📦 on stuff

"The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable"

1 Oct 2022 | Issue 35

I moved house this week. So I know exactly how much stuff I have. Having arrived two years ago holding two suitcases each, I watched a removal van packed full to the brim's worth of objects drive away. So I also know exactly how much stuff one can accumulate without effort, rather quickly.

So I now live in cardboard world. Misshapen cardboard box world. Due to "the flood". My friend Ollie sent me an extreme weather warning. The one thing about the sleepy island I live on is, apart from guaranteeing nothing happens, that the weather will follow its daily pattern of cloudy in the morning, slight chance of light showers, followed by an afternoon of 26° sunshine with a gentle breeze. I mocked.

"What is this falling from the sky?"
"Why, it is rain"
"But it is evening. It does not rain in the evening".

Chuckling away to myself. Until Anne reports that the basement is a Hong Kong style two inch torrent of flowing water. Same basement that our just-packed cardboard moving boxes are stacked in. You may be surprised how much water a box of books can absorb in a few hours.

We left two things behind. A book Anne bought second hand because the title sounded fun. It wasn't. And a dead network drive. Everything else came with us. Including the peanut powder I haven't found a use for in eighteen months. We define ourselves with the objects we acquire.

A subject that recently popped up in conversation with another friend. Who will rename nameless. For reasons that will be clear. More precisely, the topic of decluttering.

These last few months I have been a beta tester for an app called Objet. It allows you to catalogue your possessions, and in understanding what you have, aims to help you buy less better.

The app is nascent, if you're interested in your consumerist habits I recommend signing up, and help shape it. Of particular delight is the accompanying Discord server, where recommendations and thought pieces are posted. Some of which I may have "borrowed" from for this week's meditation. Hopefully I'll be interviewing them in coming months about their app and social platform.

Continuing with this friend, they were saying how proud they were about getting rid of all their old clothing. I congratulated them. Until, it turns out, getting-rid-of means putting into plastic boxes and storing in a large cupboard out of sight. Decluttering, yes, in the most linear sense. But not "letting go". What is it about stuff?

I have perhaps a harsher viewpoint since, due to extreme laziness and a mid-life crisis I have lost my life's work, and left behind what I salvaged from surviving said mid-life crisis in a flat in my homeland. I did have the cherry stoner brought over. I complained about a lack of cherry stoner. I now have three cherry stoners. Be careful what you wish for.

In 1998 I sent my portfolio to Fun-Da-Mental's Aki Nawaz hoping to get some design work for his Nation Records label (I loved Asian Dub Foundation). I took some time in getting it back. Like a year or more. The time I rang they had moved offices and thrown it in a skip. What can you say. Later, in a moment of comical misunderstanding, my son sold my collection of every record sleeve I'd ever designed to the Record and Tape Exchange. But then again I'd just set fire to my entire life in a full-on mental hissy-fit mid-life crisis. 

What did I learn from this? Apart from the incredibly bleeding obvious like don't be a lazy git and leave unrequested material in a stranger's pad for a year, or, don't set fire to your life because you don't want to get old.

I learnt that having, or not having my life's work made no discernible difference to my actual life. What would I have done? Shown the odd guest who visited my home, some artwork I had done a decade ago. Why? So they would be impressed? Like me better?

Should they not like me for who I am now? For how I treat them. For what I say, how I act, then and there. How I engage with them. The experience of making the work made me who I am now. Not the objects. It is how I am now that is important. It is how I treat you, when I meet you now. 

Hand on heart I have not missed not having these record sleeves in my possession. It's not like I played the records. I loved every minute of the years I spent designing them.

We are not defined by our objects. If you awoke one morning, naked in another country, would you be a lesser, more insignificant person, because you did not have your possessions around you? Or is your worth, your essence, your sense of self inside you? (Obviously there are quite a lot of other questions to be answered if you awoke one morning, naked in another country, but in the context here we'll just ignore those).

What about memories, you juncture? These objects hold precious memories for me. I would counter that the objects don't hold the memories, you do. We strengthen memories by thinking about them, reinforcing our synapses. What happens is the memories associated with objects become important, become dominant. But stop. Are these the most important ones? Those with the most emotional gravitas?

Without objects to jog us as aide memoires — all our memories are free to compete, to claim their rightful place in our hall of recollection — would they order with the same priority?

Would reminisces fade without an actual thing there to promote it? Are we allowing emotive value to be replaced by physical presence? Our memories held captive by what we own. Dictated to, even.

A thought experiment. If you lost all your possessions, and an omnipresent being then informed you that you are allowed to keep only twenty memories — how closely would those you chose to cherish align with objects you had once kept?

I would make one exception to the rule of not keeping stuff you don't use. Books.

Probably not in the way you think though. I used to keep all the books I read. Then I discovered book crossing — the idea of leaving your book in the wild, allowing a randomer to find it, discovering new worlds. I even created a website for it — eleven years too late mind you, to be the light of the party — which is becoming an app. Soon. Hopefully not eleven years though.

Lots of friends keep their books proudly on display. When I visit someone new I love to surreptitiously scan their shelves for titles. But are we falling into this trap again. Allowing our possessions, what we've been able to buy, our economic power, to define our character?

How are we helping the world by hoarding these words, hidden away, imprisoned, unable to be read by new minds. Keeping the wisdom to ourselves to prove our immaculate taste, our intelligence, the breath of our knowledge. Once again I counter that this is not only false advertising, but selling ourselves short. Letting our richness-of-self be represented through what we have kept hold of. Not what we've kept inside ourselves. It is not the books we own, but the books we remember. It is not the words held hostage on shelves, but the words we allowed to shape us. Give away all your books and are you less entraining at a party, less informed, not as witty? I hope not.

I have started to keep books again. By favourite authors. Titles I think friends would enjoy while they stay. Also, being an ex-designer without portfolio, those with pretty covers. All others I buy on Kobo, which lack of beautiful covers aside, is a superior medium. I can enlarge the type, I can look up words, I can travel with my library. But I can't lend. Or better still, give away.

A caveat here. I'm talking about novels. When my friend Kay was homeless, living in a trailer set in a field far from anything, the subject of how our possessions define us came up. I asked whether she really missed anything, now they'd been in storage for a year. "My books and my sewing machine" she replied. Being ever the wise (arse) one, I challenged just how many of them she'd actually read again. "They are not novels, they're reference books". I had to concede.

But my exception is not the library of books you've read. Honestly, how many of those titles sitting on your shelves are you ever going to reread? I believe in keeping a library of books you haven't read.

I've mentioned the Japanese word tsundoku before, a portmanteau of the characters for 'pile up' and 'read' ¹. I am very guilty of piles of unread books, albeit now misshapen boxes of buckled unread books. The writer Umberto Eco makes owning tsundoku not an indulgence, but a philosophical act.

He calls a collection of unread books an anitlibrary. I'm not sold on the term, so will stick with tsundoku, though what he says about them is enlightening.

Surrounding yourself with all these works you have not read reminds one of how little you actually know. How wide and deep and vast the world is with all its possibilities. What we know counts for little, but our journey to better understand what's around us is paramount.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores Umberto Eco, his antilibrary, and what we don't know in his work "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable". How unknowable outlier events pull the rug from our predictions. Given my rant about possessions this book seems to be the only non-hypocritical object I can recommend. Although I did buy a really natty faux Jean-Michel Basquiat bright orange shirt from Desigual the other week.

"The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Buy here | www.randomhousebooks.com/books/176226/

You are the universe inside you. Not the objects surrounding you. Everything changes. You are the constant. Something useful to remember. Of course Epicurus says it best.

We are born only once, and we cannot be born twice; and one must for all eternity exist no more. You are not in control of tomorrow and yet you delay your opportunity to rejoice

- Vatican Saying 14

To show there's no hard feeling to Aki here's three acts I love from Nation Records. Obviously they all have shit record sleeves, since he never hired a great sleeve designer, but hey, water under the bridge.

Natacha Atlas - Yalla Chant

Asian Dub Foundation - Naxalite

Joi - Asian Vibes

A word of warning if you search YouTube for more Joi. It seems, since their time twenty years ago, it’s come to mean Jerk Off Instructions.

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Illustration by Fatima Fletcher

The amazing artist Fatima Fletcher has agreed to be the artist in residence.

Please show Fatima your love by following and liking every single one of her posts at www.instagram.com/fatima.fletcher, and visiting fatimafletcher.com, where her work is for sale, she is available for commissions.

Her wonderful Ruff Ruff coasters are for sale at fatima-fletcher.square.site/s/shop

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References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku

Legally I have to tell you I might get five pence or something from Bookshop dot org should you purchase something, but really I just want to stick it to Amazon and keep independent bookshops alive. Yeah, rebel me, bringing the man down from the inside etc etc.