Day 24: Crime Scene

Veteran viewers of crime-scene investigation series know that the houses of victims and suspects alike can reveal unsavory truths about the life of their inhabitants: perversions, addictions and obsessions come to the fore through the things they have kept hidden from the view of all but the more intimate of their relations, and sometimes even from them: the paddles, porn and pills of a secret or second life, the ostraka of shame that signal a violation, if only perceived, of cultural or social values. Which is why they are hidden in the first place.

Attila Richard Lukacs, “Phil, Study for Goya’s The Sleep of Reason”. 1999

I have plenty of objects of guilt, but none, I think, of shame. I have my share of pornography, but nothing I am ashamed of; in fact, some of it I watch with friends. Most of the sex toys I have are common enough to be a source of amusement and nothing else; the more esoteric gear would perhaps provoke curiosity as to their intended use and a hostile observer might call me disturbed—but not indecent. No, there is nothing I feel I would need or want to hide from the eyes of a CSI detective. The closest might be a pair of old sweatpants, too comfortable to throw away but too frayed and stained to be worn in company of others, even when straight out of the laundry. Dirty sex is one thing, dirty clothes another. Even when they’re clean.

Guilt is another thing entirely. It’s that nagging feeling of regret over a transgression or omission, a violation not so much of fundamental principles of decency but of the standards we set for ourselves. A failure of courage or civility, of being away when one should have present, a lapse into selfishness or pettiness. Shame says, I am bad; guilt, I have done something wrong or failed to do something right. Guilt makes us want to atone, rather than to hide.

And I have plenty of guilt objects.  The 100 Best Swimming Drills (I don’t do drills often enough), the score to the Well-Tempered Clavier (which I keep thinking I’ll study but don’t), the second half of my friend Natalie’s first book of poems (unread), the second half of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (ditto), corkscrew (used too often), juicer (not used enough),… There are lots more. I see them from time to time, reminding me of my imperfections and failed resolutions. None is hidden so well that I can avoid encountering it entirely. I could just give them away, but then I would feel guilty about getting rid of things I was guilty about not using in the first place; it’s the weakling’s way out. Sounds complicated but it makes sense to me in a comfortably perverse way.

I know that for most people it’s the other way around. They don’t feel guilty about unread or unused books but are a little embarrassed about having a store of porn. It’s not because of some kind of internalized priggishness. I suspect most feel guilty about the very idea of using porn to get off (though of course they do use it), as if porn were something only zit-besieged adolescents and fat old men use because they can’t get fucked. The truth is, few of us who are not in relationships have the looks or time to have sex as often as we may want. Thank God for porn.

I’m actually quite fond of the porn I have, mostly because the DVDs were a gift from a boyfriend I was very fond of. He was a sometimes-out-of-work and underpaid construction worker and this was the only gift he could afford. It was a homemade gift that embodied a pride in craftsmanship and the affection he had for me. They were never just copies of DVDs; instead, he carefully selected and edited scenes from a variety of primary sources. He, more than anyone else, knew what turned me on and he curated these scenes for an exhibition that was intended for one and only one viewer: me

His DVD recorder was the prized object among a very small menagerie of possessions. He was a minimalist by necessity, having neither the means nor the space to acquire much of anything. He was that mythic figure, a man of a hundred things. He lived in a tiny basement flat. A hall at the bottom of a short flight of stairs served as the living room, barely big enough for a small two-seat sofa. There was no room on the floor for his stereo speakers, so he had mounted these on the wall. His bedroom fit a bed and an armoire he had rescued from a building awaiting demolition. But though small he had made the flat his. He had painted the bedroom walls and ceiling in swirls of blacklight paint and lined the front of the armoire with mirrors. There were a row of hardy plants on the steps of the stairs, and a collection of curios he had picked up over the years at flea markets that included a lava lamp and a minaret-shaped bird-cage. He was proud of them all. I soon came to believe that his affection for the things he owned was directly proportional to the number of possessions he had.

It’s too early in the project to considering tossing these DVDs. Even though I’ve seen some of these dozens of times and the edge has worn off, even though it’s been months since I’ve even spoken to Wacław, they are still too charged with his presence for me to consider getting rid of them. In an odd way they are among the most life-affirming things I own. It was a testimony to a rare friendship and a witness to the ingenious nobility of a man without possessions who could nonetheless craft a gift, equally rare—a gift that was made for one and only one person in mind.

Instead, I gather together some of my many guilt objects: the stretching bands, a jump-rope, a Dutch grammar, Dietmar Dath’s monumental cult novel Die Abschaffung der Arten, which I’ve tried to read at least three times but have never got beyond page 60, the Mahler symphonies I’ve told myself I really should listen to but never want to. I collect them as if preparing the kindling for an expiatory funeral pyre. I won’t burn these, of course, but I’m not inclined to give them away. Bad karma.

Day 23: Eye Candy

“Oh, my dear – where is that country? Have you ever been there?”
– The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

Gil, the frustrated Hollywood screenwriter in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, has found a way to slip into the Paris of the 1920s and into the company of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, Cole Porter, Getrude Stein, Picasso and other luminaries from the period. It’s a Paris washed in a cloying, honey-gold light. The light is everywhere: it suffuses the elegant flat where Cole Parter is to be seen singing “Let’s Do It”, radiates in the café where Gil meets Dali and Man Ray, imbues Gertrude Stein’s rambling flat and her collection of paintings and painters. It even seems to drip from the lanterns on the Pont Alexandre III and the streetlights. It’s a light that blurs the hard edges of the city; it turns the sparely furnished bar where Hemingway holds court into a cozy, almost familial interior that bears no trace of the down-and-outness of the original Dingo. It is the amber light of nostalgia, one that speaks of comfort and warmth and points to a place of innocence and play: a never-ending kids’ party. The Golden Age is quite literally golden. Or at least the light is.

Hemingway in Midnight in Paris, or through a glass amber

The nostalgia takes the edge off of everything and everyone. Allen’s Paris is inhabited by artists and writers who’ve left their modernism home at the atelier. Gil can’t resist giving Buñuel a tip for a future movie (one that the filmmaker went on to direct in The Exterminating Angel). Make a film, Gil says, about a group of bourgeois guests who arrive at a villa for a dinner party and suddenly find that they can’t leave. Buñuel’s pedestrian reply, “I don’t understand. Why don’t they use the door?” is meant to be a joke, a knowing wink to the discerning filmgoer, but ironically enough calls to mind the very kind of remark an American innocent abroad would make.

Allen’s Paris, like all romantic nostalgia, is comfort food: easy to chew and digest, and stripped of the sour, the bitter and the burning. Watching Midnight in Paris and without the benefit of background knowledge, one would be hard pressed to imagine these characters as the artists and writers who were so radically questioning the established canons of prose and painting. These characters are the cinematic equivalents of grilled cheese sandwiches and tuna casserole.

At first I thought it odd that Gil could be nostalgic about a time in which he never actually lived. Nostalgia is literally the aching to return home, to that magical place where we were unconditionally accepted and loved. Paris was never home to Gil.

But then I thought, the world I remember of my own childhood is perhaps just as much an invention as Gil’s (and Allen’s) Paris. Perhaps the places we long return to never actually existed.

We dream of places we’ve never been, events we’ve never experienced, conversations we’ve never had. I’ve run through the stone streets of an ancient city as a volcano spewed forth a shower of lava rocks. I’ve fallen from a cliff onto a Mayan altar in the middle of a jungle. I’ve swum in rivers alongside great stone cities and grassy country fields. I’ve flown and I’ve died. Why should my memories—especially those of my childhood—be any more reliable?

Betty Draper serving punch, scene from Mad Men

I know I was a happy child, but beyond that certainty, the rest of the past is a landscape much like a painting by Dalí: a great expanse of empty space dotted with the presence of a number of enigmatic objects, laden with meaning and feeling. Toys, mostly. Models of monsters and knights in armor, Potato Heads and Mousetraps, Lionel trains and bubble-light trees. But sometimes an object so closely bound to memories it has become iconic, like the electric percolator my mother put out on the buffet table at the large extended family gatherings (they were too frequent and informal to be called parties) or the TV trays we’d set up to watch an episode of early-evening series en famille. There is food on this landscape, too, things like crumb cake, homemade ravioli and jam-filled thumbprint cookies and of course that very surreal food object, the Taylor ham sandwich.

The landscape of Gil’s Paris of the 20s is populated not with things but with artists and writers, but they are depicted so emblematically that they come to resemble objects, mannequins more than men (Hemingway’s lines in the film are so awkwardly Hemingway-esque that he seems at time to be parodying his prose.). And surprisingly for Paris, there’s no food either. No one ever eats anything in this world of reverie. But then again, as far as I can recall, no one smokes, either. Or passes out drunk. Gil’s Paris is the sanitized, almost cartoon-like Paris one would find in a children’s Guide to the Jazz Age.

But that makes sense in a way. Nostalgia is always regression. We are always younger in our own chosen Golden Age.

Back in the Paris of 2010, Gil keeps discovering objects that link to his midnight city: a record of a Cole Porter song, a journal kept by a woman who was Picasso’s mistress at the time (and whom Gil slowly comes to realize he wants to make love to). I have no things that can evoke for me the city of my childhood. I make do with the episodes of Mad Men, that paean to the innocent first half of the 60s, which, in its gorgeous art direction and fetishistic fidelity to the fashion, food and décor of the period—not to mention the tobacco, in Mad Men practically everyone smokes, even the pregnant young mother—is an orgy of nostalgia. As Ruth La Ferla wrote in the NY Times,“Mad Men is that rare TV show in which an ashtray, a lipstick or an aerosol tin gets star treatment, and is a protagonist in its own right.” And I see my star—my mother’s percolator, or something very much like it.

My brother collects vintage board games. I content myself with virtual memorabilia, embedded in a set where everything fits with everything else. I’ve bought all four series and have watched them twice. It is like comfort food, though the series is much subtler and more unsettling that its art direction would imply. Of course, I recognize that the exacting authenticity of Mad Men’s production design creates as much as fantasy world as the inauthenticity of Midnight Paris. It seems that everything in Mad Men is from the early 60s (as if people only started buying things in 1960), and (almost) nothing in Allen’s Paris of 2010 is later than Haussmann (the I.M. Pei pyramid makes the briefest of cameo appearances). But I wallow in it nonetheless.

The DVDs seem a fitting object to get rid of in this project. Dispossession is, among other things, an occasion to re-examine and re-interpret the remembered past, or at least to tell a story about it. It got to me thinking, I don’t need to watch this anymore. I need to write my own Mad Men. Or at least something about Taylor ham.

Day 22: Traveling Gear

The world of fairy tales and fables may be filled with heroes and heroines and the most varied assortment of villains, but it is often the things in these tales we remember best. One Prince Charming is more or less like any other, and without their props and entourage, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are nearly indistinguishable versions of the same young starlet (a young Cameron Diaz comes to mind). But there’s no mistaking ruby for glass slippers, a glockenspiel for a pipe, or the lamp with a genie for the one the widow has. Indeed, in some tales, it’s almost as if the roles were switched: the Princess becomes a prop for the pea and a young prince the set-piece for a sword in stone.

Byron Edwards, Skinhead, Barry Island

What wondrous things these tales recount—golden apples and golden fleece, cloaks of invisibility and rings of power, flying carpets and magic wands! And what extraordinary things they do! Carpets and capes that fly to faraway places. Amulets that charm the object of desire and pelts that instill dread in the enemy. A flute whose music escorts one unscathed through rings of fire.

But perhaps the objects we remember the most are those that do something not for the one who possesses it but rather to him, the ones that empower the protagonist or are his undoing, the crucibles of integrity and folly.  The one common trait that runs through all these very different touchstones of worth and failing is that our heroes and heroines, once they come into possession of these things, can never be the same again. The very use of the object sets off a fundamental change in the way this character sees himself and the world around him.

Magic masks of self-transformation and the like are only to be found in sagas and tales. But I do have a pair of red boots that, for a time, were magical in their own way. They were like the ruby slippers in reverse. They didn’t bring me home; they led me away. They let me change myself. Not in any profound way, I suppose, and only for a while, but it was a transformation of sorts. Now they’ve lost the magic. Maybe it’s worn off or I just can’t coax it out of the leather any longer. But they’re just a pair of books right now, albeit with a considerable store of memories.

They’re actually oxblood red, not cherry red, though the classic Doc Marten boots do come in both colors. Mine are the 14-eyelet model. You can get them with 20 eyelets but I didn’t think I had the (physical) stature or the bravado to pull off wearing them. As it was, it took forever to lace them up. Once I timed it. It took me 7 minutes.

The boots are standard skinhead gear, and like much of the rest of the gear, subject to a strict code. And like many of the magical objects in fairy tales it comes with rules about how and when they were to be used.

Lacing is part of the code, the colors of the laces as well as the method: straight bar lacing, a variation of the classic European boot lacing method that eliminates the underlying diagonals but looks messy if not done to precision.

Precisely because it’s a fetish scene, gay skinheads seem to have much more stringent conventions about what was acceptable and not in terms of gear. Hair is shaved or cropped with #2 clip guard max. Braces—the kind that you clipped on—are usually not wider than an inch, crossed in the back, though guys often let them just hang from the hips. Lace colors send messages,  not about politics or  football teams but sexual practices. Polo shirts can be Fred Perry or Lonsdale or Ben Sherman, but not all the colors. Camo pants are standard issue. So are  MA1 bomber jackets..

Home-bleached jeans are worn. Before gear shops started appearing in places like Islington that actually sold pre-bleached jeans, you’d do it yourself. And there were definitely ways a skin would bleach jeans and ways that looked as if his mother did it for him.  Of course, these are jeans you could only wear with the boots, because they’re cut at mid-calf to allow for one fold of a cuff that then sits at the line at the top of your boot.

It was gear I’d only wear in certain places, and mostly abroad. It’s not only that Berlin and London are more tolerant than Athens. It’s also because there’s a broader awareness there that somebody in this gear is not necessarily a gay-bashing racist neo-Nazi.

Friends sometimes asked how I could identify with a movement that’s been associated with incidents of gay-bashing. I could have pointed to the button on my MA1 with the emblem of SHARP (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice). I could have talked about how by appropriating and re-using the elements of traditional skinhead gear as part of a fetish scene, gay men were subverting its homophobic roots. That’s all true, I think. But it’s not the answer. I liked it because it was rude and extreme. I wasn’t attracted to the elements of hate and violence but I was intrigued by its rough, unpretentious, almost proletarian character and the core emphasis it placed on comradeship.

I was in the scene for about ten years. I started getting involved just as my relationship with Matthew was winding down, and continued in it until I felt I was too old to be going around in bleached jeans and 14-eyelet oxblood stompers. I acquired the gear, which I’d wear to skinhead bars in Berlin and Amsterdam, to fetish happenings in Hamburg and skinhead nights in London. The gear didn’t make me stronger or wiser or more loved. But it made me more daring. More open to adventure. Like a magic carpet it took me to a journey to places I otherwise wouldn’t have gone and never will again. The gear emboldened me to explore recesses of my sexuality that I didn’t even know existed.

I did things I probably shouldn’t have done and would never do now, but I don’t regret what I did. And I’m slightly in awe of the Nathan who was the author of these actions.

Luckily I have a sense of proportion and I know I’m too old for the scene. You can find guys my age at a skinhead night at the London Hoist. But they’re curiosities.

I still find these boots terribly sexy on other guys, but I know I won’t wear them again. And knowing this brings an odd sense of loss:  the recognition of a closing that speaks, yes, of death, but also recalls memories of a special time of exploration and play.

There’s no one I can give them to and I won’t send them to Ali. No one tells you this in the beginning but these boots are a pain to walk in.

Day 21: Unpacking My Belongings

The closer our relationship drew to a close, the more occasions Matthew and I found to disagree. At some point—his moment of truth came earlier than mine—we must have realized there was no longer any real hope for salvaging our relationship, and the recognition of this impasse enabled us to fight more freely. You dance with more abandon if you’re not afraid of breaking something.

Tomo Yamaguchi, Berlin interior

One of the things we now found to argue about was unpacking after a trip. I wanted to do it as soon as we got home; Matthew was content to leave it for the next morning, and then he’d unpack only the things he needed. The rest could wait for the day after. He wanted to draw out the feeling of vacation; I wanted to put things back where they belonged, as if the possessions that lay stuffed in our suitcases were impish pranksters that needed to be gotten back into their cages before they started wreaking havoc in the flat. Or ran away.

Suitcases speak of transience and uprootedness, even if it’s one we’ve chosen, indeed, desire. They are the make-shift homes-on-the-go we drag from train station to bus depot to hotel. They don’t belong in the living room. They point too brazenly to leaving.

It was only later that I realized that Matthew could be so at ease with an unpacked suitcase in the living room precisely because he wasn’t planning on sticking around anyway. In his mind, he was already on the way to somewhere else.

I must have an issue with transience. Not only do I unpack immediately upon coming home from a trip, I also unpack when arriving at my destination. I’m that rare traveler that actually uses all the drawers and hangers and shelf space you’re given in a decent hotel room. Shirts and trousers get hung up, socks, underwear and sweaters are laid out in the dresser drawers, dress and running shoes are lined up on the closet floor, toiletries get arranged on the bathroom shelf (why don’t hotel rooms have medicine cabinets?), the assortment of cables and chargers are stowed in the desk drawer. And then, of course, I hide the suitcase in the closet or under the bed.

In essence I set up house. I create a shell of domesticity in which I feel comfortable. I don’t go as far as setting out framed photos, but I don’t do that at home either. Doing so would be just as inauthentic for me as wearing a blazer or a heavy-metal t-shirt. There are clothes that feel right on you and those that don’t. There are objects that belong (or could belong) in your space and those that don’t.

Those of us with the luxury to determine and equip the space in which we live have shaped, even if only unconsciously, an environment that fits us, perhaps not as closely as an antigen to its antibody, but close enough for us to feel comfortable there to a degree we don’t most other places. Think of a friend’s house. Is there nothing you wouldn’t change if his space became yours?

If I wear my house as a shell it is a relatively spare one, without the intricate and dense texture that things exposed or exhibited lend to a living space. Surfaces are relatively empty, except for my books, a handful of photographs and prints, and various minor appliances of too frequent use to be stowed away—the coffee grinder, juicer and blender. Oh, and a collection of ladles and wooden spoons set in a tall earthenware crock. It is like a protein with a minimum of folds, but there are enough to give it identity and make it feel mine. It’s comfortable. It fits.

I returned to this idea of domestic texture after coming across the work of Tomo Yamaguchi, a young photographer who works out of Leipzig and takes photos of the interiors of strangers’ flats. The rooms are neither the forlorn shelters of the destitute nor the salons of the rich but rather the interiors of ordinary people. I was struck by how the rooms had such distinctive character or texture. None of the rooms was particularly attractive or inviting, but each was remarkably idiosyncratic. I realize this distinctiveness is also the result of a deliberate curatorial act but still, these rooms told a story/ And they told it through the objects they housed.

The things in each room oddly enough seemed to belong together. I had the feeling that if all these objects fell out of their frame, I could put most of the puzzle back together again. Some pieces, like the porcelain figurines and paper roses could go into more than one frame but the others, I knew: the embroidered cat pillows and spindle-legged ashtray stand and hanging spoons in one, the enamel ewers, antique alarm clocks and the collection of blue bottles in another, the cheap Danish 1970s furniture, ceramic gnomes and beeswax candles in the form of druids in another.

The kinship of objects was all the more arresting because of the frequent clash in patterns, color and style they evinced; they were like adopted children who after long years growing up in the same house have come to so resemble one another in behavior and speech that the casual observer ceases to remark that they share neither skin color nor build. The disharmony in the patterns of the rugs, throws, pillows and mats that draped these rooms was particularly jarring. Perhaps most people have a higher tolerance of incongruous visual elements than I do, a higher threshold for visual clash or whatever we call it. There may not even be a visual equivalent for “dissonance” or “disharmony”.

Many of the flats depicted in Yamaguchi’s photographs also contain a collection of sorts. The number of items in the collection varies from flat to flat: there are thirty of more enamel pitchers in one photograph but only a half-dozen gnomes in another, but even in the latter the coexistence of these objects was not coincidental. I was convinced that they did not all arrive in the buffet at the same time. They had been accumulated in that ritual act of repetition that gives collecting its meaning. I am also absolutely convinced that the persons living in these flats would be able to recount with an amazing degree of clarity the circumstances under which they acquired each of the items in their collection and the story each had to tell. Each object has taken its rightful place on the shelf or in the buffet in an order known only to the collector. What is a collection if not, as Benjamin wrote, “disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?”

The aphorism appears in a small, delightful essay called Unpacking My Library, in which Benjamin, himself an avid collector of rare books, invites the reader to share in his thoughts on collecting as he unpacks the crates containing his books. The text traces the particularly intimate relationship that a collector develops for the objections in his collection, an intimacy intricately bound up in acts of acquisition and conquest.  He writes: “For a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” And he can do this because precisely of the memories that these objects incorporate.

It strikes me that this project is paradoxically an act of collecting, too. It has many of the features of collecting. I document the objects I dispose of; indeed, I am still considering whether, and if so, how to photograph them. I think about how best to organize and display them. I search for appropriate titles for the texts and the photographs and reproductions of paintings that accompany them. I catalogue and index the things I give or throw away.

It is a odd set of things, this collection of loss, made up of objects of disrepair and neglect, of incongruity and obsolescence. But the things in my collection of loss, like the crates of Benjamin’s books and the array of blue gin bottles in an anonymous Berlin apartment, contain memories, too. And chronicling the loss of these things is perhaps just as good a way of preserving these memories as displaying them in a cabinet.

The first objects I acquired in Athens, even before I bought a table or camping stove for my wholly unfurnished flat, were a pair of small, oblong decorative plates from the island of Skyros that were given to me by a grateful mother whose son I was tutoring in English. I had just arrived in the city and had picked up the lesson from a friend of mine who had met the son while vacationing on the island. I knew nothing of what a private tutor would charge and wound up asking for much less than the going rate, so the mother’s gratitude was quite understandable. Though it wasn’t just gratitude. She was hospitable in that grand and genuine way many islanders are. At the start of each lesson she’d make me coffee and accompany it with a homemade spoon sweet served on a small plate that I knew was reserved for company.

The plates she gave were are handsome ones for their genre, both hand-painted, one with a scene of a yellow-sailed schooner on a billowy green sea, the other a wispy indigo butterfly hovering between two mauve flowers, and both ringed by a riot of decorative elements.

The scallop-edged plates could form part of a collection and in fact, plates like these were traditionally displayed on the walls of Skyrian houses. The ones I have came with holes in back ready for hanging. I never did hang them, and rarely used them, and only when I was serving something like stewed octopus or yellow lentil purée.  The plates always seemed to belong to another household.

I will keep one plate, the smaller one until I write about Aris, the teenager I tutored. The other I’ll give to Joanna. One of her grandparents was born on the island and though I doubt if the plate will wind up on the wall, it will find better company in her flat than it ever has in mine.

Day 20: Leaving Home

I didn’t think of myself as an immigrant when I first arrived in Greece. I wasn’t even planning to stay. It was supposed to be my year of self-indulgence before starting a “real career”. I would finish the play I had begun in graduate school. I would travel to the islands and Italy and France.

But even if I had known I would wind up living here for twenty years and not one, I would still have been a privileged immigrant. The place I had come from had not been visited by war or famine or persecution. I didn’t speak the language, but the one I did speak was understood by most here. I had money. I had skills and education. More importantly, I had a place to go back to.

Philip-Lorca di Corcia, Gianni

Of course, I was a foreigner here and almost as clueless about the local culture as the Ethiopians and Filipinos and Kurds with whom I stood in line at the Alien’s Bureau to get my papers processed. But by virtue of my skin color and place of birth, I was one of the “good” foreigners, even when many Greeks consider Americans hopelessly naïve. I was generally treated well, except at the Alien’s Bureau, where I was dealt the same rudeness, condescension and indifference as my counterparts from Asia and Africa were.

There was one other thing I had in common with my fellow immigrants. The only possessions I had were those I arrived with. I had given away my books and most of my clothes before leaving Boston. Living with Mark and Annette I hadn’t needed to have any furniture of my own. Apart from my beloved Motobécaine, which they offered to store until I returned to the States, I actually possessed nothing other than the clothes I had packed with me to come to Greece.

I might have packed differently if I had known I’d be staying the rest of my life. Ahmed and Sultana and Tadeusz knew they’d be staying, and their suitcase was likely better suited for a life of exile than mine. Among the inexplicable objects I carried with me across the Atlanticwas an umbrella. What possessed me to bring an umbrella in August to a country that has a word for the rain that breaks the summer drought in  late September I don’t know. And of all the umbrellas I could bring, I schlepped a non-retractable one. Admittedly it was elegant, with its wood-tipped ribs, generous slate gray fabric and an ash-blond wooden handle. But it was too big to fit in my suitcase and I had to carry on board. If I had know what awaited me in Athens—apart from the lack of rain—I would have left it in Boston and brought something more practical with me.

No one had told me before that when you rent an apartment in Athens, you get basically just the physical space. No refrigerator, no stove. Not a single piece of furniture. Just the space.

I rented a tiny basement studio flat in an area of town frequented by students and the lower intellectuals of the left. The flat was basically a room that served as both bedroom and living room, plus a small kitchen and bathroom. The place was dark, even at noon. Only the top quarter of the single window looked out on to the street; the rest faced a very narrow window well.  Now I wouldn’t be able to stay there for more than a day or two but back then I was so happy to finally get out of the cheap hotel I was staying at that it seemed the perfect place to finish my play (not without justification, since there was very little I could do in the place other than sleep, read and write). And the landlady was nice. She took a liking to me and arranged for her brother to deliver a cot to the place.

Apart from my clothes and toiletries, the cot and my umbrella were the only possessions I had. The next day I bought some cheap sheets, a blanket, a couple of pots and pans, and a hotplate. A few weeks later I got a small desk and a pair of chairs. I was set.

Living so sparely had its disadvantages, but I suppose I saw it all as an adventure of sorts and it didn’t bother me much. I couldn’t entertain the few friends I was making, but they had much nicer places and would invite me over for dinner. The owner of the language school I worked for took me under her wing, and I’d go to her place in the early afternoon for a Greek lesson followed by some of her amazing cooking. I think she was eager for the company. Her husband was in jail at that time for embezzlement.

At home I accommodated. I bought powdered milk for my breakfast cereal. I cooked things like omelets and tuna stir fries and canned bean salads that I didn’t need a refrigerator for. But mostly I ate out in tavernas, which is where I met Matthew. I sometimes think that if I had been living in a nicer place he wouldn’t have asked me to move in with him so soon. We would have waited, and then he might not have ever asked me to move in with him. And like the privileged immigrant I was, I would have returned to the States.

I still have the umbrella twenty years later. Considering how easy it is to lose an umbrella, this is remarkable. I’ve lost more than a dozen umbrellas over the decades but this one is still with me. Part of the reason why, I suppose, is that’s so conspicuous. I would start to leave a restaurant or the movie theater without it and someone would inevitably cry out, “hey, you forgot your umbrella!” But the real reason is that I just stopped using it after a while. It was too big—when I stood it erect on the floor it reached up to my hip—and utterly inconvenient for travelling. The fashion statement it made was anachronistic and, yes, somehow very foreign.

I keep it in an umbrella stand on the landing outside my flat. It’s been used once in the last ten years, when a sudden autumn storm broke when Nikolas was about to set off for home after supper at my place.

The umbrella, along with the overcoat I’m not parting with, is the only thing left from the stuff I carried with me from the States. It’s a relic from a bygone culture. The firm that made my umbrella has gone out of business; American Umbrella Company now refers to an Ohio roofing and siding firm run by an Air Force vet. I don’t know what happened to the bike; I think Mark donated it for a church fund-raising garage sale. It, too, was a relic of a dying tribe. Motobécaine was bought by Yamaha, which didn’t continue the bike line of business (the Motobecane bikes sold in the US under the French company’s old logo are Taiwanese). Even Mark and Annette are gone from Boston. Sadly, Mark died last year. Annette moved to Rhode Island with her new boyfriend. My umbrella is a symbol of my life in Boston but a reminder of transience and mortality, an emblem of loss. It is among the saddest objects I own.

Ever more frequently I notice immigrants, mostly South Asian, wheeling shopping carts around my neighborhood, stopping at dumpsters to pick through the garbage and  retrieve pieces of wood and scrap metal and, if they’re lucky, an old appliance or gadget. Considering how little Greeks recycle their waste, the immigrants can actually eke out a living out of this trade. In the evening I bring down my vintage, non-collapsible umbrella and set it beside the dumpster. The next morning when I set off for work, it’s gone.

Day 19: Child’s Play

Imagine you’ve been asked to curate an exhibition of your life. You’ve been given a warren of six or more rooms (depending on how old you are) in a small abandoned hotel that is scheduled for demolition. Each room will be devoted to your life at a specific age, say 7, 13, 18, 30… You’ll soon realize that the first room, the one dedicated to your childhood, will be crammed with things, more so than any other room in the exhibition.

Nigel Shafran, from his series Charity Shops / Car-boot Sales / Market Stalls

Many of the earliest memories I have from childhood are connected to things. Even when I recall persons and places and events, they are always accompanied by even more vivid memories of things. I could draw a fairly good reproduction of the Thanksgiving house decorations my mother would put up. I can almost feel the seersucker shortie pajamas I wore at our summer house. I recall a particular kind of crayon that had to be kept in the refrigerator and a plastic cup I drank out of with its built-in plastic straw. My parents surely celebrated at least part of my birthdays in the kitchen but I don’t remember any in particular. But I do remember the parallel grooves in the edges of a formica kitchen table and the yellow plastic cushioned seats of the chairs that were set around it. And, of course, I recall the toys and games, the Elgo sets of red plastic bricks and white trim that my brothers and I built houses from, more idyllic than the basement flat we lived in, and the panel-and-girder set we constructed towers and forts with.

My brother and I always seemed to be making things. My mother got us to make break baskets out of Popsicle sticks. We glued pasta shells on empty cigar boxes, which she spray painted gold, and ironed fallen oak leaves between sheets of wax paper. She let us watch entranced as she heated marbles in a cast-iron frying pan and then slid them into a bowl of ice water; this would “crystallize” them, or so we thought, as we glued them onto the earring posts she had given us. She gave us sheets of small mosaic tiles that we’d pull off from and affix, one by one, to a concave square disc that could be used as an ashtray. Once she baked an LP and let us shape it into an undulating fruit bowl.

It was my introduction to the transformative processes of art, though then it was just a lot of fun. No, it was more than fun. It was enchanting and magical, seeing how an object slowly took or changed shape as it was being constructed or manipulated.

I would experience this again in junior high school in shop class, also known back then as “industrial arts”. Such classes were more or less done away with in the 1990s under the pressure of funding cutbacks and, as philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford notes in his Shop Class as Soulcraft, a general lack of appreciation, if not actual belittlement, of the value of the manual trades.

In shop we learned how to use a lathe to turn a columnar block of wood into the neck of a table lamp. We were taught how to hammer a piece of sheet metal into an ashtray. We were shown how to work with plaster and stir in powdered pigments ever so gently to create a sense of marble in the mold for the (yes) ashtray we were making.

I imagine these activities were intended not only to teach us how to use power tools and work with different kinds of material but also and more importantly to train us to make things, in preparation perhaps for our future as a provider and metaphorical builder of the family home. These classes taught us respect for good workmanship, which was a matter of skill but also attentiveness, timing and the respect, if not affection, for the materials with which one works.

I, for one, saw how easily things could go wrong: too much pressure for too long would turn the piece of wood spinning on the lathe into a spindly mockery of a chair leg. I wasn’t very good at making things. Maybe I was too unsure of myself as a kid. Or too nervous around the power tools. I never became good with my hands. I contented myself with assembling things, rather than making them. Naturally I knew fairly early on that building bird and monster models and filling in the contoured shapes of a Venus Paradise coloring sheet, whatever pleasure it afforded me while I was doing it, was a substitute for something else. Later on in life I started making things of my own: poems, some stories, thousands of lines of programming code, a couple of plays. Not prolific in output and, with the exception of the code, usually for myself and friends, but it was in some sense creation.

But I don’t know how things work. The mechanics of objects mystifies me. I had to ask my downstairs neighbor to help me put up a blackout shade on my glass-paned bedroom door. Jörg says even girls have better toolkits than I do.

Which is why I have a collection of broken things. The clocks with the paralyzed second-hand, a Braun citrus press that dribbles when I squeeze oranges, a Phillips body shaver that keeps getting stuck on “on” and buzzes until the battery drains, a blender that’s been reduced to only one speed.

I’ve accommodated myself to these disabilities. I’ve replaced most of these things, anyway. I keep saying I’ll take them somewhere to get fixed, but I never get around to it, so they just pile up, witnesses to my incompetence with things that do things.

I still retain enough from the early lessons I learned with my mother and her crafts projects and then later in shop class not to be able to throw these disabled objects out. Something in me says these things should be saved. Now as I write this I remember my friend Anita telling me about an organization in the city that does exactly that. You call them up and arrange a time for them to stop by and pick up things that have broken—CD players and old PCs and I suppose even blenders—and they fix them and then re-sell them. The money goes to some charitable purpose, I can’t remember which exactly, but it doesn’t matter. They can have them all—the blender, the VCR, an old laptop I have, even the body shaver (though I doubt if that has any salvage value)—except maybe the Braun press. I can deal with the dribbles for now.

Day 18: A Charmed Life

The wall clock stopped dead at 10:19. It must have been p.m. It’s something I would have noticed during the day. I’m not an obsessive clock-watcher, but there always seems to be a reason to check the time. Are the lentils done? Will I be in time for the bus that leaves on the quarter-hour? Is it too late to call Michael, who goes to bed even earlier than I do? Too early for Nikolas?

Francis Upritchard, Roman Plastics

The next morning I replaced the batteries and reset the time. It was then that I noticed that the problem wasn’t the power source but the second-hand. It was stuck at the 50-second mark. It made a beat, lurching to the next mark on the clock and then falling back, as if the move to 51 seconds had proved too great a challenge. It kept repeating this pattern, beating like a needle-shaped heart, up the clock face a quarter-inch and then back down, again and again, the last palpitations of a fallen, loyal sentry.

The clock was a classic Braun (excuse the redundancy) wall clock of impeccable simplicity and functionality, a cream-colored 1950s model with the hours marked in a geometric typeface. It had stood guard on a post in the kitchen for the last decade. I must have looked at it thousands of time. Even now that it’s gone, I catch myself craning my neck to the post, only to see a column of absence. It makes me uneasy that it’s gone. It feels as if someone had stolen the flat’s mezuzah.

I don’t know what possessed me to throw it away. This was before the What’s Left project. I vaguely remember thinking it’d probably cost almost as much to repair it as to get a new one, only to discover later that, first of all, this particularly clock is no longer produced, and the auctions for the few you can find on ebay start at over $120. I’m sad it’s gone. It was a beautiful object. (If one thing this project is teaching me, it’s how attached I am to the—few—beautiful things I own).

I had a second wall clock in the bathroom, a cheap nautical-looking thing but at least it told the time. I put it up where the Braun clock had been. A few days later it stopped. The second-hand was trapped at about the same place. The 50-second mark.

It doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. I know it happened. I may have misremembered the exact point at which the second-hand of the first clock stopped, but I know the second-hand was entrapped. You don’t forget a jammed, pulsating clock hand. Twice. I took it down right away.

Two arrested wall clocks is something to be reckoned with, even for someone like me. Dieter says I’m overly materialistic. He means I tend to explain nearly everything—including things like infatuation, faith, and altruism—in terms of physical processes. God is in the neurons kind of thing. And he’s right, even if I do try to keep this to myself. I don’t tell Liza that the “active ingredients” in her shockingly expensive homeopathic medicine that she swears keeps her migraines under control has a concentration of one molecule to an amount of water roughly 30 billion times the size of the earth. I have some very smart friends, some much smarter than I am, who are convinced of the effectiveness of things that to me seem to have no solid scientific claim to truth. I suddenly felt very much like them.

Yannos is one such friend. He has a big glass apotropaic eye hanging in his living room. A navy-blue blot within a powder-blue yolk suspended within an ever lighter blue medium. “To ward off the evil eye,” he said. “I know, you think it’s ridiculous, but it doesn’t hurt to take precautions.” Yannos calls his mother whenever he has headache. To cast off the evil eye. I once told him that he could have instead set out one of his heroically sized dildos, as they did in Antiquity, but he wasn’t amused. I’ve learned not to contest his theories. I’m even less inclined to do so now that I’ve suffered the ignominious and eerily similar end of two wall clocks.

By coincidence I caught an episode of Warehouse 13 on satellite TV last night. It’s a rather silly series about Secret Service agents assigned to a warehouse in an out-of-the-way corner of (what is already) out-of-the-way South Dakota that houses supernatural artifacts. Their assignment: to retrieve artifacts that have gone lost or stolen and to investigate reports of new ones. What I found intriguing, though, was the way in which the magic of these artifacts was constituted. Many of the objects incorporated traces of the person who had once been their owners and “behaved” accordingly. The Sylvia Plath typewriter that sucked the life and will of anyone in its vicinity, Borgia’s comb, which endows the possessor with the ability to control another person’s mind but at great personal expense. Man Ray’s camera, which enables one to transfer the youth of one person to another by superimposing photographs of the two.

Though the series is a hoot, the idea that an artifact might incorporate traces of a person is not all that strange. We “wear off” in the objects we use, and sometimes literally so, when we deposit our secretions and our scent. Hence the disgust at the idea of using another’s toothbrush, and the pleasure we have in wearing a lover’s shirt or sleeping on his pillow. We break in jeans in a way that makes them unfit for anyone else. Our shoes bear the marks of our unique, unmistakable gait (the first thing a good shoes salesman at a specialist running shop does is to ask to see the soles of your running shoes). How else can one explain the value people across the ages find in relics, both of the dead and the living. How else does one explain why people would bid for William Shatner’s kidney stone ($75,000 the final price) or a pregnancy kit whisked away from the bathroom of a hotel room that Brittney Spears was staying in?

The good thing about the case of the paraplegic clocks was that my friend Nikolas’s gift of the driftwood mobile sculpture he made for me has found its rightful place in my flat, right where the nautical clock once hung. I used to have the sculpture affixed to a tiled wall near the toilet, partly because of the water element common to both, partly because it gave me and house- and dinner-guests something interesting to look at while they were about their business. But even a materialist like me knows that the location wasn’t the most propitious. I like looking at it and it reminds me of Nikolas, though I don’t need his sculpture for that. There are some friends you carry with you all through your days, and Nikolas is one of them. But I think of the sculpture as one might amulets and talismans, hei-tiki charms and the supernatural artifacts of Warehouse 13; I feel there’s a part of my friend “in there”. It is an object of good karma; even I can understand that.

But if there are objects with good vibes or feng-shui or karma or whatever else you want to call it, there are also those with bad vibes. One is a small, antique picture frame that’s been in the flat as long as the Braun clock has been. It’s in bronze, with an intricately wrought floral border around the frame that ends at the center top in an elaborate bow, at the center of which sits a small opal.

I’ve kept it hidden in a small wooden drawer within another drawer. I don’t even like looking at it. There’s something about the frame, maybe it’s the bow at the top, the sense of a present about to be wrapped, that makes it look like a trap, poised, like the Plath typewriter, to suck out the like of the person whose image is placed within the frame. I never got rid of it. It was Matthew’s, and he just forgot about, I think. But I also felt weird about throwing it out, who knows what petulant spirit I would incite by tossing it into the garbage. It’s more the kind of thing you would consign to a forgotten attic or warehouse. I don’t have an attic but there is a sub-basement in my building that someone told me people used during WW II to hide during Gestapo raids. It’s a good story, even though I’m not sure I believe it. But it’s the right place to get rid of the frame.

Day 17: Accounting for Loss

My insurance agent, called a few weeks ago. Thankfully we seldom need to talk. The only reason he usually calls is to remind me that a payment is due on one of the policies I’ve taken out with his company. A useful man in an emergency but not one whose company I seek. He’s one of those persons, like my physiotherapist and accountant and ENT doctor, whose names would have been absent from the address book I had a decade ago, their places taken up by guys like Mark (skinmusc) and Andrzej—Hoist!, whose company I very much did seek, if only for a brief period of time.

David Renggli, 'When I Work My Bed Sleeps' and 'Interview With a Wall' (2007)

He told me he wanted to meet to talk about revising the coverage I have for the contents of the house. “You know, it’s been seven years since you took out the policy, and by now you’re probably underinsured.” Underinsured. He said with the gravity of a doctor who pronounces you anemic or hypertensive, and the certainty of a school-teacher reciting a corollary of physics: the quantity and value of one’s possessions increases in direct proportion to age.

I suppose as a pithy summary of a general trend it has some truth. I certainly have a lot more stuff than I had as a college student or when Matthew and I were first living together. But in the last seven years, how much could have changed? I invited him over the house anyway.

“Hasn’t the value of most of this stuff actually gone down in the last seven years?” I asked, after we finished the obligatory small talk about our summer vacations. We were sitting at my kitchen table, the same one we had sat at seven years ago. In fact, the flat looked pretty much as it did seven years ago. The refrigerator and dishwasher were new and I’d gotten a sofa bed to replace the couch Matthew had taken (fair enough, he took so little when he left), but otherwise, it looked the same to me.

“Well, your policy is for replacement value so depreciation isn’t a concern here. And it’s gotten more expensive to replace some of the bigger ticket items.” He leaned forward, retracted his smile and knitted his brows ever so slightly. “But the real concern here,” he said, in a way that implied that if it weren’t my concern, it certainly should become one, “is that you’ve acquired a lot more things in the meantime and you don’t even realize it.  Most people don’t, you know.” It sounded ominous, this silent, unnoticed accretion of stuff in my flat, almost as bad as the mercury I’m bioaccumulating from the tuna I eat.

I tend to think of my flat as one of the major constants in my life. Things arrive and things depart Plants wither and die, new ones are bought at a garden fair. Old clothes are rounded up for a charity drive, new shirts and sweaters arrive at Christmas and sales. Objects break down. Stuff leaves in the occasional spring cleaning. But there seems to be some unseen adjustment mechanism that regulates my domestic milieu intérieur and keeps it in a state of homeostasis. The idea that my possessions were inexorably growing in number, like some indescribable, indestructible, nothing-can-stop-it blob or the ineluctable mid-riff bulge, was certainly disturbing.

“It’s like bed mites,” he said, relaxing back in the chair. “Did you know that in ten years’ time the weight of your mattress doubles because of dust mites and dead skin?” Insurance agents are like that. Full of stories of the worst things that can happen to people.

I’m too persnickety to take the mite story at face value (in fact, it turns out not to be true) but I thought it was an apt metaphor for my music and books and DVDs. Because they accumulate in the way sloughed-off skin and dead mites do—ever so gradually, bit by bit, book by book, disc by disc—I never quite realized how many more of them I have now than before. It was only when I cleared off the jars of dried lentils, quinoa, wheat berries and pasta in the pantry to make room for paperbacks that I thought, ok, this has gotta stop.

“Ok, I’ve got more books and music. And the dishwasher is now high-end. But I’ve also gotten rid of stuff,” I said. I would’ve told him about my theory of domestic homeostasis but the guy was obviously more comfortable talking about things.

“Not much, I bet. Why don’t you just take a look at the inventory we have on file,” he said and pulled out a photocopied sheet of the things I’d included when the policy was drafted. “And just make changes where necessary.”

I looked at the list later on that evening. Some of the appliances had been replaced, but no new ones added. The value of clothing inched higher a wee bit, mostly because of cycling gear, and kitchenware likewise, thanks to the acquisition of a professional chef’s knife and some new pots. An iPod had been lost and an iPad added. Books and CDs were adjusted upwards.

In the end, not much had to be revised. The bottom line changed less than it would have if I had just used the annual rate of inflation for the last seven years. It was still a shock, though, to see the final figure. My boss has a little painting in the guests’ WC in his house that’s worth more than the entire insured contents of my flat, but it still seemed a lot of money to me. It made me think once again that I’m still just toying with this project.

I can remember the stuff that arrived more easily than the stuff that left, especially the things whose loss is simply accepted as a consequence of everyday life—glassware breaks and socks seem to get lost in the wash—or the even more peculiar things whose loss, like the enigmatic if extremely small (0.000056g) diminution of weight that has been detected in the official kilogram stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, goes unnoticed or unexplained. Occasionally I’ll remember an object, like the silly liqueur glasses we once had with a thick, flared yellow-plastic stem, and wonder, whatever happened to that?

This evening I rifle through my drawers of socks and gather up all the single ones. There are nine. I look around for sets of glassware decimated in years of use and collect these as well: a single brandy snifter, a pair of flutes, a couple of crystal sherry glasses. I move to the cutlery drawers and find unpaired cob holders and chopsticks and various other orphaned or disabled objects. I move from drawer to drawer and room to room, collecting the evidence of loss–the disc-less jacket of a recording of the Allegri Miserere, the wide-angle lens for a camera I no longer own. They are curiosities arrested on the brink of disappearance, appendages left behind in an imperfect act of de-materialization.

Like the vanished substance of the prototype kilogram, they are all of trivial worth. Nothing needs to be adjusted in my insurance inventory. Not yet, anyway.

Day 16: Playing Cards

Ali stopped by last night to pick up the clothes I had set aside for him. Ali of the seductive, inquisitive chestnut brown eyes, noble Ali, the rare immigrant who is neither obsequious nor strident, proud of the culture he was born into but receptive to the one that by choice or necessity has become his second homeland (he speaks a near flawless Greek).

Anne Arden McDonald, Untitled Self-Portrait, 1993

He arrived with his younger cousin, who by coincidence was also called Ali but who unlike the elder Ali had no papers, and two large, somewhat beat up suitcases. That was my idea. I didn’t want them returning home with giant black garbage bags stuffed with clothes and running the risk that the police would mistake them for illegal immigrant peddlers.

I knew he didn’t want them all the clothes, but he was too polite to choose, even though I encouraged him to do so. “Someone will need this,” he said, folding a red-and-black checked lumberjack shirt into one of the suitcases. I doubted it. But it was clear that he didn’t want to offend me by rejecting items of clothing and thus criticizing, even if obliquely, my sense of fashion.

I was ashamed to tell him why I was getting rid of these clothes. The thought of voluntarily ridding oneself of one’s possessions would have seemed obscene to him. His father’s farm was expropriated by the government, or he had been forced to sell, I’m not sure which. Not that it matters. In either case it was a matter of forced dispossession. He was somewhat stoical about it. Fate, he said. The luck of the draw.

I can’t pretend to understand what it means to have the very source of your livelihood wrested from you, to see what you have you always thought of as yours as much as you would your skin and breath, suddenly and arbitrarily declared not yours. And it’s gone. Either that or you are.

Or maybe I do have an inkling. A year of my life was stolen. My 18^th to be precise.

I was coming back home to New York after spending a year in San Francisco before starting college. I was hitching back, just as I had left New York ten months earlier. I might never had made it to California if the second ride that picked me up on I-80 West outside Paterson, New Jersey—a guy with a pony tail in a pink Chevy—wasn’t headed straight to the Bay Area. His car suffered a major breakdown in Indiana; he bought another used car on the spot and continued to Oakland. I was in  California in four days.

I wasn’t so lucky on the return. The guy who picked me and my fellow traveler Jill up outside Daly City—also a long-haired Haight veteran in a beat-up car from the previous decade—wasn’t clear about where he was headed. That should have been a tip off. But I thought he was just being nice when he said, “Hey, I can get off on the next exit. Bring you closer toL.A.Every mile helps, man, eh?” Eventually he let us off at an isolated spot near San Luis Obispo—“Probably easier to get your next ride here,” he said, as we exchanged the traditional locomotive hippie handshake through the driver’s window. He pulled off with our backpacks still in the trunk.

“Hey, you forgot our backpacks!” I screamed. “Our backpacks!”

That night Jill and I giggled ourselves to sleep at a Catholic youth shelter in town. Now I would’ve flown back home the night of the theft, but I suppose I was a lot more flexible back then.Jill and I bought a bus ticket to L.A., where we stayed a few days at a friend’s house before she went back to her husband in the city and I continued on to Mexico, travelling till my money almost ran out, and then hitching back to New York.

I was saddened by the loss, though I didn’t realize how great my sadness was. My loss wasn’t on the scale of Ali’s or his father’s, but it was a theft of identity nonetheless.

There was a pair of jeans in the backpack that I had worn most of my year in San Francisco; it was so tattered that a counselor at the halfway house I worked at had taken them and sewn on patches from a wild array of fabrics; the pants were a walking patchwork quilt and I loved them. There was also a favorite sweatshirt in the pack, the one I had worn travelling with Jill to wineries in Northern California and the coast at Big Sur and artichoke farms in the Salinas Valley. And loads of pictures. The witnesses of my year of self-discovery and adventure and coming out. Pictures of Don, the son of a hamburger tycoon with a self-appointed mission to document gay life in the city who had let me stay with him at his spectacular apartment in the marina, and gentle Damian, a young psychiatrist in the Mission with his coterie of crazy transsexual friends, and Martin, a failed writer with a penchant for Singapore Slings who gave me a place to sleep when I first came to the city, a bunkbed in a dorm with other stray adolescents that he would visit late at night with less than honorable intentions, and Jill, of course, and a dozen other people I would never see again in my life.  All this was gone. It felt at times that I hadn’t really lived those adventures, as if I had never really met these people.

I was mistaken, of course. Memories exist outside of the objects in which they are at times incorporated—the souvenirs, photographs, and gifts that record the persons and events that mark our days. But it’s also true that the memories embodied in these mementos can exist independent of the memories archived in the neural backwaters of our brain.

I have one photograph from my year in San Francisco. I don’t know how it survived. It must have been in my pocket. It’s a picture of me.  A cycling cap sits on an unruly mane of curly dark-brown hair. I have the start of a beard, denser at the chin but hopelessly spare on his cheeks. I’m wearing a salmon-colored t-shirt, the kind you’d pick up in a discount department store, the ones sold three to a packet, with a pocket where men of an earlier generation used to keep their cigarettes. It hangs loose on my my somewhat wiry frame, drooping enough to reveal tufts of chest hair and a trace of a thin silver chain.

The young man in the photo has a mix of grace and vulnerability, sharpened by a subtle sexual energy that seems to course just below the surface. I don’t remember myself this way, beautiful and desirable. I still keep the picture with me. It’s a memory I would not otherwise have had.

Of the things we keep for others (as opposed to those objects we retain because of their utility or value or pleasure or beauty), some we keep because of a perceived obligation to our forbearers, others because of our respect for our friends. And then there are those things we keep because they remind us of the persons we were. And, as in the case of the beautiful young man in the salmon-colored t-shirt, because the object is the only means we have to remember.

For a moment I consider sacrificing the photo for the sake of the project. But I know I can’t do that, not now. It would feel as much a violation as the initial theft, and indeed, a more traumatic one than the first, as this is the only thing left connecting me with that year.

This is detachment on a grand scale, and I’m not ready for it. I need to inure myself in the discipline of relinquishment, and to do that, I must start small.

Matthew and I were a couple with intense serial friendships. We went through periods when we’d spend almost every night with the same couple. And then something happened—the couple would split up or move—and then we’d meet another couple and do the same thing over again. Stathis and Vangelis, Greg and Paula, Nick and Nick. It was always the same pattern. We’d hang out together, cook together, take our dogs out together and travel together. And we’d play cards together and almost always birimba. During our travels we had amassed a collection of playing cards. We had decks with reproductions of maps from the Age of Exploration. We had decks with traditional Russian figures—landed gentry and country folk, with very fine (and small) markings in fine Bodoni-like font for the suit and number, which wasn’t all that practical, but more playable than the French revolutionary facsimile deck, which didn’t have kings or queens at all. There was also a set of decks called Vieux Métiers de France—the queen of spades is a fishmonger, the ace of hearts a wine grower. There are brossiers and ceinturiers, cartiers and chandeliers.  We had decks emblazoned with malt whiskey brands and decks with ducks. The most handsome was a reproduction of a deck called Hector de Trois, designed by a certain Baptise Griumaud in 1848, who based it on a 17^th century design held by the Cabinet des Estampes de le Bibliothèque Nationale. The deck, with its strongly drawn if somewhat unattractive figures in black, gold, dark red and pine green, seems almost hand-painted. It is beautiful and memorable at the same time.

It’s odd. I haven’t had these cards in my hands for years. I took them out tonight and shuffled through them. They made me think of Stathis, who sadly died a few years ago. And the Nicks, who long ago separated, though I’m still convinced they were always looking for each other in the relationships they had after they left each other. I suddenly felt enormously grateful—to whom I don’t know, really—that they graced my life for a period of time. I suddenly want to write about them. I think that if I do, there’s no reason to keep the cards.

Trusting myself that I actually will write Stathis and Vangelis’s story, I slip the decks in a leftover department store gift bag. I’ll take them to a friend of mine who organizes poker nights at his house, though I doubt if his card-playing buddies will appreciate the crownless Liberty and Equality appearing on the figure cards.

The San Francisco photograph excerpt is taken from a longer post in Breach of Close entitled Looking Back.

Day 15: I-Books

The things we use in the company of others are fraught with multiple and ambivalent—if not at times wholly contradictory—meanings. The pillows we strew on the couch, the stack of hand-towels in the bathroom, a dish to leave olive pits in, the music we play, these are possessions we set out for the physical and emotional comfort of our friends and guests, a way to show them we think they’re special, to celebrate their presence in your house, to create an environment in which they feel at ease. At the same time, of course, they say something about us, our taste and generosity and sophistication (or lack thereof). They attest to the person we are or want to be, which of course is not the always the same thing. The greater the discrepancy between the two, the more inauthentic the object and the more visible the pretension.

Sandra Bowden, Book of Nails, 2003

There is perhaps no greater touchstone of inauthenticity than the coffee table book. Ostensibly a means to spark conversation but more than often not serves to allow guests to occupy themselves while the host absents himself to stir the risotto or refresh drinks, these large-format, visual-heavy albums are also a witness to the interests, education and indeed character of the host. Or what we know he isn’t but desperately desires to be.

Of all the books that line the bookcases and shelves in the house and could have been selected, these four or five occupy the most highly charged and prominent of positions in the entire house—directly in the middle of the company that has gathered for the evening, squarely set on display between guest and host. Of all the books that the host could have pulled from the bookshelves or bookcases, these few are the ones that say, “Yes, this is me. I find these books so interesting that I think you might find them interesting as well.” These are canonical books of identity. They remind me of oversized missals on the altars of the Catholic churches I frequented as a child.

It is never a chance selection. It is always a more or less deliberately curated exhibition of one’s self, whether actual or desired. They are meant to be viewed, much in the same way as a valuable illustrated manuscript in a museum case is intended to be approached. The priceless manuscript gives us one, presumably characteristic, look at the contents of the entire book; the coffee table book presumably affords us insight into the character of our host.

They are not books to be read but leafed through while the tea brews or in the intermission between cocktails and soup, which is why the genre is often heavily dependent on visuals and light on text (though not always; my friend Nikolas’s coffee table is indeed his own reading table, more private than public perhaps, and as fascinating as the man himself). They are books for the eye rather than the mind, lushly if not beautifully photographed albums luxuriously printed on glossy high-quality paper and covering topics ranging from the expected, like the aerial photographs of Our Planet Earth and illustrated histories of rock bands to the more esoteric titles of The Art of Boxing and Surf Photography of the 1960s and 1970s and Science on the Nanoscale to the enigmatically arcane Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World Most Colorful Despots. Not to mention such meta-coffee table books as The Coffee Table Coffee Table Book, a history of the genre told by a pair of design curators, and the shamelessly opportunistic Books Do Furnish a Room.

I think I have a relatively honest coffee table. But I can’t help thinking, perhaps there is a bit of posturing in the selection of books I have laid out. In my defense they are nearly all catalogs of exhibitions that I have actually been to and that intrigued me: the Palle Nielsen Orfeus and Eurydice series of prints, an Atget restrospective, Demand at the Nationalgallerie. And, ironically enough, given this project, the catalog which accompanied the centenary celebration of the Deutsche Werkbund that was held in Munich in 2007 but more so of the now iconic objects the Werkbund produced in its hundred-year history . Parr and Badget’s marvelous history of the photobook comes the closest to pretense. I know much much less about the history of photography than a book like this might indicate.

Although relatively honest, these books don’t make my guests feel more comfortable or trigger talk (how do you strike up a conversation on “Art Between Traces of the Past and Utopian Futures” anyway?). They perhaps say more about what I want them to think of me. As I said, they are not particularly inauthentic possessions. I do care about what these books talk about and I still read through them on occasion. But I am obviously neither a well-read connoisseur nor a professional in art, and certainly art is not theonly thing I’m interested in. And art in Berlin even less so.

If I really were focused on my guests and wanted to provide them with something entertaining to pass the time with or begin a strand of conversation with, I’d have laid out the richly illustrated Mediterranean Islands (replete with crowd-factor rankings) and Beefcake: Muscle Magazines of America 1950-1970 or the even more provocative album of Tom of Finland drawings. But instead I have exhibition catalogs.

We use our possessions to construct and refine our sense of self. It’s not all we use, of course. Values, memory, desire and neurosis are also instrumental in cultivating our identity. But possessions matter.

I recently ran across a curious experiment in self-perceptions that Russel Belk described in his fascinating essay on “Possessions and the Extended Self” (which I’ll be coming back to in a future post). Conducted by Ernst Prelinger and written up in theJournal of Psychology as “Extension and Structure of the Self”, the experiment asked subjects to sort a collection of 160 objects on a continuum between “self” and “not self”. Genital organs and the skin proved unsurprisingly to have the highest rankings of “self”, followed by psychological processes such as conscience and physiological ones such as pain and itching and then attributes such as occupation and then, before valuesand abstract ideas, “possessions and productions” (the latter including effluents such as perspiration).

If possessions are intricately involved in our construction of an extended self, then dispossession is logically an ebbing or constriction of the self. It is not coincidental that prisons, monasteries and mental hospitals strip the inmate or applicant of his possessions, including in some circumstances even physical “possessions” such as hair, in an attempt to diminish the individuality of the inductee. The simple answer to the question, what is left of Nathan after what Nathan owns is gone is… less of Nathan. Provided, of course, that what is lost, discarded or expropriated is a possession with which I have used or now use to construct my identity. Most of the objects I have rid myself of so far have been relatively inconsequential to identity, so perhaps nothing has really been lost of Nathan.

Today’s loss is no different, I’m afraid. I am relieving myself only of the temptations to pretension: a hardcover copy in French of volume 5 in Joann Sfar’s graphic novel series on the Rabbi’s cat, Jérusalem d’Afrique, which, while a nice reminder of a visit to the Brussels Musée de la Bande Dessinée suggests a proficiency in the language I do not possess; an edition of the scores for Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (I don’t play music), and The New Cook, a chic minimalist volume of meals I will never cook. These possessions, which I will give to friends, are easy to disown. But I am bound to run out of the inconsequential and inauthentic, those possessions in which I have invested little of myself and which can easily be dislodged from my home without compromising the self I have constructed within this home. And then things will get very interesting.