Culture Crash

Nora and I are both educated in a field that studies the ways that objects carry meaning.  Small objects, the size of a robin’s nest; large objects, the size of a neighborhood.  We invest those things with meanings based on their associations — what we were doing when we found them, the relationships we had when we lived there.  We invest those things with meanings because of the cultures they’re associated with — the menorah, the Coke bottle, the Goth trenchcoat.  And because we invest things with meanings, they talk back to us in powerful ways.  “If this is what I have, or what I want, this must say something about who I am.”

No surprise that Nora and I have books and magazines everywhere.  They say something about who we are.  But also no surprise that Nora has a dozen or more containers of fleece waiting to be spun, and that I’ve spent a lot of time planning the coming pool room in our home.  We don’t yet have time or space to spin yarn or play pool, but we believe that we are people who do.  Even inert, the spinning wheel and the sample scrap of Simonis billiard cloth speak reassuringly to us.

We’ve been in our home for almost exactly two months, and have spent much of that time deciding which of our things go where, what is prominent and what is background.  I think it means a lot that we’ve privileged things that allow us to have friends over.  The guest bedrooms, the nice dishes, the table on the patio and the chairs on the porch, all of those things have come before building out the office or arranging the garage.

So the past couple of days have been deeply disconcerting.

Late on Saturday, the movers drove away into the night with the turkey sandwiches and Gatorade that we’d sent them off with, and Nora and I sat down in our house and reviewed the suddenly revised layout.

The china hutch doesn’t have anything to do with anything else in the living room.  The marble dining table and the chairs don’t feel at all right in the kitchen.  The sideboard is the wrong color, the wrong shape and size, the wrong historical period.  The coffee table dominates the conversation in the living room, not letting anything else get a word in edgewise.  The end tables, pressed into service as nightstands in the two upstairs bedrooms, are as comfortable as a princess at a potluck.  And the hundred or so boxes in the garage weigh (literally, about three tons worth) on our future plans.

On Saturday and Sunday, we both, at different moments, talked about our engagement with these objects in terms of violence.  I referred to being invaded; Nora talked about being held hostage.  In both cases, the metaphor is one of meaning.  When a nation is invaded, it’s not merely that one’s land is being held; more important is that one’s values are subservient to alien values.  When someone is held hostage, it’s not merely that their mobility is restricted; it’s that their freedom is subject to demands that may not be met.

Mom’s things, each taken on their own, are lovely.  The quality is high, the utility intact,  the design done with care and craft.  The problems we face are not material; they are cultural.  The farmhouse has been overrun by a high-rise apartment; self and community shadowed by family duty.

But Nora and I both recognize the fact, and the meaning, of the invasion, and I feel the stirrings of an insurrection.  We are not helpless bystanders.  We can respect the life without devotion to each object of the life.  (And as I was driving back to Medford on Sunday afternoon, I was thinking seriously about what aspects of my own past I can jettison without disrespect to my past itself.  Do your children a favor and throw some things away today!)

In New York, part of the response to material overabundance was that we should call fine auction houses.  In Middletown Springs, the response has been that we should have a big tag sale.  Again, similar logistical and material practices described through different kinds of associations, different cultural color. 

We’ll face this again when we take in some things from Mom’s vacation house, and when we take in other things from my apartment in Medford.  In each case, things of value and use -- even affection -- will be found alien, not absorbed into our lifestreams.  We'll work to help someone else make use of them, someone who may find them to be reliable narrators of their own lives’ goals.  These were all things that have effectively provided reassuring and nurturing stories for decades, and for someone, they will again.