Today just as I was about to star cooking dinner, I heard a knock, and then the ring of a bell, and a French Lady blew in like a hurricane 'he-llo!'
Claire-Elise was her name, and she'd come before to see Grandma, and help her tidy her kitchen counter and shelf. Although she looks just slightly younger than Grandma, she has all the vigour and verve of a much younger woman. Auntie Sarah came in, and they sat in chairs in the kitchen while I leaned against the oven to warm myself, and watched as the conversation slowly meandered over to method and systems and tidiness.
Perhaps some background would be useful. My Auntie Sarah's house is, quite frankly, untidy. Yesterday's dinners are still in pots and pans on the stove top, papers scatter the table, and it's always a struggle to find something when you need it. Auntie Sarah is a very creative person, and starts a lot of projects, and also is always helping someone (or many someones) out, and as a result has very little time to get things in order in her house - Grandma tells me she wishes Auntie Sarah would be a little more selfish. Put that together with the fact that Auntie Sarah and her family are all by nature not the tidiest of people, the house does get very messy.
Claire-Elise spoke about how her Aunt and Mother had different ways of approaching mess. Both were untidy people, but Claire-Elise insisted (successfully) that her mother create method to her madness and declutter her life. It reminded me of the movement towards minimalism that is gaining agency in the philosophy of the present age - a sort of allergic reaction to the voracious consumptive activity of capitalism. What fascinated me, however, was Claire-Elise's theory of the effect of decluttering on the mind. Because her mother remained relatively mentally sound even in her latter days, while her sister, who refused to declutter and was constantly on the hunt for something misplaced, developed dementia, Claire-Elise hypothesised that by living without system, without method, you fill your brain with the mental clutter that easily slips out. You constantly use brain space to think - keys? book? heavy-bottomed pan? And because those places constantly change, your memory weakens, and adopts a dynamic of letting something quickly slip away in a life where things are as certain as quick sand.
Auntie Sarah murmured assent, and said it is difficult, because often she feels objects calling out to her. Objects with beauty and sentiment and history that all have various pulls on her affections and aspirations. When cleaning out Uncle Fred's house so it could be sold, she couldn't sleep almost a whole night because she could feel the pull of the multitude of things, and when she drove from Gloucester back to Ixworth the car was full of items whose call had proved strong enough, like some canvases, and a typewriter.
I thought the idea of objects calling, objects having agency and power, striking. Is that why Buddhist monks use meditation to snip the bonds between them and earthly and material? Are their chants and mantras a means of creating a sound that will drown out the sounds of things - and is the answer to a world chanting for our attention to create our own chant or is that simply adding to already excessive noise? Are the voices of objects akin to the colours from sound that a synaesthete would see? Is our conception of objects 'speaking' to us ('that painting spoke to me') innate or is it conditioned by things like the talking teapots and toys we read of and watch when young? Do objects we cannot categorise speak to us or only things that have attachment to memory (what would a Renaissance wunderkammer sound like I wonder)?
And so we wheel back to objects and memory. Do things help us remember, or do they wear away at our faculty of memory, like friction on bicycle brakes?
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