision.” Another hoarder, Irene, expresses in the article how these collections become viewed as attached to personal identity and worth: “If I throw away too much, there’ll be nothing left of me.” Dr. Randy Frost, who has done decades of psychological research on the subject, describes hoarding as a kind of developmental stall “where everything in orbit becomes a part of them.”
ReplyDeleteSo I asked myself, what might re-start the stall, compel the deferred decision, drive the action forward: maybe a taste of necessity, a reminder that life is more valuable than identity, I decided. And maybe also a taste of long-lost feelings, from a time when things were moving forward—before that stall in developing—to awaken the hunger for that progressive purpose again. So here it is; my imagined scene for eliciting those two stimuli: a little rogue fire and a little instinctive water-throwing.
– 1 October 2015
I felt a slight connection to this poem while reading it mainly because personally I am often referred to as a hoarder by family and friends; I place value in physical objects too much and almost everything that I have has a connection to a memory; I often can’t find myself willing to let go of things that I truly do not need. However, when I do begin to purge my room and house of unnecessary objects and possessions, it is usually because I am motivated by something or a friend has helped me get started. This poem seems to confront literal getting rid of things but also perhaps addresses leaving behind emotional baggage. Often I personally hold onto things, whether it be keeping a grudge, bad memories or bad feelings. To get rid of these unneeded weights, sometimes I need help, a person needs to function as my “fire” to help me rid myself of these hindrances to my emotional and mental state. It is super cool how you turned the difficulties of freeing oneself of things into a poem. The spacing is very interesting, is it meant to be a fire roaring up, water being poured, or something else entirely?
ReplyDeleteFire, pouring - yes. I can't telly you how much I sometimes wish someone would just destroy all my things. Then I'd have to remember, one by one, the half-dozen things that are Actually worth replacing. How light this world could be ... :)
DeleteFinding the use or value in things, and storing them up, is a very human trait ~ even a more broadly animal trait ("A study done at the University of Richmond cites that squirrels fail to recover up to 74% of the nuts they bury").
ReplyDeleteIn the end, the question is: how do you feel about these things? Do they really meet the [Marie Kondo] bar of sparking joy?
I get pretty sad/anxious, looking at clutter. And even though I feel that pull of "What if I need it... what if I'll miss it later..." as I set things into a give-away pile (I also get this from my mom), I almost ALWAYS feel relief and a wave of energy/lightness when I lessen my load.