When Sticking To A Good Thing, Is A Bad Thing
One can only wonder what amazing confessions and inspiring questions the mangrove has heard in his time, from the passerbys of the riverside and the leisurely strolls of cyclists and joggers. Would we then call the mangrove a hoarder, for sticking firmly tight to the shoreline and refusing to move his housing of the families of fish and frogs over time? Are his roots above and below ground a symbol of stagnance or stoicism? Perhaps there is much to learn from the floating doghouse that once homed the manner of canine and flea and Farmer's Curse, to the deep sunk shoreline that has seen many seasons of receeding more prolific than one mans' hairline.
In a moment reminiscent of the opening and finishing of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I too am followed by some foul dust in the wake of my short and long-term dreams. Unlike poor Nick Carraway, I am not inclined to reserve my judgement on this particular matter; some awful (but nevertheless apt) advice was given to me when I graduated high school and looked forward with that eerie bout of optimism and fear to the uncharted future. A nagging voice in my mind repeats to be from time to time – perhaps something like the Ghost of Christmas that haunted Ebeneezer Scrooge in his sleeping hours – to be weary of your hoarding ways, for the older one grows, the greater the propensity to hold on to things grows. When I first heard this, I thought it was pretty laughable and unstable advice: after all, what could I possibly acquire that would seem worthwhile holding onto for dearest life?
In the most recent times I gave a bit of thought to that bit of advice and fed it to my insecuries like King Lear would have cast the physic to the dogs; I took to my hands and knees and decided out of a whim to clean out my wardrobe (being weary of falling skeletons, mind you). There are many frightening things to be found there, from socks that have needed mending from some many months of neglect and wear, CD’s of computer games that were once as thrilling as our latest generation of high-octane charged shoot-em’ups, articles of clothing bearing no resemblance or practicality to me any longer. I scoffed and shook my head, retrieved a garbage bag from the kitchen and proceeded to fill the bag until it reached the rim. I didn’t throw it into the large bin outside until several days later, when I finally had enough of haunting dreams and pangs of absolute desire to hold on to those articles of the past.
It seemed that I was in fact quite the hypocrite, but with absolutely no realisation or acknowledgement of this fact until Jasmin naughtily pointed it out to me. The idea of hoarding sounds deplorable to me, but in fact my subconscious had made motives in conscious action that made me do it. I promise. My subconscious is ready to take over the world, one bag of articles of memorabilia at a time.
I have only reached one and twenty years of age and I am in possession of so few valuable material things. Yet to these practical and everyday items, I pour the greatest dependency. To those articles of the past that take up space in the cupboard and grow cobwebs and house all manner of small things, from sentiment to the spider eggs, I pour the essence of my being. I simply cannot bring myself to throw away.
That’s why it’s no surprise to me that my grandfather would not allow me to rearrange or even so much as breathe on any of the artifacts in his house during the first few months of the passing of my grandmother. That’s why he took such great offence to my innocent question as to the sheer density and quantity of items in his garage – seeming garbage of rusty tools and machines of lathe and glass rending – and why, when I ask myself the reason for hoarding, the answer comes to me much more easily than it has ever done before.
My family is an intensely sentimental bunch, and we attach stigma to most novelty and the most prized value to seeming junk of the past. I cannot help but wonder if I might have inherited something of this tendency, when my drawer still contains photographs and love letters of relationships past. This is probably why I can’t bring myself to throw away my first guitar, my ratty socks, my first computer or even the tail feather of my previous budergigar. Even more prolific than my material accumulation is my vast stockpile of memories, bearing a photographic resemblance to the actual place, the actual smell and sound and sensation of being there and interacting with these spectres of time is like making a duaggerotype with stenciled bordering and a glass frame, for permanent reference whenever a friend asks.
Hoarding in itself doesn’t really seem to be such a bad thing in the end. We all want a working and tangiable memento of our past to refer to from time to time, to draw strength from and to use as a medal for accomplishment in day-to-day life. Sometimes, while we are hoarding consciously or unconsciously, we are making ourselves – not the object or the memory – a kind of anachronism and ultimately arriving at a realisation of the timelessness of our inner consciousness. With that resource of the inner psyche, we can call upon all of our bodily sensations to relive a moment in time and tie that physical sensation to an emotion, to a memory, to a postcard that we can bring up at dinner parties with family and with friends.
At the end of it all, we can’t all be hoarders. The DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble to create a distinction for the concept of hoarding if it didn’t have some unique characteristics of itself that cannot possibly be omnipresent in all of us, just in a select few with whom such a quality becomes a pathology and not a pleasure.
There’s nothing really wrong with finding a few good things that we hold dear and keep with us. After all, as the old saying goes, when you’re onto a good thing — stick to it. In justifying that saying, some treats that we hold on to – whether in everyday practice or in our memory – are still worth their weight in gold; I cannot imagine my life without the songbooks and recorded sessions of inspired jazz pianists, saxophonists, trumpeters, trombonists, hornists and vocalists. We each have our own pockets of memory that are lived in the present sometimes… would you dare then, compare me to a hoarder for saying that my 40GB worth of jazz music is excessive?
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