The Museum of You (4): Favourite Things

In a recent, slick television ad created by Colenso BBDO for State Insurance, people from different walks of life are seen carefully wrapping their most treasured possessions and putting them into boxes. A tiny box for a single toy truck; a regular box for a collection of porcelain figurines; a comically large box, for an entire house.

You can watch the 60-second ad here.

Love your stuff, says the slogan. And: ‘Your favourite things are worth protecting. Tell us yours at my3things.co.nz, and help us do things differently’.

Sharing intimate information with an insurer is not the thing one does the most freely of care, and with very good reason, but these days companies want you to talk to them, it’s become a customary part of the set up. Call us on this number; text us your choice; go on our website, and tell us what you think. Now I’m not sure when it was that the campaign was discontinued – the ads were showing as late as last week – but if you do bother to go to my3things.co.nz, this is what comes up:

Whatever information you or others might have communicated to State Insurance, it’s been securely locked away, and whether it has helped the company do things differently is not clear at this time. Here is the eponymous policy, if you wish to take a gander. 

So what are these favourite things? Few of the items shown in the ad are of likely monetary value: a couple of motor vehicles, a small art collection, plus the house itself. Mostly they are objects primarily if not solely imbued with social meaning: personal photographs, of course, as Louisa Jaggar had predicted in the book that inspired this occasional series, but more generally items handled and talked about with the kind of tender care that one reserves to that which is irreplaceable and therefore would be largely pointless to insure. The owner of the vintage bright red Fiat Cinquecento might get some money paid to her if the car was lost or stolen, but one feels that it wouldn’t be the point. And then there are the little toy truck, the much loved figurines, the items that require explanation in order to be understood: the point of all of these is precisely that they are uniquely meaningful to their people and cannot be adequately accounted for by their exchange value. The ad of course is a clever acknowledgment of this: if misfortune should befall you we’ll give you some money, but we’re ultimately powerless to replace those objects and what they signified. However we understand this and we care. Feel the love of the brand.

It’s emotional manipulation with a light touch, and frankly there’s a lot worse on the air, plenty of ads that are more insidious than this. Nor is our emotional attachment to objects being newly exploited here, every second advertiser does it in every second campaign. But the imagery is perhaps worthy of a second look.

First of all… where are these people going, that they need to make sure they have packed the house? I’m being too literal, no doubt, the packing is just there to signify how much we care, and how much State Insurance cares that we care. But how is this for literal?

A giant shoebox, right in the middle of Wellington’s Civic Square. You can peep inside it – it has holes, as if for letting the air in. The obvious association is with the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, albeit in an utterly impoverished form: in spite of the appeal for the public’s input, there is no meaningful social dimension here, no way to make a mark. The shoebox sits there like an alien construction, as if abandoned by an absent-minded colossus. And that’s what makes the ad visually and conceptually intriguing, that incongruity of scale: we wrap things that are too small and things that are too large, things that do not belong in a shoebox. We displace them, we close them in. In order to protect them, we fundamentally alter their nature: you cannot live in a house that sits in a shoebox, nor drive a car inside of one.

This is all done for comic effect, but then so was Buster Keaton’s drowning life preserver, discussed last year by Evan Calder Williams in a brilliant post over at Socialism and/or Barbarism. The wrongness of objects in Keaton’s Steambot Bill, Jr., their refusal to behave as we expect of them – so perfectly captured by the life preserver that sinks like a stone towards the bottom of the river – was put on that occasion at the service of Calder Williams’ newly-minted hostile object theory, that is to say

a conviction that objects aren't just indifferent to us, aren't just coherent beyond our intentions, aren't just darkly resistant to correlating with the world as it is for us. Far worse for us, when we can glimpse even a shadow of how they are not for us, they reveal themselves, with a faceless sneer, as fundamentally hostile, uncertain, dangerous, and incommensurable with the purpose for which they were designed.

There is no such apparent malice in the relationship between the objects and their owners in the ‘Favourite Things’ ad, or if there is it goes the other way – it is the objects that get mistreated, put to the wrong use. Yet one should bear in mind that the primary function of these objects is to serve as mediators, carriers of memory: that’s the significance of the shoebox, which is also – not by coincidence – the key metaphor in José van Dijck’s seminal study on mediated memory. Photographs, documents, small keepsakes: those are all things that bind us affectively with our past, and help us give it coherence. They are the key exhibits in the museum of us, to a not insignificant extent they are us. But the comically oversized shoebox casts a peculiar shadow over this. Look, it says, there is no limit to your capacity to love stuff. You can save everything, keep everything, in the dark, in an attic, forever.

***

It is my modest conviction that the failure to truly question the simple, appealing narrative of the shoebox is one of the key problems of contemporary memory studies. Saying that memories are not created independently of culture, nor independently of mediation, but exist in a dialectic relationship with them is satisfyingly descriptive, but fails to answer for the anxiety, the tensions, the dysfunction, in short what we might call – warping the title of Daniel Miller’s anthropological study of Stuart Street, London – the discomfort of things.

There is ample scope, for those who should seek to remedy this failure, to establish a branch of hostile object theory dedicated to studying the contents of those mutant, abnormal shoeboxes – the photographs that obscure their subjects, the diaries that forget what’s written in them, the recordings that misconstrue their content, not to mention the proof artefacts that keep faithful record of things that never happened so dear to Philip K. Dick. These are the hostile objects that will betray our trust and make us reliant on false pasts, false histories, sometimes to the point of neurosis and death. They succeed in doing so precisely because we are naturally predisposed to trust in everyday things and in their capacity to carry concrete, objective meanings within coherent and authoritative narratives, as opposed to social meanings within competing and contestable ones.

There is another piece of advertising that caught my eye last week. This one:

It is, somewhat perplexingly, a road safety ad, urging us to get off the road if we’re too tired to drive, or else a giant hand will close on us and destroy us. Closer inspection reveals the demonic appendage to be made of a clutter of grey and indistinct household objects.

These are like the spectral double of State’s favourite things: unbranded, unloved and unlovable, they are the consumer objects that we are forever doomed to accumulate, working ourselves into life-threatening levels of exhaustion. They are malicious, Calder Williams would say, because they instantiate ‘the antagonism… that drives capital.’ They are therefore

built records of a labor that wishes it did not exist. That abhors the conditions that demand it and which, conversely, it demands as the guarantee of a continued recognition that this labor meant something.

That they mean something: it’s what we ask of our things, so as to give meaning to the labour we exchange in order to purchase them, and the work necessary to care for them. We may take some comfort in the notion that this affective and symbolic content is furnished by people and not inherent in the objects themselves, and opine that agency rests therefore solely with us. But in fact the meanings that we can attach to things, and the kind of memories that they can mediate, are culturally codified and predetermined to a very significant extent; and even that doesn’t account for the murky undertow of anxiety and fear – of death, of there being no future, therefore no sense in memory – that is always pulling down on our desire to find simple comfort in things.

The application of hostile object theory to the study of mediated memory would lead us into those depths, where subjectivity doesn’t coalesce according to orderly and normative patterns of behaviour but rather explodes into a fitful incoherence, eroding our faith in personal as well as collective histories. At the very least, this should help us realise that there is no safety in wrapping our favourite things and placing them in shoeboxes, for there’s no guarantee that when some day we go back and open the lid, those meanings – if not the objects themselves – would still be there for us to read.

Evan Calder Williams, 'The Drowning Life Preserver (Hostile Object Theory)'. Socialism and/or Barbarism, 16 June 2010.

The Museum of You (3): Something You Lost

I once had a friend who liked to participate in the auctions held from time to time in our hometown of objects found in railway carriages. He enjoyed the exercise very much and was always full of stories about the scarcely believable things that people would forget on board - oil paintings, large farming implements, furniture, complete dinner sets. I suspected some of these finds to be apocryphal, and none more so than the urn with the ashes of an unknown deceased, if for no other reason that I couldn't believe the authorities would put that particular item up for auction. Ditto the inflatable sex doll. However, over the years I received some independent verification that a) this auction actually exists, although it is held in a very out of the way location and you have to know somebody who knows somebody since it isn't advertised anywhere, and b) people do in fact lose the most bizarre things on trains. (Including, yes, dead relatives).

According to this forum of railway enthusiasts, Milan is the only Italian city where such objects are sold; elsewhere they are donated to charity. Imagine then the surprise of the drug rehab centre that earlier this year received a backpack found to contain 64 dynamite sticks weighing 12 kilograms in total. It later transpired that the backpack had spent up to two years in the lost luggage office of the in Genoa railway station, and the police is still working on figuring out how it came to be lost, and by whom. But of course in stations and airports elsewhere, most loudly and proudly in the US, you are reminded that if you so much as leave your luggage unattended for a few minutes, it will be seized and destroyed. It is best to beware of contents unknown.

There may be some deeper cultural undercurrent here than the straightforward fear that something may have been abandoned with malicious intent. When people come to be separated from their stuff, it is an alienation of sorts - a very literal one, in terms of the word's etymology, as well as the inverse of the Marxian sense, that inscribes alienation in capitalist relations and notions of property. In the cultures that establish a strong correlation between who you are and what you own, the idea of things being lost is psychologically disruptive, regardless of the raw material value of the thing lost.

The act of losing money - either because of theft, or a stock or property market misadventure, or the loss of one's job - is pertinent but requires separate treatment. The wonderfully worded notion of one's 'personal net worth', that naturally originated in the United States, can be brought to bear here, but money isn't stuff. It exists on a much more abstract plane, changes in value as a result of its own special dynamics, and the nature and psychology of its ownership are quite unique. One can of course think of examples of how money can be turned back into stuff, such as this exchange in Buster Keaton's Sherlock Holmes Jr:

"I lost a dollar"
"Can you describe it?"

Or the classic image of Uncle Scrooge swimming in his money.


Or again the tradition of the lucky penny. But for most intents and purposes, and even as it allows to acquire things, or buy some more life in the bizarre lease arrangement that governs human existence and subsistence in capitalist societies, money is an abstraction, a number, not a thing, and certainly not something you'd ever be so crass as to display in the museum of you, or that can be lost irreplaceably - any amount of money of equal or greater denomination will do.

If I may be allowed a little autobiographical moment, I have in fact lost an item that nicely illustrates the difference between semiotic and material value, insofar as this difference can be said to exist. It seems that some time during my fourth year on this planet I taught myself to read and write, something that my parents only became aware of one night when I left a note on the dinner table and made it with a scowl for the door of our apartment. The note said

SONO SUTUFO DI QUESTE INGUSTIZE
VADO DAL MEDICO
NON SO SI TORNO
GIOVANI

Which, minus the typos, translates as follows

I AM TIRED OF THESE INJUSTICES
I'M GOING TO THE DOCTOR'S
I DON'T KNOW IF I'LL EVER RETURN
GIOVANNI

As it happens, it was dark in the landing outside and I ventured no further. In typical fashion, however, my mother took the fact that I wanted to leave the family entirely in her stride, and opted to celebrate instead my cognitive prowess. She therefore tucked the note in her handbag and proceeded to show it to all and sundry. In fact, if you resided anywhere in the Northern Emisphere during the Nineteen-Seventies, I'd say you've probably seen it. Then we lost sight of it for, oh, fifteen years or so, until I found it amongst some junk in a drawer and possibly even chastised my mother for being so careless with it (you can see where this is going), then took over the curatorship of the precious childhood artefact. And I can tell you exactly how I lost it: I put it inside a tacky but fond copy of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and in the flurry of activities that preceded our emigration to New Zealand the book must have ended up in the wrong box, because it never reached us down here.

I am genuinely sorry about that, and seeing as mum and I remember the note's contents word for word, hence there is no loss in that regard (although a bibliographer might beg to differ), the reason must be that I see intrinsic value in the object itself, some sort of material validation of my having been a precocious pain in the arse. The metaphor of the museum is a good test here, for I have no doubt that I would have included it in my personal exhibit. But it wasn't to be.

If the book ended up in the wrong box, it would have made its way to a second-hand bookshop, so chances are somebody eventually came into its possession. I wonder what they made of it, if they chucked it away or kept it as a curio, perhaps to be used as a bookmark for the flamboyantly bound works of that man from Baltimore. I'm thinking probably the former. But as it happens, that note is exactly the kind of thing that would have tickled the fancy and curiosity of the readers of Found Magazine, seeing that it is not too dissimilar for instance from this entry on Found, the work of an unknown primary school child in Brooklyn:

'Holla. This world is going be ruined. Finish.'

Creators Davy Rothbart and Jason Bitner explain that at the magazine they

collect found stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, doodles-- anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life. Anything goes.

I shall freely confess to finding the magazine itself exquisitely boring, but it's quite the phenomenon, with books and tours (featuring songs inspired by the finds), a dirty section, international beachheads and a lively community. By all accounts its creators are smart people who are quite aware of participating in a culture that, in the words of Eric Karjala,

insists that certain things be popular, and it doesn’t necessarily matter what: a hideous dancing baby, the senseless engrish from an obscure video game, a random 1980s pop hit by Rick Astley. We are so desperate for commonality that any random cultural artefact can become a shared experience, and this is especially true on the internet, which is viral not just in nature but in consequence, making us nauseated from the absurdity.

The little spice that Found adds to the mixture is that its artefacts are collected around, in the incongruously named Real World, and dematerialised, beamed into cyberspace to provide momentary occasions of reflection and contribute a whole new source of material to the ever expanding uber-text that so many of us read every day looking for meaningful signs. As if the information already there wasn't enough, and these 'glimpses into someone else's life' contained special kernels of truth, otherwise missing pieces of whatever puzzle it is that the culture is trying to solve by means of the Internet.

Or maybe people read Found because it's innocent fun. Either way, it leaves me fairly cold: there is so much more in the world that gets meaningfully lost, instead of just being crumpled and discarded, as most of Found's finds are, indicating that perhaps they had ceased to be significant to the owners themselves. If I have to go looking for glimpses, I'll browse the lists of items recovered by the Carabinieri, or by the city of Turin, the two largest online repositories back home, and there, hidden amongst hundreds of cellphones and personal organisers and umbrellas and sunglasses, discover candelabras, exquisite antique jewellery, a vest pocket watch inscribed 'from your friends', magnificent old coats, but also - and overwhelmingly - items of little or no value, that yet some officer has bothered to archive and describe, often in painstaking detail, just in case they might have, for their owners, a meaning that they themselves can't see.

There is much there to fantasise about the personal histories, and the connections lost, but also something to commend in that idea of service, the effort spent with very little statistical chance of reuniting anybody with anything.

In that spirit, did you happen to lose this in Cusano Milanino some time in 2004?

I know whom you can call about that.

The Museum of You (2): Somebody's Home in Leipzig

Go to The Museum of You (1)

Socialism has to start somewhere
(The Lives of Others)

Wild new Ubik salad dressing, not Italian, not French, but an entirely new and different taste treat that's waking up the world.
(Philip K. Dick, Ubik)


Justine and I left Italy in October of 1997, and spent much of the last six or so weeks in the country getting rid of stuff. Actually, we had planned to go for at least a couple of years - the hold up was that I had to earn the exemption from the military service - and I had had some time to change the mindset I grew up with vis-à-vis my things: namely that they'd stay mine forever, barring the odd change of heart or swap for item of similar value. LPs, favourite furnishing, books, memorabilia of various kinds: I never really envisaged having to give them away, certainly not all at once. Therefore I grew up a hoarder. Of books and music, especially, like most people of my age and circumstances.

The prospect of moving to New Zealand, even though it may not be forever, changed all that. Justine's mindset was already that of a light traveller, but for me it took some adjusting. Long story short: I learned to stop hoarding. And we got rid of whatever we couldn't fit in the luggage for the plane and the two big boxes to be sent by ship. Justine's beloved jeweller's desk and some books were sold, while the rest we gave to friends: stereo, television, more books, some furniture, a conga drum I don't despair to play (badly) again some day. And an answer phone, with its little micro-cassette still in place. The answer phone went to our good friend Caterina, who some years later got together with a chap called Max. And it was Max who, during an IM chat a couple of years ago, told me they were going to return the cassette, and that I should listen to it.

They did, and I did. Turns out my father had left one of the messages still recorded on the B-side.

We lost dad in July of 1999. The message was left in late September of 1997, shortly before our departure. It was brief and mundane: he and mum wanted to know when I was going to swing by and teach them to use the PC I was leaving behind so they could communicate with us. Brief, mundane, and possibly a little impatient. But we had no other recording of his voice, and to hear it like that, without warning (although I did have an inkling) had an undeniable effect. The sense of presence that recording technologies are able to provoke is very familiar to us all, and yet in the precise moment it occurs so often a source of astonished surprise. But it was in this case a somewhat uncomfortable presence. Because of that hint of impatience, perhaps? It was so rare in him. For whatever reason, I still don't know how I feel about the tape. The best analogy I can come up with is that it's as if this was the only photo we had of him, and it wasn't a terribly flattering one. But it remains a unique record of somebody so dear and so missed, and naturally I'm very grateful to our friends for giving it to us, and am treating it with utmost care - I made in fact an mp3 of it right away for extra safety.


How to curate the museum of you is one of this blog's recurring topics. What we do (and what to do) with our stuff, with the benefit of hindsight or, sometimes, foresight. In this sense the returned tape has to be seen as a most fortuitous addition to the collection, something that we didn't anticipate would one day become precious. Had we remained in Italy and kept the answer phone, in all likelihood we would never have bothered to inspect the tape. So departures, too, can aid. Giving things away.

A most irreverent segue. Some time in 1989, a 24-year-old man leaves his apartment in Crottendorfer Straße, Leipzig for the last time. But it isn't a long-planned departure: he leaves food in the fridge, a cup of coffee on the table, dirty dishes in the sink from the night before. The most salient things we know about this man is that he spent a year in jail and that the police wants to speak to him in relation to a mysterious audiocassette. His name hasn't been made public. But the accounts of the discovery focus not on the person, but rather on what he left behind, and more specifically on a number of consumer products made in Eastern Germany at the time and since discontinued: Marella margarine, Vita Cola, Karo and Jewel cigarettes, Elkadent toothpaste, some liquor or other. Says Mark Aretz, the architect that entered the apartment for the first time in almost twenty years last November, while inspecting the soon-to-be-renovated building:

When we opened the door we felt like Howard Carter when he found the grave of Tutankhamen. Everything was a mess but it was like a historic treasure trove, a portal into an age long gone.^[1]

I know what some of you are thinking: he's going to read way too much into this. And I'm not going to disappoint you. Because, seriously: it was barely twenty years ago. I know a certain wall fell in the interim, and the world won't be the same again, but Howard Carter was looking back some four thousand years; and what rocked his socks wasn't the pharaoh's toothpaste either.

Post-Fredric Jameson, we've learned to recognise this fetishistic attachment to the most insignificant details of our immediate past as 'a tangible symptom of an omnipresent, omnivorous and well-nigh libidinal historicism'[2]. And of course the demands of surface realism - of getting the tiny details just right, of evoking the past with the sharp exactness of a product label of yore - are highly instrumental to this particular project. Hence the well-nigh libidinal excitement of the media reports: we travelled back in time, and what we found were margarine and cigarettes and socialist cola.

It adds a delicious layer of irony that this scenario could so easily have been written by the authors of a recent film that grappled with - or, according to some, is at the forefront of - the phenomenon of Ostalgia, or nostalgia for the East: Goodbye Lenin!, in which an ardent supporter of the Socialist Unity Party who wakes up from a coma after the fall of the Berlin Wall is spared by her children the possibly fatal shock that this piece of news would bring, and nursed in her apartment as if the DDR still existed. An illusion that involves - among other things - transferring new products into the old, familiar containers, for without the meticulous preservation of the surface reality of everyday gestures and objects, time itself could not be stopped and rewound.

Jameson coolly describes what Philip K. Dick had feverishly inhabited, but with no less precision, for his stories of false and implanted memories are also about the past as commodity, and about carefully crafted illusions of authenticity, while another real, which may or may not be the real real, threatens to burst through the cracks and assert itself at any moment - as it does in the form of a statue Lenin hoisted through the streets of Berlin at the end of Goodbye. But it's a discussion for another day. Today's story was that of a modern archaeological dig in the middle of Leipzig, looted for objects of absolutely no value, while the sole ancient inhabitant left, taking perhaps the contents of the museum of him. I hope he did.


Update 21 February 2008

Alas, he didn't. A correspondent in Germany got in touch to reveal the rest of the story as it has since emerged in the local press. She writes:

A Spiegel journalist found out what had happened to the guy who had lived in the flat. In the English article it just says that he was "a 24 year-old man who had been in trouble with the authorities" (not unusual for the GDR) but it turns out that he had as a 22 year-old apparently said to a border guard that he wanted to go West (as a kind of joke - see also Milan Kundera!) so the authorities (not surprisingly) locked him up for a year or so. His parents set up the flat for him and he lived there for a few months after his release but then he was thrown out of the GDR (put on a train with a one-way ticket to the West) in September 1989. In November the Wall fell and he visited his parents in Leipzig that Christmas. He had found a job as a carpenter in Lower Saxony. On the 19th of September 1990 he was on his way back to Lower Saxony from a building site in Hamburg in a minibus with colleagues when the bus crashed and he was one of those killed, dying of head injuries in a Hamburg hospital on September 21st 1990 aged 25. His parents still live in Leipzig.

^[1] Statement originally made to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. For the translation I referred to the CNN article.
^[2] Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review (No. 146, 1984), p. 66.

Author unknown. East German Apartment Caught in Time Warp. CNN.com/Europe. January 29, 2009.
Fredric Jameson. ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. New Left Review. No. 146, 1984, pp. 53-92.
Benedetta Perilli. Qui Crottendorfer Strasse, Lipsia, la casa dove il tempo si è fermato. La Repubblica.it. 27 January 2009.
Matthias Lüdecke's photos of the apartment can be viewed here

Goodbye Lenin! (Germany 2003, dir. Wolfgang Becker)



Bonus Track
Self-Referentiality - Where Would Blogs Be Without It?

A couple of maintenance notes: I never explicitly acknowledged the kindness of my friend PFB, who set up some time ago on a page hosted by the Politecnico in Turin the 'printer-friendly' version of this blog you can find in the sidebar. You have to right click on a post's title first (the blog's homepage address won't work) and the little app will format it nice and ready for printing, if that's how you roll. I personally don't, but I used it today to (finally) do a proper backup of the posts thus far. I'm sure there are better ways, but I found saving in html the pages thus rendered a very quick way to stash away the posts, whereas I'm not interested in keeping a record of the changing content of the sidebar itself. I'm sure that by tweaking the script on PFB's page you could backup the whole of the Internet that way, given but world enough and time.

Also: as of last week (and also on the sidebar) it is possible to subscribe to this blog via email, an idea I shamelessly purloined from Harvest Bird's recent beautiful site redesign. Thought you might like to know.

The Museum of You (1)

In an earlier post on objects and memory, I pointed out that our household is not blessed with an abundance of precious heirlooms. Other than an old Roman oil lamp, whose value is more symbolic than monetary, we simply don't own very many old things: you could very reasonably blame a combination of not being wealthy enough (nor, perhaps, inclined) to purchase such things and the fact that we haven't been completely orphaned yet. On my side of the family for instance my mother is the custodian of a fair collection of stuff, of varying sentimental, aesthetic and economic value. But at this stage it's the lamp, a pocket watch that my father used to carry around in his late teens in an effort to pose as a dandy (a picture that I am simply not able to reconcile with the person I knew, but I have unimpeachable witnesses) and a book dated 1824 entitled Conversations of Lord Byron: noted during a residence with his lordship at Pisa in the years 1821 and 1822 by Thomas Medwin, Esq. The book was a present from mum, who bought it at an antiques dealer's in Milan in an effort - I think - to convey her regret at having given me such grief when I abandoned the study of physics for the humanities. (For the record, it wasn't a difficult decision: I would have most certainly become the world's worst physicist. And I can do far less damage as a humanist.)

As it turns out, we're not taking exceptionally good care of any of these objects, but we could be doing much worse. I have it on the authority of Saving Stuff: How to Care for And Preserve Your Collectibles, Heirlooms and Other Prized Possessions, a book co-authored by Louisa Jaggar, who came up with the idea, and Don Williams, senior conservator at the Smithsonian Institution.

The message of the book is simple. As Williams explains:

Saving Stuff is about preserving and maintaining "the museum of you". This museum is made up of the objects that have special value for you. I can't stop an earthquake, flood, or alien invasion, but I can share how to prevent most homegrown catastrophes as well as how to go about saving stuff: comic books, wedding dresses, baseball cards, furniture, stamps, papers, film, pictures, records, DVDs, CDs, dollhouses, flags, and weird and wacky things like Cousin Cecil's African water buffalo head or your private collection of sheep's eyeballs kept by your grandfather in mayonnaise jars. (p. xxvi)

'Objects that have special value for you' is of course a phrase very close to my sensibility. Indeed, being in charge of one's museum means having to make the full range of curatorial decisions: not only how to preserve an object and what measure of use it should be allowed to retain, if any, but also and in the first place what is in fact worth caring for and preserving based on one's resources and the space available.

I find the figure of the curator very interesting, both literally and metaphorically. Literally, in that I like finding out about what makes things decay: it turns out that for the most part it's light, and little animals, and a biggish animal (us) and use. Whereas metaphorically the curator - more so than the librarian - is an ideal character to study when thinking about how to remember the things that matter, as faithfully as possible, for as long as possible, while at the same time allowing them to be accessed and enjoyed.

And further, oftentimes the museum is the product of an ideology, and in is charge of constructing a narrative - the New Zealand reader will no doubt think: Te Papa. Both of these aspects, ideology and narrative, are not so readily associated with the other chief institution-come-metaphor, the library, and are mostly overlooked in discussions concerning personal memory, except when this memory is externalised in the form of a memoir.

But reflecting on the nature of the museum achieves a little more still: for a museum is also, non-metaphorically, a place in charge of preserving a collective past, so it is a locus of memory in its own right. The ensuing feedback loop with the museum-as-metaphor is productive in that it encourages reflection on the relationship between individual and shared memory, between history and art and their transmission.

Consider also this: typically a museum is in charge of storing artefacts with semiotic - but not predominantly linguistic - value. Try not to think of the Magna Carta or the paintings of Colin McCahon, for a moment; or if you must, try to think of them for their material value, to the extent that it differs from the value that you would assign to a transcription of the former or a photographic copy of the latter. And now consider personal memory also as a place where one attempts to make sense of meanings conveyed by concrete things, and not just at the abstract level of the written or spoken word. You can mentally detach the words from a page, often without loss of meaning; but you cannot quite so easily detach meaning from a statue or a building or an urban landscape. And because materiality is what is lost in mental representation - and mental representations are the stuff of memory - it is critical that we not allow it to be forgotten. We have to educate ourselves to think in the three geometrical dimensions, plus the many other physical dimensions of hunger and thirst and pleasure and pain and so forth, to develop a whole, functional conception of our environment. There are obvious social and political implications regarding the levels of abstraction one chooses to engage in.

Metaphors are important, they are tools for everyday thinking. And when it comes to memory, the computer has arguably (look: I'm arguing it) become the dominant metaphor, almost to the exclusion of all others. And it can be useful, like any other disciplined, self-reflexive way of thinking, I won't deny that. If you're the kind of person who likes to think of reading as an act of uploading of information into the mind, and of writing as downloading, you'll get no quarrel from me. But like all metaphors, this one too can be stretched to occupy and undue amount of conceptual space, and it has been.

Excessive allegiance to the computer metaphor has lead to reductionist notions such as the idea that everything can be digitised without loss of meaning or value, and that the digital repository is coterminous and coextensive with the mind's. The particular madness that lies this way is of course the great mind uploading project, aka immortality-on-a-hard-drive, a brand of post-religious fundamentalism that will make regular appearances on this blog as the object of varying degrees of ridicule.

But all in due course. For the moment, let's go back to the museum of my household. The collection thus far: a hundred years old pocket watch, an ancient oil lamp, an early nineteenth century book from England. And it turns out we're not doing too badly, according to Mr. Williams. The book sits on a shelf where it doesn't gather an undue amount of dust, nor is plagued by excessive humidity or extremes of temperature. The light that falls on it from the only fixture in the room is within the requisite number of foot-candles. We could do better by laying the book flat or wrapping it in acid-free paper, especially the latter; better still by creating a special box for it. But both options involve concealing, and we're not into that. The lamp is easy to care for: it sits on a shelf, gets dusted regularly with a brush. And the watch lies wrapped in cloth inside a drawer whose microclimate happens to be fairly stable, and that's just about ideal. Its only forays occur when my oldest son asks to be allowed to have a look at it and wind it up. Saving Stuff cautions of course against letting children within a nautical mile of something you care for, but we don't let the imperative of conservation impair the boy's ability to connect - however tenuously and symbolically - with his nonno.

What about you, dear reader? If there are any objects that are of value to you and you'd like some advice on how to take care of them, Mr. Williams will be here all week.




Don Williams, Louisa Jaggar. Saving Stuff: How to Care for and Preserve Your Collectibles, Heirlooms, and Other Prized Possessions. New York: Fireside, 2005.