Recently, I set out to create an autobiographical portrait by documenting my stuff, the detritus of nostalgia, the totemic embeddedness of everyday objects, and the matter that inhabits my memory and my space. These trinkets of affection, reminders of loved ones, a collage of my youth, spelling out a narrative of self. My intention was to create a catalog as an interpretative guide to one wing of this Museum of Us, the wing being me, the us being my family of four.
While I had begun my spreadsheet, something else inside me was jockeying for more immediate attention. Something felt more urgent, something less ambitious yet necessary for my heart and mind before my larger homegrown institutional effort opened to the public. The winds shifted, floor plans needed to be redrawn, acquisition policy needed to be rewritten, and rope drop would have to wait.
I realized I was processing loss and the inevitable loss yet to come. My reflection turned to what it means to be mortal, to move through time and space with increasing resistance and deterioration, to say, oh hello gravity, it's you who had it out for me this whole time, isn’t it?
My inventory will have to wait. I found myself instead wrestling with the ghost of my father. The story of what I keep and what I get rid of is one I still want to tell, but the bigger story that I felt stirring is the reconciliation of my father’s physical and mental decline over the period of the last two decades. I am faced with the unavoidable acknowledgment that I am at the age of the onset of his hastened aging. The midlife crisis, if you want to call it that, has been one of me processing the possibility of my own mental deterioration and my attempt to take control of loss through a severe decluttering of my own design and direction.
Crisis is not the right word. There is no panic here. Fear, yes, but a slow, quiet little thing like a lanky blue avatar fretting and wringing hands somewhere off to the side in the control center of my mind. It has yet to overtake my days, it just hops about from foot to foot with a low-grade fever of anxiety. Conveniently, this impulse to test the essentials of memory has nicely coincided with my minimalist tendencies, so the deep, long spring of middle age still received a thorough cleaning. The deaccession from the museum’s wing of self and its archival stacks has begun to release its assorted trophies back into the wild.
The purposeful purging of stuff has become a meditative practice, an active prayer, a discipline for rootedness, and yes, admittedly, a means of control. Disciplines are anchors of sanity and processes for clarity. The rituals offered elsewhere in society have lost their luster and effectiveness for me. They feel steeped in dogma, or clunky like self-help books-on-tape. They are fibrous tethers as opposed to the necessary steel chains and anchor of something substantive. This habit of decluttering keeps me moored in reality and prevents me from being overwhelmed by the relenting and crashing waves of products and social cues telling me to want and be more. It also gives me a purpose and identity not defined by holding on, but by letting go, accepting that my memory is less important than presence.
This discipline is a weight I need and can bear, as opposed to the dragging down of the burden of stuff. We call it a belonging as if to convince ourselves it belongs in our life, but in the end, it really is just stuff, and we become its belonging. An anchor can be raised when ready to sail on, but belongings often drag us down deeper into the sea, drowning us with their false valuations. We hang onto these objects as pieces of our narrative, as a means to tell our story to ourselves and others about the times, people, and places, that made us. They are souvenirs from our past to remind us of this journey. But as I watched my father slip away, turning into breath and then no breath, even the heaviest of objects could not keep his mind from departure.
But what if memories can also drag us down, as they can distract us from the living, and prevent us from stepping into an undefined future? What if these stories are crowding out our ability to make new ones, our ability to be present in this moment? Decluttering our home, office, storage unit, of our shelves and our selves allows for new incarnations, new manifestations of who we are and who we are to become. This does not mean throwing everything away, but the art of getting rid of can be just as meaningful as that of the process of acquiring the thing in the first place, be it memory or memento. It might also be necessary to heal.
This is not a manifesto for minimalism of material or mind. It is, to borrow a term from another of my projects, a manifest, a palimpsest manifest, cataloging that which I keep, and one that over time will thin to a whisper, translucent like the ghost of a treasure map, an atlas of self thin as the wing of a dragonfly.