Parable of the desk
On the virtues of distraction (or certain forms of it)
Lately, instead of writing, I have been organising my desk. It was probably overdue. The desk had become coated in a thick scale of miscellaneous things: bills, receipts, stationary, business cards, scraps of paper with enigmatic phrases jotted on them (their meaning and purpose long forgotten), books, postcards, dried flowers, mementoes, keepsakes, and all kinds of odd objects which had no obvious home, and so were left here on the off chance I would find one for them later. The clutter was especially dense towards the edges of the desk, where I had continually pushed it as I tried to maintain a small enclave for my work.
I don’t consider myself particularly messy or chaotic. In some ways I’m quite fastidious. For various reasons, the desk simply stopped being one of the areas where maintaining order seemed necessary or important. On dark winter mornings I can ignore the world beyond the narrow beam of the desk lamp, and at ten o’clock I normally go to the local library (though I admit this is partly to escape my desk). I suspect we read too much into the tidiness of workspaces. Most rooms can speak volumes in one way or another, but aside from the extremes of obsessive order and degenerate chaos, their degree of neatness doesn’t necessarily provide great psychological insight. I’ve observed studios and offices where the disorder rises and falls reliably, in a kind of tidal motion, whether according to a schedule or through some spontaneous rhythm. Messiness often reflects a temporary surge of stress rather than a permanent facet of character. Clearly there are kinds and degrees of disorder that are incompatible with a fulfilling life, but entropy can also be contained, and strangely stable. When we focus our attention in a particular direction for a period of time, other things necessarily fall into the background, and sometimes we just have to let those regions go to seed until we are ready to cultivate them again.
The great benefit of a messy desk is that you get to tidy it. In the right circumstances, this can be a very useful form of distraction, one might even say a productive form of distraction. There are challenges that cannot be met directly, goals that cannot be aimed at. The practical tasks surrounding a practice – tasks of preparation, maintenance, planning – are often crucial to the emotional life of the practice itself, for reasons that cannot be easily articulated. Tending to a space, deconstructing and recombining its elements, it the kind of tangential activity which allows you to contemplate a project from a different, more detached perspective. This, in fact, is why I organised my desk. Not because the disorder was becoming oppressive (though in hindsight, it was). Not because I found it satisfying (as usual, I mostly felt guilty for not doing it sooner). I organised my desk because I didn’t want to continue in the established pattern, wanted to break and reconfigure that pattern. I did it not in order to write, but in order not to write. To indulge in the luxury of just thinking about things, with no obligation to reach a particular type of conclusion, or any conclusion at all.
So what did I contemplate, while organising my desk? I sense that The Pathos of Things is reaching an inflection point. The idea I set out with, more or less, was to chronicle the modern world from the perspective of its artefacts, and to examine our relationships with those artefacts. This undertaking is still as compelling as ever. But over time, the undertaking has changed me, and so it must change with me. New thoughts and sensibilities may require new methods and forms. New enchantments and disillusionments may call for new voices. My voyages into the non-human world – the world of objects, products, structures, devices, images, tools – have made me appreciate humanity in unexpected ways. They have also loaded me with a lot of melancholy that I didn’t bargain for; melancholy at the hollowing-out of cultures by technology, at the casual annihilation of the natural world, at the degradation of artefacts themselves through a loss of integrity and care.
How to weave these and other themes into the chronicle, how to express the joys and sorrows of the chronicler; these are some of the problems I am ruminating on, as I hack and weed and prune the overgrown field that is my desk. To those of you who have supported me this far: thank you. To those who have not – it’s never too late to start!
I wish all of you a very Happy New Year.
As usual, you've hit directly into my thoughts that I didn't have the words for. I look forward to another year of your insights!
The clutter-stress relationship reminds me of an argument against open concept kitchens. Another blogger proposed that open floor plans were only aesthetically pleasing in showroom level of cleanliness and order. Closed off kitchens are better for the overall mood of a house because kitchens are never totally clean. Dishes, countertop appliances, and foodstuffs accumulate with mind-boggling persistence and create stress when they're constantly visible. So to reduce stress against inevitable kitchen messes, just keep the kitchen out of view.
I used to scoff at this because I loved my luxurious-feeling open kitchen with an island, even when it got cluttered, but I think there's merit to this. I can count on my hand the number of times my kitchen was tidy enough to feel admirable and boast-able, and one of them was after preparation to move out. The lies we tell ourselves about disorder and uncleanliness seem related to the way we weigh aspiration and potential as substitutable for actual reality.
Wessie, nicely done. And I know this is the dark part of the year in a dark land. But a word of caution, if I may. The default stance of entire rafts of intellectuals is a sort of downbeat pessimism, even, as you say, melancholy:
"They have also loaded me with a lot of melancholy that I didn’t bargain for; melancholy at the hollowing-out of cultures by technology, at the casual annihilation of the natural world, at the degradation of artefacts themselves through a loss of integrity and care."
I certainly feel that, and I'm sure it creeps into my writing from time to time. But, speaking as a reader, this kind of melancholy is so common that it's usually boring. It's like french fries, chips I guess you say. Sometimes you want a steak frites, I get that, but . . .
SO, as you navigate this inflection point, I hope you keep what's distinctive, penetrating, and even dynamic about your voice. Seek out what's particular, special, worth attention. That's what good critics, like you, do. Mere gloom is widely available in the UK (even if purveyed by Afrikaners) and elsewhere. Keep up the good work and Happy New Year!