In college my roommate was reading The Condition of Postmodernity by David Harvey for a class when she quoted a passage to me that I still remember ten years later:
Deeper questions of meaning and interpretation also arise. The greater the ephemerality, the more pressing the need to discover or manufacture some kind of eternal truth that might lie therein.
(This first statement is not that original. Bonnie Raitt sings it more lucidly and artistically in her song "Angel from Montgomery," which has always made my heart ache with its lyrics:
Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold onto
To believe in this living
Is just a hard way to go)
Harvey then continues:
Rochberg-Halton, in a sample study of North Chicago residents in 1977, finds, for example, that the objects actually valued in the home were not the 'pecuniary trophies' of a materialist culture which acted as 'reliable indices of one's socio-economic class, age, gender, and so on,' but the artefacts that embodied 'ties to loved ones and kin, valued experiences and activities and memories of significant life events and people.' Photographs, particular objects (like a piano, a clock, a chair), and events (the playing of a record of a piece of music, the singing of a song) become the focus of a contemplative memory, and hence a generator of a sense of self that lies outside the sensory overloading of consumerist culture and fashion. The home becomes a private museum to guard against the ravages of time-space compression.
EB told me after reading this passage that I am a quintessential example of someone who decorates her room to ward off time-space compression and create a meaningful identity. And it was certainly true of me in college. My room was a piece of art-- my blankets strewn on the floor since I had no bed frame; my desk crafted from a hollowed out door and two filing cabinets since I could not afford to buy one; my only other furniture was two vintage chairs and a beat-up mirror bought cheap at a a garage sale around the corner.
On my desk sat a glass bowl containing burned twigs and paper, a symbolic cremation of my dead friend Alex. On my walls were stills from Sadie Benning's short film "Jollies," a copy of a photograph of a warped greyhound by Joseph Koudelka and a computer generated three dimensional depiction of the protein hemoglobin which has always fascinated me. The walls exuded me.
My room was not so much a reflection of my identity during my marriage when my husband basically forbid me from decorating as I pleased (I wanted to paint the famous quotation from Henry Beston's Outermost House about how wild animals are not inferior to humans but rather "other nations" on the wall of the guest bedroom which he did not approve of...)
When I left my marriage for months I possessed nothing, not even a bed or pillow. My room was barer than bare. I slept half the week in San Jose and half the week at my girlfriend's house deep in the Santa Cruz mountains. I was in shock, in transition, my identity not exactly shattered but in flux (I was going from being sickeningly settled to having my whole future up in the air).
When the girlfriend and I broke up, I finally found it in me to begin to put together a room that reflected me a little bit, hanging a series of over-sized bird postcards that my sister had picked up for me in Israel (the Griffon vulture being my favorite). I gradually added more touches that were me. On the bookshelves I bought sat a wooden canvasback duck that the Santa Clara Audubon society gave me as a gift; it reminds me how I can survive disaster because it makes me think of a time in my life when I was betrayed by a veterinarian I greatly admired and let go from a job in a shelter, losing as a result my training, my income, and jeopardizing my standing in the veterinary nursing program. I had watched canvasbacks at a marsh near the shelter on almost every lunch break so that duck became for me a symbol of my phoenix-like rise from the ashes of that particular calamity. I also put up photographs of blue herons I took as a teenager in the Netherlands and other momentos. The room was me. Then I decided to move to DC and the whole work of art got taken apart and put into boxes.
In DC this summer I had no room of my own, between sharing a room and living in a fully furnished and decorated house.
So now I get to re-construct my old room and in the process am forced to re-construct my identity once more. This time it is once again a rather minimalist room, as it was immediately following my divorce. Perhaps I am again lacking a firm identity, empty at the core, but I do not think that is what it means this time around. I think the ephemerality of my existence does not feel so pressing in a town where I have lived so many years and have many good friends. I also feel that my identity is more solid and does not need the buttressing supports of a room full of momentos to remind me who I am. The room definitely still reflects me-- the few books on the floor are absolutely me to a T, the paintings reflect my artistic tastes and the crow reminds me of Eagle Eyes and Corvid, who share my love for intelligent birds.
EB probably asked about the skeletons (wondering why they weren't being displayed) in her comment on my post where I first put up the first pictures of my room because of an event that happened a few summers ago that made a huge impression on her and D: I came to visit North Carolina and discovered some skeletons (quite literally) in my dad's attic from roadkill I had picked up, buried and let decompose as a kid (yes, even as a kid I begged my parents to pull over when we went by roadkill). I proceeded to jettison my clothes and pack the skeletons in lieu of my wardrobe. I returned to California with a suitcase of skeletons but no clothes. EB and D thought this was remarkable. I thought it was the obvious and logical solution when presented with a space crunch in packing.
So no skeletons, but perhaps in the future when I lead less of a spartan existence they may feature prominently on some wall or display case.
(EB it seems you have more and more free time on your hands judging by your prolific posts on your own blog as well increased commenting on mine so I thought I would write you something sufficiently intellectual that it would stimulate you while you are on maternity leave and home alone with the boy... hope it makes you smile with fond memories).
If you look closely, there are also cameras (yay photography), houses making up the shirt's seam, and a strange marble piece in the left hand corner that I like.
