Decluttering
Another year, another gerund. The “ing” in “decluttering” signals a continual process, something we should always be doing, something, in other words, that never gets done. If my Facebook feed can be believed, however, there is a special time for starting the process decluttering, and it was last week. The website “Positively Present,” for example, tells told us that “the change of a date on the calendar can be all the inspiration you need to make positive changes.” January is the time for getting rid of many different kinds of things, decluttering sites inform us—from clothing to kitchen appliances to toxic relationships.
Out—and down—with the old. I am reminded of New Year’s Eves of my childhood in Italy, when I would stand on our terrace at midnight in my (new) Christmas snuggie pajamas and watch as folks on other terraces lit firecrackers and threw unwanted objects into the cobbles below. I have only two photographs of these Roman celebrations, taken, I think, at two different times. Each image features—and indeed is lit by— a sparkler in whose halo I see my own face. Behind me, standing over me, is an adult—in one case I think my godmother, who recedes into the black of fading film. My memories, obediently black and white, also include a soundtrack: the whoosh of sparks flying, certainly, but also the thump of household objects dropped from above onto what one can only hope was an empty street. There were faucets, I remember, and books, and maybe clothing. Family legend speaks of toilets flying through the air and breaking as they landed.
This is decluttering with a vengeance. The gentler admonitions for Marie Kondo-style clean living, attentive folding, minimalist spaces, and living gratefully and lovingly with less, can, however, also feel as if they have a vengeful edge. The exhortations to declutter for the new year on my FB—and the sites to which the feed leads me—infallibly assume a connection between a clear space and a clear mind, even if studies towards which I am suspicious but grateful have shown that clutter can actually inspire creativity. Like the studies that conclude that a certain amount of mess and dirt is helpful to children’s immune systems, these ventures into domestic science give me a great—one might say vengeful—pleasure.
Cluttering
The satisfaction I derive from counter-narratives of decluttering does not protect me from the possibility of shame. After my husband and I have removed, organized, recycled, and carefully put away the sanctioned clutter of Christmas—the ornaments, the last-minute presents that seemed like a good idea online and late at night, and the horrible, planet destroying mounds of shredded wrapping paper—I ask myself if what is left constitutes clutter with a capital “C”. Am I that thing, that person, that has no name: a clutterer? I survey my house for symptoms that I find listed in decluttering manuals and find the diagnosis inconclusive: yes, too many pairs of shoes on the floor, knickknacks gathering dust, books everywhere, but also yes to containers for these things and an enthusiastic yes to sorting.
It may all come down to that fetish of declutterers: multiple sets of measuring spoons. So far every website or book I have read has mentioned these items—mostly in passing as if to briefly signal their absurdity and move on. “Do you really need two sets of measuring spoons?” they ask. There is a slight whiff of eugenics here: it is as if your original and singular set is reproducing in your drawer at night, or as if the second set has snuck in uninvited to drape itself over your drawer dividers and lounge lazily among more purposeful tools. I have three sets and—another no-no—one of them is broken. I can get defensive here: I need those spoons, not just for parallel cooking, but in case one is dirty and I don’t feel like washing out molasses before measuring, say, baking powder. The broken set is an older one whose teaspoon is missing: the gap it has left actually makes identifying and using the tablespoon easier. Declutters afraid of reproduction might be comforted to know that measuring spoons live in different places: one in the baking drawer, the broken one in the tools-with-one-purpose drawer, and the third one with the spoons slim enough for spice bottles in my spice drawer—which, if I do say so myself is a triumph of categorization, labelling and color coding.
Hoarding
At the bleakest moments of the new year, on long dark January nights, I am haunted by another question: “Am I a hoarder?” We have moved to character here. “Clutter” is stuff; “hoarder” is an identity imposed by others or by oneself. Most people (who are not medievalists or Harry Potter fans) don’t speak of a “hoard,” when they mean piles of possessions. “Hoarder” polices clutter, threatens to turn your objects into a person, and that person, oddly, into a thing. Clutter’s shameful stepsister, “hoarder,” takes up all available space: “hoarder” is what you are, or worse, what you might become.
Hoarder is also a shorthand for an unease with the world, a condition, as anthropologists would say of “matter out of place”—Margaret Meade’s famous definition of dirt. I used the shorthand, the diagnosis, when, clutching the frozen corpse of my cat, I left the home of a neighbor who had called to say he found Henry dead on the street and was “saving” him for me in his freezer. As he escorted me to his kitchen, I was dimly aware of piles of newspaper higher than my head lining the hallway. When we got to side-by-side freezer, there was Henry, wrapped in a dishtowel. Everything that was not Henry in the freezer was frozen peas—pack upon pack of an identical store brand. I walked back through the tunnel between the newspapers, with Henry, to the front door, where the man told me that my cat was by no means the first he had found, “rescued” and frozen. There might be many words for this man, this likely cat-killer, this collector of feline corpses, this person who lived off frozen peas and the grief of others. The word I used to my husband was “hoarder.” This had something to do with numbers: the thousands of newspapers, the hundreds of packages of peas, the many dead cats. It was also about feeling that things were out of place: newspapers in the hall, a cat among peas.
Collecting
I have used the benign word “collector” as one among many to describe the man who likely killed my cat. The term was a resonant one in my family: my uncle Leo was a collector of beautiful objects, especially in glass and silver. He had started collecting art nouveau pieces in the 1920s when they were swept out of favor by things with straight lines. Then he moved to art deco. My uncle Barry collected antique watches and fishing equipment. My mother and father collected what the Victorians would call chinoiserie, although they could not afford very much of it. Collection was contagious across generations: Uncle Leo started my collection of Shelley china that I have spoken of elsewhere in this blog variously as a burden, a sign of privilege, and a pleasure.
My uncle Leo, he of the beautiful objects, lived in a rent-controlled seven-room apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan. My mother stayed there during my father’s treatment for cancer in 1978, after which Leo made it clear the house was too much of a mess to visit. Over the years, his partner and my mother would offer to come in and clean or to hire someone to do so. These efforts may have worked for a while, but by the 1990s no one was allowed in. My uncle spent most of his time at his partner, Betty’s, apartment, in violation of rent-control occupancy requirements. When he died in his late 90s, he was being sued by the landlord for non-residency. Leo started spending one night a week at the apartment; otherwise he would go to “visit his things.”
After his death, we realized how many of those “things” there were. I went in with a notebook for inventory purposes; ten minutes into the visit I had given up on the possibility of inventory and the notebook had disappeared into a sea of object, never to be seen again. There were indeed some—many—beautiful things, although he had already sold a lot of his glass through auction. They lived with, were tangled up in, in some cases lay underneath piles of other things, not beautiful. I counted 75 electric razors, many of them broken. There were hundreds of belts in all sizes, from cheap plastic to Hermes and Dior. There were drawers full of objects he had bought at the dollar store. Looking at a pile of plastic objects, fingers itching to scoop and throw, we would catch a glimpse of silver, the curve of a cheek or a leg of an art nouveau icon, a small felt bag or jewelry box that might or might not contain something valuable. A silver lighter dangled from a cheap belt, an art nouveau ashtray hid among the folds of a polyester scarf.
Worst of all was my uncle’s erstwhile medical office, from which he had presided as “Doctor Wienick” for many decades. Here we found checks from before the period where they displayed addresses or account numbers; some did not even have a printed name on them. My uncle’s partner insisted on shredding these for security purposes although the accounts—and in most cases the banks—with which they were associated were long closed. We also found hundreds of sample boxes of medicine, some of which had expired forty years before. If I had had the time we could have traced in those boxes of pills a history of American medicine and its regulation. We found multiple boxes of thorazine, packages of thalidomide. Part collection, part archive, part hazardous waste site, my uncle’s apartment strained against its own categorization, and against a foundational family story that had something to do with my uncle as family patriarch and even more, perhaps, to do with the beauty of things. Uncle Leo stories that had seemed mildly and wonderfully eccentric were now freighted with pathology. I thought of how over the years, he had used the trunks of his successive red cars as places to store things he had bought and wanted to give away. I can’t remember how many times I met Leo at his car as he followed New York City’s slightly less rigid alternate-side-of -the street parking rules for those with MD license plates. While in earlier times he would pay people to wait in the car until he had to move it, in alter years he would sit in the red, or crimson, or scarlet Chevrolet of the moment, reading the newspaper and waiting for folks to drop by so he could open the trunk and slowly sift among the treasures there. Dried apricots from Zabar’s (sometimes directly from the source, sometimes from resale shops); pens that broke as you looked at them; a Shelley cup or five to add to my collection; many, many desk calendars, some outdated.
Curating
So, my uncle was a hoarder. He was also, of course, still a collector. He did not do Swedish death cleaning, he did not sort, categorize, or index. Armed with a notebook—or even with the full panoply of my academic tools—I could not turn his hoards safely back into a collection. Today, many years after Leo’s death, we would have advised him to “curate” his collection. “Curate” is a word I despise, since it has slipped with capitalist ease from its original association with the museum profession to internet advertising. “A curated collection, especially for you,” means an algorithm on social media or on Amazon has—however ineptly—projected past buying or searching choices onto a range of possible future purchases.
But perhaps there is some possibility in the expansion of “curate” that involves not so much moving out as moving back. “Curate”—both the verb and the noun meaning a low-level priest—comes from the Lain for “care.” Curation is, can be, a caring—indeed loving—process of sorting, of lifting the good and valuable from the dross in which they are embedded. In that sense, I am curating the memory of my uncle: thinking of him not as a hoarder with all that comes with this term, but as someone who loved objects and lived a long life among them. He did not, at least late in life, “care” for those objects by cleaning or sorting them, although he fought (however problematically) for the right to house them. My curated memory—and I choose it-- is not of the apartment after his death, but of Leo rummaging in his truck for something to give away.