on moving
It seems I'm what you'd call a natural when it comes to forgetting, intentionally or not, the reappearing part of my disappearing act. But the past 5 weeks have been fast. I can hardly remember where I've been. I only vaguely understand where I'm going.
Maybe it's simple and I've just lost my knack for moving. I've never lived anywhere for more than a year since I was 19. Even small moves across portland required a regrouping and a regathering of my things and I was able to sift through most of it and be on my way. Before I left for Barcelona I spent the summer relishing the idea of living a lifestyle that allowed me to pack up and leave, every posession in one car, in a twenty minute time frame. Like some domestic prisoner of war or a young Algonquin. In my mind some brutish man with a moustache tells me I have twenty minutes to decide what will be part of my life and I can choose it all, i've duped them, because I'm so simple and minimal, all I really need and all I really own is this tshirt, these old jeans, a kazoo, and a solid well-read copy of The Poetics of Space!
Prepping for my move to Somerville (which is happening right now), it's laughable, really, to think that I'll ever really achieve a possessionlessness. Instead I pack my books in boxes and wrap old bottles in newspaper and plant lavender in terra cotta pots and fill my old wooden bank crates with old letters and rocks and tins, all in preparation of transfering the objects and things my mother says make me me. I'm equally intrigued and repulsed by the idea of being defined and characterized through objects and spacial aesthetics ("who said that life is not objects? I kill him with one" thank you terita.) Intrigued because I buy it. I understand the reflective abilities of the spaces we create and the political and poetic qualities they embrace or reject. I'm hugely interested in this. Still, when it comes to me and my little room in something of a tree fort in Somerville, MA, i'm queezy with the idea of my things making me who I am. As if without them I am a black slate rubbed over with a wet cloth. Maybe I am. I'm constantly informing myself of who I am by, more often than not, exposing myself to books, materials, images, sounds that enhance what may otherwise be mere tiny seedlings of an opinion or belief. I suppose I'm caught up lately with the idea of redefinition. I want my descriptions to be liquid. Today my nouns are verbing all over themselves and the adverbs run amok and my adjectives hesitate inbetween contexts.
