The Ecology of Things

FACED WITH LIFETIMES OF BELONGINGS IN AN EAST LONDON STORAGE UNIT, JOAN JULIET BUCK GRAPPLES WITH THE PULL OF THE INANIMATE AND THE UNUSED.

By Joan Juliet Buck

The corridors of the Big Yellow storage facility in Bow are made of embossed aluminum panels between hundreds of doors painted a pitiless yellow. Every few minutes, when someone opens one of those doors without first having punched in their entry code outside, an alarm overwhelms the piped music.

On the ground floor, it’s industry. Pallets heaped with plastic packs of soft drinks, dog treats, and human snacks are wheeled out of units and into trucks.

One floor up, a spine of empty space runs forever between banks of imprisoned personal belongings. A red capital letter marks the spot where each perpendicular alley crosses the spine.

Locked up here, behind two yellow doors, is my husband’s old life.

I have had storage units in Santa Fe, New York City, Brooklyn, Poughkeepsie, Kingston, Hyde Park, and some were curiously welcoming. Moishe’s in Brooklyn had fat round Egyptoid columns so well-proportioned that I wished I could move in.

Not so much here.

The prison effect veers towards morgue.

It’s spotless. It’s so clean that I don’t understand the mouse droppings we found last May on some things we’d stored the previous October. The things had not been gnawed, only delicately shat on in random lines of mini turds. I didn’t want to export the mini turds to America.

Things in storage are in a static moment of transit, neither here nor there. When, in that netherworld of storage, they are altered by circumstances and mouse turds, it’s the same as a passenger falling ill before the plane takes off. Do you strap the passenger in and force them to cross the Atlantic or do you get them off the plane for medical attention?

The house is sold, the washing machines long gone, and the effort of getting a professional to remove the dirty loveseat and the shat-upon armchair from Wick Lane in Bow, take them away for an unspecified amount of cleaning time, and return them to a storage unit only to be shat upon again, seems disproportionate to the sad material goods themselves.

We phone about to check who would accept the loveseat and the armchair. His family is big—there is no shortage of intimates to potentially remove them, clean them, use them.

Giving away used sheets is always wrong. Charity shops don’t like them. But giving away bags of sheets dotted with mouse droppings is an insult. Those sheets were almost new. I cry a little. The striped ones would have looked so nice in the house over the Hudson. The sheets have to be jettisoned.

We don’t live here, we don’t have a car, we don’t have a skip or garbage cans. We don’t know where to dispose of them.

Big Yellow is like a national park or a rehearsal room: You must take out what you brought in and leave no garbage behind. In the case of the national parks, it’s to keep nature clean and avoid poisoning the wildlife. In the case of the rehearsal rooms, it’s to keep the space at maximum neutrality, erasing your drama to make room for the next.

In the case of Big Yellow, and all storage places everywhere, if customers are seen throwing away the things they paid to store, it’s an attack on the core belief of storage.

You must not break your agreement to pretend to believe that your belongings are so precious they’re worth the price you are paying to store them.

If the corridors of Big Yellow were to be littered with discarded items, it would be like broken windows in borderline neighborhoods. The fabric of the idea of storage would fray.

Keep pretending your things are precious. Keep the faith.

The mouse droppings meant that Big Yellow had not kept their part of the agreement.

If mice could get in and shit all over the stuff we’d agreed to pretend was precious, the storage had to pretend to be as upset as we were.

The manager of Big Yellow made an exception. He granted us the freedom to discard. “Pile it up here,” he said, giving us a flat aluminum cart with a yellow metal handle. His people would make the stuff vanish.

This freedom opened up the way for my husband to add other things, mouse-defiled or not—ceramic, cloth, metal with UK plugs, books, splintery wooden crates. Things he no longer had feelings about, things unwanted in the new life.

This is where I experienced my epistemic break.

I have raided flea markets on three continents, and defined myself by how I wielded my taste in the choices I made: tin Athenas and empire prints of Egyptian statues instead of the frilly, the fretted, the Victorian. Bronze antiquities instead of flowered china plates, curiosities rather than souvenirs, rugs not doilies.

I entertained intimate relationships with statues, books, lamps, and hauled an ancient footed rush box from continent to continent, because as long as it didn’t break, there was no need to dump it. We maintain things to keep them new forever—but the older things are, the better they tend to be. Well-made objects retain their shape and patina for so long that it brings up your own mortality and the question of who will own them next.

I long ago learned the care and the tricks to handling, packing, moving, and unpacking large things. Specifically, how to use t-shirts, sweatpants, and pillows to protect and immobilize breakables, and to never pack metal next to glass. New York to London, steamer trunks; Paris to London, tin trunks; Milan to London, packing boxes; London to New York, tea chests; New York to Paris, professionals.

I knew my parents’ possessions as well as I knew my own. I’m an only child: Everything I touched was in effect mine, if not now, then soon. Then it was soon.

The pile of my late mother’s clothes in the living room of my father’s helper was so shocking that I took nothing but a coat that I soon donated to the Met. My father shipped the objects to me, and then himself, and then he too was gone and I had everything.

There was too much for me, but every object reaffirmed our connection, our love. Each one was family.

The things were all I had, there were no people left. No siblings to quarrel over ownership. So began the triage, the jettisoning, the distributing, the keeping. I kept the praying sculpture I’d known since I was two. My parents called him Saint Darryl; he’s Flemish, made of wood. He was old then, and is older now. His face is cracking from the dry forced-air heating. A few days next to the humidifier make no difference.

I have known every one of those possessions in some depth with all my senses, known everything about them—provenance, time frame, places, stories—whether I kept them, gave them away, sold them, or even once or twice broke them and decided not to repair them.

I have jettisoned and given away 50 times the number of things I still own, over and over, all over the world, and wonder sometimes at how fast I let things go.

But within the last year, I realized that all those things coming through my hands and out of my hands and into other hands were not a series of wasteful decisions, but a demonstration of the way I proceed, which is from tactile experience to tactile experience.

My husband’s things are not like that for me.

I don’t know them, I never did, but I tried to go to work for them.

I swaddled vases in towels and sheets and t-shirts and duvets. I carefully wrapped terracotta panels in yards of wholesale bubble wrap that arrived as tall and fat as rolled carpets. I cleaned the cases of his innumerable compact discs, while on the other side of various rooms, he vanished into the maw of memories. I saw him read letters from, to, and between his parents.

I admired paintings by his half-sister, then by a distant cousin, an aunt, an uncle, a grandfather, a great-uncle.

One day over lunch, under the kitchen skylights while we were preparing the house for sale, I asked him and his half-sister for a quick count of the immediate family members. They couldn’t decide if it was 49 or 50.

I was impressed—not jealous, amazed. Like a lemur looking at an elephant. Here in Big Yellow, even more than in my husband’s house, I am bewildered by the things around me.

They are the tactile remains of his long and happy marriage— holidays included. It’s their inclinations, their preferences, their choices, the accretions of time on objects in their life, in their houses.

I have known him forever but am new to his life like this. I still can’t name the faces in the old family photographs, don’t know the story behind the brass bull, can’t fathom why he must keep the lacquered African masks made in China. I don’t know the day the mirrored Indian pelmets were bought, or where.

I wasn’t in Tonga when he was there on fieldwork. I don’t know how to handle a bark cloth—do you roll it, fold it, wet it first, interleave it with tissue or towels? I try to protect the edges of the frayed revolutionary posters, but it’s all alien. He has an uncountable number of flutes, a violin or two, an accordion the size of a minibar.

The first round of discards went into the green skip outside his house. The things here are the bare bones. Many things went to their children, who want less than I’d have imagined.

The lengthy dismantling is agony for him and them, which is why this move has taken him so long.

There is nothing I can say here. My comments are inappropriate or go unheard.

I don’t recognize the smell of this dust.

I have long believed that each inanimate object is inhabited by a spirit. It’s what the South Sea Islanders call mana. I have venerated certain things—the praying statue with the cracking face, the footed rush box, many more. I have related to the helplessness of objects, seen their vulnerability, been touched by them.

But here’s my epistemic break.

I’m unable to feel the charge of his inanimate possessions. They’re just things. I’ve been trying to serve them for two years, but I can find no empathy for their helplessness.

For the first time in my life, I am neutral in the face of possessions.

Neutral is not a familiar stance. It makes me feel diminished to not be lit up by feelings. The neutrality feels like the loss of a faculty, a gelding.

After three years of marriage, late marriage, to the boy I fell in love with at school, I am shifting away from my need for objects.

I don’t need to love the objects now that I can love him.

A modest amount of furniture is coming to America: a guest room bed table, a garden umbrella and stand, a round table, seven chairs. And a black metal Art Deco hall stand that looks almost like the one I gave away 17 years ago.