{"id":222514,"date":"2022-10-24T12:00:10","date_gmt":"2022-10-24T11:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=222514"},"modified":"2022-10-24T13:23:59","modified_gmt":"2022-10-24T12:23:59","slug":"the-last-temptation-of-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/10\/the-last-temptation-of-things\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Temptation of Things"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Zero Waste Solution, Wareham, MA. PHOTO: DAVID RATCLIFFE<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.\u201d <\/em>\u2013 Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

22 Oct 2022 –<\/em> Let me tell you a story about a haunted house and all the thoughts it evoked in me.<\/p>\n

Do we believe we can save ourselves by saving things?<\/p>\n

Or do our saved possessions come to possess their saviors?<\/p>\n

Do those who save many things or hoard believe that there are pockets in shrouds?\u00a0 Or do they collect things as a magical protection against the shroud?<\/p>\n

These are questions that have preoccupied me for weeks as my wife and I have spent long and exhausting days cleaning out a friend\u2019s house.\u00a0 Many huge truckloads of possessions have been carted off to the dump. Thousands of documents have been shredded and thousands more taken to our house for further sorting. Other things have been donated to charity. This is what happens to people\u2019s things; they disappear, never to be seen again, just as we do, eventually.<\/p>\n

Tolstoy wrote a story \u2013 \u201cHow Much Land Does A Man Need\u2019\u2019 \u2013 that ends with the answer: a piece six feet long, enough for your grave.\u00a0 As in this story, the devil always has the last laugh when your covetousness gets the best of you.\u00a0 Yet so many people continue to collect in the vain hope that they are exceptions.\u00a0 Ask almost anyone and they will reluctantly admit that they hoard to some degree.<\/p>\n

In capitalist consumer societies, getting and spending and hoarding not only lays waste our powers, but it is done on the backs of the poor and destitute around the world.\u00a0 It is a system built to inflame the worst human tendencies of acquisitiveness and indifference since it teaches that one never has enough of everything.\u00a0 It denies the primal sympathy of human care for all humans as it teaches that if you surround yourself with enough things \u2013 have ten pair of shoes, twenty shirts, an attic filled with things in reserve \u2013 you will be safe from the fate of the majority of the world\u2019s poor who have next to nothing. It is an insidious form of soul murder wherein one pulls the shades on the prison-house, counts one\u2019s possessions, and shakes hands with the Devil.\u00a0 And it is sadly common.<\/p>\n

From attic to cellar to garage, every little cubbyhole, closet, and drawer in this relative\u2019s house was filled with \u201csaved\u201d items.\u00a0 Nothing was ever thrown away.\u00a0 If you walked in the front door, you would never know that the occupants were compulsive keepers.\u00a0 While there were plenty of knick-knacks in evidence like so many houses where the fear of emptiness rules (the emptiness that is the source of \u00a0freedom and creativity), once you opened a drawer or closet, a secreted lunacy spilled out seriatim like circus clowns from a small car.\u00a0 Like all clown shows, it was funny but far more frightening, as though all the saved objects were tinged with the fear of death and dissolution, were futile efforts to stop the flow of time and life by sticking a finger in a dike.<\/p>\n

Let me begin with the bags.\u00a0 Hidden in every corner and closet, there were bags stuffed in bags.\u00a0 Big bags and little bags, hundreds if not thousands, used and unused, plastic, paper, cloth bags with price tags still on them.\u00a0 The same was true for boxes, especially empty jewelry boxes.\u00a0 Cardboard boxes that once held a little something, wooden boxes, cigar boxes, large cartons, boxes from every device ever purchased \u00a0\u2013 all seemingly being saved for some future use that would never come.\u00a0 But the bags and boxes filled each other so that no emptiness could survive, although desolation seemed to cry out from within: \u201cYou can\u2019t suffocate me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tens of thousands of photographs and slides were squirreled into cabinets, closets, and their own file cabinets, each neatly marked with the date and place of their taking.\u00a0 Time in a \u201cbottle\u201d from which one would never drink again \u2013 possessing the past in a vain attempt to stop time.\u00a0 These photos were kept in places where their taker would never see them again but could find a weird comfort that they were saved somewhere in this vast collection.\u00a0 Cold comfort by embalming time.<\/p>\n

It so happens that while emptying the house, I was rereading the wonderful novel, Zorba The Greek<\/em>, by Nikos Kazantzakis.\u00a0 There is a passage in it where a woman has died, and while her corpse lies in her house, the villagers descend on her possessions like shrieking vultures on a carcass.<\/p>\n

Old women, men, children went rushing through the doors, jumped through the open windows, over the fences and off the balcony, each carrying whatever he had been able to snatch \u2013 sauce pans, frying pans, mattresses, rabbits \u2026. Some of them had taken doors or windows off their hinges and had put them on their backs. Mimiko had seized the two court shoes, tied on a piece of string and hung them round his neck \u2013 it looked as though Dame Hortense were going off astraddle on his shoulders and only her shoes were visible\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The avidity for things drives many people mad, to get and to keep stuff, to build walls around life so as to protect themselves from death. To consume so as not to be consumed. \u00a0Kazantzakis brilliantly makes this clear in the book.\u00a0 Zorba, the Greek physical laborer and wild man, is different, for he knows that salvation lies in dispossession.\u00a0 One day he encounters five little children begging in a village.\u00a0 Their father has just been murdered.\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t know why, divine inspiration I suppose, but I went up to them.\u201d\u00a0 He gives the children his basket of food and all his money.\u00a0 He tells his interlocutor, a writer whom he calls \u201cBoss,\u201d a man whom Zorba accuses of not being able to cut the string that ties him to a life of living-death, that that was how he was rescued.<\/p>\n

Rescued from my country, from priests, and from money. I began sifting things, sifting more and more things out. I lighten my burden that way. I \u2013 how shall I put it? \u2013 I find my own deliverance, I become a man.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the jam-packed attic where there is little room to move with boxes and objects piled on top of each other, I found a large metal four-drawer file cabinet packed with files.\u00a0 In one file folder there was a small purse filled with the following: four very old unmarked keys, six paper clips, two old unworkable watches, a bobby pin, a circular case that contained what looked like a piece of a human bone, a few old medallions, tweezers, four buttons, an eye screw, a safety pin, a nail, a screw, two ancient tiny photos, and a lock of human hair.\u00a0 Similar objects were stored throughout the house in various containers, bags, boxes, the pockets of clothes, in old ancient furniture in the basement, on shelves, in cigar boxes, in desks, etc.\u00a0 Old receipts for purchases made forty years ago, airline baggage tags, ticket stubs, school papers, jewelry hidden everywhere, old foreign and domestic coins, perhaps twenty-five old unworkable watches, clocks, radios, clothes and more clothes, more that anyone could ever have worn, scores of old pens and pencils, hand-written notes with no dates or any semblance of order or meaning, chaos and obsessive account-keeping hiding everywhere in contradictory forms shared by two people: one the neat freak and the other disorganized.\u00a0 One dead and the other forced by fate to let her stuff go, to stand naked in the wind.<\/p>\n

How does it help a person to record that they bought a toaster for $6.98 in 1957 or a bracelet for $20 in 1970 or that they called so-and-so some undated time in the past? \u00a0What good does it do to save vast correspondences documenting\u00a0 your complaints, bitterness, and quarrels?\u00a0 Or boxes upon boxes of Christmas cards received thirty years ago?\u00a0 Or brochures and receipts from a trip taken long ago?\u00a0 Old sports medals?\u00a0 Scrapbooks?\u00a0 Photos of long dead relatives no one wants?\u00a0 Fashion designer shoes and coats and handbags hidden in a dusty attic where you don\u2019t even know they are there. \u00a0An immigrant mother\u2019s ancient sewing machine weighing seventy-five pounds and gathering dust in the cellar?<\/p>\n

Nothing I could tell you can come close to picturing what we saw in this house.\u00a0 It was overwhelming, horrifying, and weirdly fascinating.\u00a0 And aside from the useful things that were donated to charity and some that were taken to the woman\u2019s next dwelling, ninety percent was dumped in a landfill, soon to be buried.<\/p>\n

In his brilliant novel Underworld<\/em>, Don DeLillo writes about a guy named Brian who goes to visit a collector of old baseball paraphernalia \u2013 bats, balls, an old scoreboard, tapes of games, etc. \u2013 in a house where \u201ca mood of mausoleum gloom\u201d fills the air.\u00a0 The man tells Brian:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s men in the coming years they\u2019ll pay fortunes for these objects. Because this is desperation speaking \u2026. Men come here to see my collection \u2026. They come and they don\u2019t want to leave. The phone rings, it\u2019s the family \u2013 where is he? This is the fraternity of missing men.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Men and women hoarders, collectors, and keepers are lost children, trying desperately to secure themselves from death while losing themselves in the process.\u00a0 In my friend\u2019s house I found huge amounts of string and rope waiting to tie something up neatly someday.\u00a0 That day never came.<\/p>\n

Zorba tells the Boss, who insists he\u2019s free, the following:<\/p>\n

No, you\u2019re not free. The string you\u2019re tied to is perhaps no longer than other people\u2019s. That\u2019s all. You\u2019re on a long piece of string, boss; you come and go and think you\u2019re free, but you never cut the string in two. And when people don\u2019t cut that string \u2026.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult, boss, very difficult. You need a touch of folly to do that; folly, d\u2019you see? You have to risk everything! But you\u2019ve got such a strong head, it\u2019ll always get the better of you. A man\u2019s head is like a grocer; it keeps accounts. I\u2019ve paid so much and earned so much and that means a profit of this much or a loss of that much! The head\u2019s a careful little shopkeeper; it never risks all it has, always keeps something in reserve. It never breaks the string. Ah, no! It hangs on tight to it, the bastard! If the string slips out of its grasp, the head, poor devil, is lost, finished! But if a man doesn\u2019t break the string, tell me what flavor is left in life? The flavor of chamomile, weak chamomile tea! Nothing like rum \u2013 that makes you see life inside out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the way out the door on our final day cleaning the house, I found a beautiful boxed fountain pen on a windowsill.\u00a0 I love pens since I am a writer.\u00a0 This one shone brightly and seemed to speak to me: think of what you could write with me, it said so seductively.\u00a0 I was sorely tempted, but knowing that I didn\u2019t need another pen, I left it there, thinking that perhaps the next occupants of this house would write a different story and embrace Camus\u2019 advice about an excess of things.<\/p>\n

Perhaps.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Edward Curtin is a widely published author and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. His new book is <\/em>Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies<\/a> \u2013 His website: Behind the Curtain<\/a> – email: edcurtinjr@gmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 edwardcurtin.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

22 Oct 2022 – Let me tell you a story about a haunted house and all the thoughts it evoked in me. Do we believe we can save ourselves by saving things? Or do our saved possessions come to possess their saviors?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[232,1170],"class_list":["post-222514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-capitalism","tag-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}