Renunciation of possessions has a very long if not very thick history. Siddhartha Guatama and Francis of Assisi are two rock stars of that tradition, and they all have received a lot of press and not much shade. Somehow not having things is supposed to be a sort of spiritual path, some way of finding one's true self. I would suggest that supposition is seldom true, and that more often it is in acquisitions that one finds one's true identity. One cannot choose one's inheritance, nor have much control over one's environment. But one can choose what one acquires, even if one has a very small budget and can only afford pebbles and feathers.
Much of my life has been an average one of getting and spending. When I was a kid, I had dreams of a somewhat wild and adventurous life, but fear of facing my homosexuality led me into marriage and fear of getting shot in Vietnam (and repulsion at the idea of shooting others) led me into teaching, and soon I had a family and bills, mini van and golden retriever. I often thought of the scene in Zorba the Greek when the Englishman asks Zorba, 'Are you married?' Zorba's response defined my condition for years: 'Am I not a man? I am a man. And is not a man stupid? So I married. Wife, children, house, everything: the full catastrophe.'
It would have been convenient for me and for many other people, probably, had I not been so stupid, if on one Saturday outside a Shoney's on Poplar Avenue in Memphis, when my future wife had said to me about my orange hunting cap, which embarrassed her, 'Choose between me or the hat', I had kept the hat and walked away. But, I married. After too many years, I divorced and went out in search, I suppose, of 'my true self', as well as the joys of sex and love which I had been told I would find in marriage, to which I had pretended all those years.
All of those years, and in the years following divorce, I collected things, mostly books and pottery, two of the heaviest collections, but also clothes and textiles and paintings. Those collections of things were much more a window into my 'true' self than the various roles I played in the various societies that formed my environment. But, as I began to become something of a traveler, those collections became more and more of a burden. Looking for a new home, I would discard and recollect. One of the first things I did when I arrived in Santa Fe was to donate all of my Memphis clothes to the Holy Faith Episcopal Church rummage sale, along with my matching set of Land's End luggage, and start to acquire Santa Fe style duds.
A common metaphor claims that life is a journey. One can easily look at the journey without much consideration of the life within the travels. Bruce Chatwin's books describe the search for home, for one's place in the worl. He was always disappointed that they were placed in the travel section of book stores. When, in Santa Fe, I discovered his books, they were like a mirror to my own life, except that it seemed Chatwin's life had been the one I had imagined in high school, and he had a bigger budget. Chatwin was introduced to collecting and wandering by a curio cabinet in his aunts' house, I by a curious round cardboard box in my father's dresser. Both of us collected things, had problems finding homes for them, and often spent long periods away from them, Both of us kept setting up housekeeping somewhere just to wander off and abandon the home fire for a campfire in some strange place. Both of us had a tendency to show up on some friend's door step and expect room and board in exchange for the pleasure of our company. He had a slight advantage in that he and his wife maintained a mariage glanc, something I had hoped might have been arranged with my wife, so he had an agent for selling and storage. Just as it can be hard to separate the journey from the life, it can be hard to separate the collection from the collector. Having no agent, I trimmed down to very few things indeed for a three-year kayak adventure.
When I came again to land, I had even less. That story can be revisited here, if one should desire. What is interesting about my having few things is that people thought I must be 'spiritual', must be anti-materialism. It gave me a certain entirely undeserved attractiveness. What was much worse is that I began to believe it myself, as one can tell from the linked post. I became for a willing public the detached monk they thought they admired. What is missing from that post is how carefully I had selected--the hipster term is 'curated'--the items with which I awoke at 6:00 am in my little hut, beginning with the blanket, woven by the abbot at Christ in the Desert Monastery from wool of the monastery's sheep, and certainly including the Eyre & Spottiswoode books from which I read the offices and the riranium pot in which I boiled water for coffee in my carefully selected mug--at that time I think it was a Francoma piece from the 1930's. Everything I had was carefully selected--curated--not because I was anti-material but because, despite my 'put an axe in your television' rant, I had and have a deep respect for material. The wind may blow where it will, but without a body to blow into and out of, it don't mean much.
What is often overlooked in stories such as Siddhartha's or Francis' is that in order to renounce possessions, one must have them. Both of them had inherited possessions and roles in an accepted social structure. Because they had wealth, they had the freedom to renounce it. (It was harder for Siddhartha's servant Channa, and would have been even harder for the people Siddhartha saw along his way.)
I and most of my friends are, by historical standards, almost unimaginably wealthy. It is easy for us to renounce stuff, and just as easy, perhaps easier, to reacquire stuff. What I think is more important than renunciation is what one then chooses to acquire, symbolized by the Buddha's begging bowl and the Saint's grey habit made of rags and belted with rope. That's the tricky part. I am going to risk great heresy here and say that I think that both Siddhartha and Francis never really got past their renunciation to explore their potential. When he sees the parts of life that had been screened from him, Sid decides that all life is suffering and wants to escape it. After abandoning his monks for a bit of self-indulgent masochism, Frank returns to yell at them because they have built huts against the snow and rain. People who have those cute little statues of Frank in their garden, preaching to the birds, forget that basically what he said to the birds was 'Shut the fuck up! I'm talking.' These rock stars were still arguing with their fathers. Hugh Chatwin, Bruce's brother, thought that the reason Bruce never admitted to having AIDS is that he didn't want to disappoint their father.
Insofar as one can go beyond one's inheritance and environment, it is with acquisitions. They may be physical, or they may be ideas or knowledge. It is often the physical acquisitions that give one strength to pursue the journey to finding oneself. They are like sacraments, outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. I mentioned pebbles and feathers as I started this essay, and it is I think an interesting coincidence that Chatwin's most closely held possessions were Peruvian feathers and some small objects almost like pebbles, little Inuit carvings that reminded him of Brancusi's stone-like sculptures. When I was wandering on the bounding main, I carried with me a stone from the bottom of the White River and a hawk feather from along the Buffalo. These are the sorts of things anyone can cling to to assert who they are, to define themselves in a grasping environment.
As I have gotten older, I have come to refuse, as much as possible, to be surrounded by things that I do not love, that do not encourage me to be true to what I think is real and dear. I do not want many things. Whether that makes me nearer the gods or not, I only want things that I really like, that I enjoy seeing around me. I cannot control all of my environment, or I am too lazy to try--I hate aluminum window frames but am too lazy to change them--but I can control the things I touch and that touch me every day. This is more difficult than one might think. I am bombarded by suggestions that the proper home environment is designed by Jony Ive. It is much the same in the world of ideas. One who would be acceptable in my environment should mouth the platitudes of Progressivism. But I think iOS icons are tacky, and Progressivism and facts just don't jive. So, I walk a more difficult path of discernment and selection.
So, just as I had spent an extra $1000 on a kayak than the cost of the more common fibreglass boats that might have taken me to the same places because it was more beautiful to my eyes, or as I spent $350 less than the cost of an iPhone because I find my V20 more beautiful, more personal, I spent an extra $200 for a new Kindle Oasis on which to read Utz, because I like it's balance in the hand, and its grey colour. It's easy for me to be choosy in most of my purchases, because I have chosen not to have a car and its expenses. In all of the acquisitions the primary consideration was whether I wanted this thing to become part of my world, part of my life.
Utz was Chatwin's last novel, the story of a very discerning collector of Meissen figurines, who used them to maintain a degree of liberty in a totalitarian state, but who is also bound to them with ties that restrict his liberty. They become his world, and he a character in that world. *
I know: this sounds almost like the old New Yorker cartoon of a newly married couple in which the wife asks the husband as they survey their wedding gifts, 'Do you think we can ever live up to our dinnerware, dear?'. But in a world swirling with values and claims, it is necessary to have both rocks and feathers. One needs at least a small pebble for ballast, to keep one from being tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind. And one needs a feather to mount up with wings as eagles, to renew one's strength, and to look beyond's one suppositions and prejudices.
*I am giving Utz very little due here, for it is actually a rather densely packed little book that deals with politics and journalism and sexuality and academia and more. I reread it a few weeks ago, as I was thinking about writing a blog post about collecting, and I was surprised by how much I had forgotten.
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