Stuff

In a marketplace in Mombasa two salesmen, having maneuvered me in such a way as to make exit difficult, subjected me to the most asperous of hard sells, successfully getting me to part with what seemed like a titanic sum (eighty dollars, I think) for what they claimed to be an “antique” smoking pipe. I brought this pipe, together with a small stabbing dagger I’d purchased two years earlier in Marrakesh, with me when I went off to college, where I discreetly stuck them in a drawer and never touched them again (to this manly assortment was added a blow-dart gun from Ecuador, which I did use once, shooting a girl I liked in the foot). When, after inhabiting the bottoms of enough drawers, these trinkets were finally relegated to the bottom of a garbage bag, so too fell away whatever vestigial impulse I had to buy stuff while traveling—I suppose I didn’t want to clutter the vitrine in my mind that houses the memory of that stupid pipe.

“Grab something!” her husband shouted at her, “Quick!” as if he’d just smashed the windows of a store. But all the things in the house, the two-story house that after the artillery shell struck looked like a head split open by an axe, all these things were hers. They were her things. How could she grab what she already had? In the end, for reasons she could not explain, she took a bag of raisins.

Overloading on decorative knick-knacks exchanges space for surface area, freedom of movement for optical pleasure, dustlessness for distraction. And despite my personal proclivities, I rather like those homes where objets grow like bouquets of stalagmites in every corner. Once I dog-sat a taciturn greyhound in such a place, where there was a whole table devoted just to folk-art crosses from around Latin America, at least fifty of them. I never do it, but in these situations I always have the same thought: would the owner realize it if I pocketed one? Not that it would give me any pleasure. Chipping off limestone is not stealing a cave.

You buy something, it’s exciting, even a fresh bottle of sunscreen can feel exciting, and then in two days it’s old, it’s boring. This is a classic problem. Only books maintain a shred of their virginity after you buy them, which I think explains the existence, as a unique category, of bibliomania. It’s a compulsion I haven’t had the chance to engage in, because peripatetic living has engrained in me the formula that one book bought is one book that must fit in a checked suitcase on visits to my parents’, where I maintain my library in absentia. I don’t mind this work—I like to think of stuff as being ennobled through transport. One collectioneering friend of mine has, while living in the same city, moved an impressive number of times, and it always pleases me, much more than the items themselves, to see, among the impressive array of big boxes laid out around her apartment at moving time, the one labelled “Shells.”

Coming home from St. Petersburg I brought my parents a giant novelty bottle of Armenian cognac, shaped like a scimitar. They put it on the mantle, where it sat for a few years, until one day it exploded. More stuff should be like that. Forks should shatter, brooms should detonate, stereos should spontaneously combust. To quote Sans Soleil: “Poetry is born of insecurity: wandering Jews, quaking Japanese; by living on a rug that jesting nature is ever ready to pull out from under them they've got into the habit of moving about in a world of appearances: fragile, fleeting, revocable, of trains that fly from planet to planet, of samurai fighting in an immutable past. That's called the impermanence of things.”

She told me about how her ex-boyfriend used to sometimes enter a fugue state while tidying up, and unwittingly throw away all sorts of things that she owned. I found this hard to believe, and yet I must confess to a certain pleasure I feel in getting rid of things that don’t belong to me. For a period of time I lived with my grandfather, and every so often, urged by forces I cannot name, I would choose a cabinet to purge. You can see it from my side: those jars of homemade cherry jam were up to twenty years old. You can also see it from his:  why, why, only to have come and gone and left me with even less than I had?

The young have a fundamentally different relationship to objects, a more artistic one. She convinced me to lug from Guanajuato all the way to New York (mercifully in an era of inefficient airline luggage pricing) an entire sink, which we found in a trash heap. What can one do with a sink? What can’t one do with a sink? One can leave it in one’s basement until one’s mother throws it away—the regret from its disappearance will power us to live another day.

The first apartment of our own that my parents rented in the U.S. was so empty that I cried when I was told to step inside. There was nothing: no dressers, no drawers, no bed, no mattress, no tables, no chairs, just grey carpet spanning from white wall to white wall, and the kitchen faucet watching over the emptiness with its gleaming alien head. I mean to say it was a normal unfurnished apartment, but at that age I did not yet grasp the concept of accretion—it seemed that furniture would be alien to the essential nature of this space, and that so would I. Maybe this left a mark on my psyche, or maybe I still don’t grasp the aforementioned concept, because I’ve never hung a thing up on my walls (not quite true: once, thinking it would be the first step to curing my indomesticity, I tacked above my desk a much-lauded map of the United States). I can’t shake the feeling that everything around me is already in its proper mood and place.