A night photograph.

Dear Shutterbugs,

I saw an inspiring movie about a photographer recently; it was all about stuff, and you know how I adore stuff, and as a corollary, I adore considering the meaning of the stuff we save, and the relationship between the things, the stuff, and the meaning of the stories that reside in the objects.

Consider, please, a glass duck shaped ashtray.  It's big, it's heavy, and it has a little mate, a smaller duck.  Consider also that the smokers who owned these items have departed this plane, and now there are just the ashtrays and no ashes.  Why keep these items?  Right now, I'd say, keep them because they telescope time and space.  One sees these ducks, and one sees a ghost of the table they sat on in the house of the smokers.  Mind you, I never saw them use these ducks to hold ashes; for ashes, they used a finny little sandbag thing, with a concave brass dish with a wavy brass strip attached.*

Which is another ghost image that lives with the ducks, the sandbag ashtray.  The little memory landscape map that these ducks reveal can grow and grow.  You step outside, beyond the table the ducks are on: the sky down there is so white, high, and un-blue.  It is nearly always warm and damp, and there are stringy, ungainly cacti clambering along a painted wall, and they bloom sometimes at night; huge, creamy, fragile trumpets of deliriously fine fragrance.  There are bricks, and a kind of feeling of scuffling along the grit of them near to the cacti.  There is a lot of light coming from the window, too, because now it is night.  It's all there, and how can this be kept with the ducks?  How can it remain in the ducks?  It cannot.  The ducks will go on perhaps, to tell a totally different tale, to people that I will never meet.

And that is the kind of story that stuff is telling all the time.












* A little like this one:

the debate continues

Dear Women,

I have been considering the Bundt pan as a symbol of the tyranny and shaming of 'decluttering' for nearly two years now, and it turns out I am not the only one to recognize the Bundt pan as a weapon in the raging war of 'stuff' vs. 'organization.' 

Why the Bundt pan?  I found it being sold at a friend's house in a garage sale and my friends' explained their Marie Kondo induced epiphany vis-à-vis the Bundt pan.  They used it barely once a year, and really, even though the cake was delicious, they only made it once a year.  The cake may have sparked joy, but the pan did not.  It couldn't be kept for such a minute fraction of duty.  I mentioned that it might be a problem when one wanted to make it and there was no pan, but this wasn't even audible in the landslide of stuff they were shoveling out their garage door.  They were headed for a new life, in a new town, and they needed less and different stuff for their new life. 

So be it.  I guess I can't rescue every Bundt pan in every home in every town.  A one-woman crusade to save occasional cake-making? 

I give you this article, on the politics of kitchen spaces; see what you think about it, and enjoy, above all else, the freedom you have to hold onto your Bundt pan or to give everything away.

Read This!

Dear Cinderella,

I am cleaning this week, because I am having some people over-  there is a lot of dust and spider webs and paper scraps-  what my Mom and Dad always called 'schnitzels' of paper. 

I have a whole box of these paper scraps, because I think I might one day make new paper out of them.  Or maybe I will stuff them into a sculpture skin, and I only I will know that the innards are schnitzels saved over years. 

I also have bags of fabric snippings- no, I don't mean anything you could make a quilt with, I mean really small snips and threads.  They make nice little piles and I love the way they sit in rows. 

I know that I am going to have to become comfortable with the disappointment others will have in me for this behavior-  I know that collecting bottle caps has become 'hoarding' and that makes me quite ill by today's standards. 

Phooey on that, and read this, too, while you are at it.  It's long, it uses big words and it is subversive- you will love it!

Another Postal Post

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Always on My Mind,

 

I think I already mentioned to you  a book I read recently: Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett.  I dearly want you to read it too, because it is such a pleasure to enter its world.  Sometimes, here at the Dodo, the One Who Grows Plants for Sustenance will grow a fabulous melon; a melon that seems to taste of every day it lived, grew, and throve in the sun and wind, damp and wet.  When we are graced with a thing like this, or even if the One Who Cooks for Sustenance makes something startlingly good, I want to run out and yell it from the rafters, I want you to come over, immediately, to have a slice of this melon, or this dish.  To show it to you, to share it with you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Going Postal is like that melon, and this film clip, from the Library of Congress (which has many fascinating film clips) of postal workers in 1903 is like that melon, too.  Notice, and I know you will, how this fast sorting is humans, is us, working like a computer.  Does it make you feel differently about us?  Computers?  Mail?  The very nature of communication, which is language repeated?  Yes, you are right, everything leads to my favorite question:  What, exactly, are we doing here?  What is the meaning of it all? 

 

I had a months long argument with myself (no, you don't always win that way- in fact, you mostly lose those arguments) in 1994 about meaning.  If things have meaning, I do not know what that meaning is.  However, if things have no meaning, it isn't worth getting up in the morning.  Therefore, all things have meaning.  Or, they don't.  You can decide though, on a day to day basis, when the alarm clock rings.  You can say to yourself:  Does this day, this hour, have meaning? 

 

I can see you are thinking I am being too nihilistic, but that isn't it at all.  Try it, it's fun:  Does this have meaning?  Don't be too hard on yourself if at first you guess wrong a few times, because, as per my argument with myself, which I lost/won, things have meaning, or they don't.  The things that don't have meaning today, should just be laid aside until sometime as they are more useful.  The damnedest things turn out to be useful later on:  chicken wire, chamber pots, Cher, Gilligan's Island (now really, who would ever have thought that show could be useful, could have meaning?), the time your friend wouldn't share a cookie with those boys, a button you put away 20 years ago.  Oh, there is an absolute avalanche of useful and meaningful stuff out there/in here!