I've become interested in the tv shows about hoarders and hoarding. The footage of people drowning in their things, overtaken by their things, evicted and oppressed by their things absorbs me. My own tendencies to hoard are minimal. I much prefer the satisfaction of throwing things away, giving things away. It's like the inside version of weeding a garden.
Paul views things rather differently. He appreciates people's regard for the things around them, particularly those hoarders who see something unique and wonderful in every broken lamp or old game ("well, we might find another one at a yard sale and then we can combine them and have all the pieces"). I had a friend in Vienna who lived above the flea market. When it rained, he would race down to the market and buy as many of the old toasters and appliances that he could carry. He hated the thought that the appliances would be left drenched and helpless. Anyway, Paul has viewed the therapists on these hoarder shows as the bad guys, that is, as a kind of ideological thought police trained to rein in the hoarders and make them into proper consumerist subjects rather than subjects whose consumption has become so excessive as to be an illness or syndrome.
Last night, though, Paul said something a little different. My daughter and I are painting her room and refinishing her floors (a nasty job that immediately redeems those who undertake it). This means that all her items are now in her brother's room (her brother is on a camping trip in the wilderness; I figure that if I'm not done when he gets back, at least he's become accustomed to roughing it). So the room is difficult to navigate. There is a small path through bookcases, toys, and mattresses over to the bed. Every surface is piled high with stuffed animals, baskets of girly things, pillows, paper, extra lamps. We look like hoarders. And Paul, who is in the process of painting of the kitchen in an apartment in the building he owns, noticed that the occupant of the apartment has saved lots of little packets of soy sauce and other condiments. She hasn't lived there in a year, but she had saved the packets in case she needed them. Or someone else, like one of her kids or a friend who might stay for a weekend, needed them. She saved the condiments because she was imagining a future where they would be needed. Don't must of us have a little bit of the hoarder? And if so, why the impulse to denigrate people for and cure them of their hoarding?
What if these hoards of items are not remnants of a past that cannot be let go, symptoms of loss, but instead elements of a hope for a future? On one of the hoarding shows, the expert convinced a woman to get rid of some of knitting needles and yarn stash. Those items are about a future, future projects, and a step toward undertaking those projects. Another hoarder was a dumpster diver and an artist. He saw a future in each wonderful object. It would become art. It might not be art yet, but that was the future he imagined for it.
I see these hoarder shows as sharing the current moment with post-apocalyptic fiction. Both mark the end of the future. Our capacities to imagine a future not overrun by zombies and violence seem too pathological, too fantastic. They have become evidence of an imagination unconstrained by reality. Throwing out things is a way to throw out options, alternatives, different futures. The lesson these hoardist missives impart is that one must consume properly, along one path. Futures are not allowed.
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