jaeleslie

The thing about walking around the mall is all the stuff. Three times around is a mile and a quarter. It's more interesting than walking around the gym, where there's nothing much to look at, but the stuff tends to suck me in. Wanting it, hating it, thinking about it, being attached to it. All these holiday trees are there right now, and real live trees (which these refer to) are objects of veneration to my people. Now we all have problems with our stuff, having enough of it, or precisely the right stuff, or storing it, or managing what has turned into too much stuff. I myself have too many art supplies, and too many books, if you can get your head around how that might be possible.

In my reading lately the idea of how stuff has become a fetish in our culture keeps popping up. Realistic novelists discovered they could say a lot, often about squalor, with the close description of stuff, like when Jane Austen's character Fanny leaves Mansfield Park and sees how her family's tea dishes are not quite properly clean. When you don't have any connection to it, it's just stuff, someone else's junk, but if you're like me you find treasure at all the yard sales. Like the two mismatched shoes Robinson Crusoe finds washed up on the beach from his shipmates in the wreck. He gets over it. Past use, past care.

There is a store at the mall where some of the artists I know have opened a collective shop for the holiday season. I am a maker of stuff myself, mostly of things to hang on the wall. (Also of dinners but those disappear with astounding rapidity and have to be made all over again the next day.) I find like the poet William Carlos Williams said, No ideas but in things. I have to think about what is worth making, of all the ideas calling out to me their possibilities.

It's a rich country, at least the part of it where we have computers and web browsers. Most of us don't really need more than we have. Walking around the mall I saw these stuffed bears and plastic poinsettias on a tree, very simple, not a family tree, just a quick window dressing in a card shop. Those bears might mean something, maybe if they were on a different tree, or if they were my bears I might be making something more of them. And the poinsettias, very obscurely, they have some bright red significance if I can just work out what it is. Or it might all just be trash headed for the landfill at the end of the season. I felt right at the edge of where things mean something, or don't.

Is it "time to remember the poor" yet? And then what?