A Re-evaluation of Tidying

When I first read Marie Kondo in 2015, I felt something click. This was what I had been looking for. Here was the thing that spoke to the desire for a clean aesthetic with my increasing dread of consumerism. And what the effort was pinned on was Joy, or if you prefer, Happiness. I had been given permission to be Happy, and instead of needing to buy something, I needed to look at what I already had and decide what I needed to keep, not disavow. I also loved that she *wasn't* talking about minimalism, and in fact made room for people who genuinely enjoyed certain things to keep them. I harbored a fantasy about a relative of mine being able to have a home that spotlighted their love of tea, peacocks, and red. 

But maybe the better question is why I was looking for it.

I've felt bullied in my life for and by a lot of things, and the state of my home was a big one. My homes were too messy when I was younger; I was messy, I was dirty. It was a failure of my parents, but of course it was my mother's responsibility because that's how people look at everything. And when I got married and had a family of my own, no one gave me an excuse if I had to work as well as take care of a family, or if I didn't have money for the things that made a home more inviting. I was expected to keep a certain kind of home. Because I failed, I decided it was easier not to have certain people over -- certain family members as well as, er, friends -- than to have to defend myself. I did not want those people back in my home once I made it "presentable" or "acceptable"; in fact, maybe it's even fair that I didn't want to be accepted. But I did want to proclaim to people that it was exactly as I wanted it, and that while I had decided I could not use my home or other possessions to achieve approval, I could at least use it to exercise control.

Healthy? Hell no. But, I daresay, completely normal, with a legacy stretching back centuries.

The first thing that forced me to admit that maybe tidying really was more aspirational than I had wanted to be true was Catherine McCormack's fantastic Women in the Picture. McCormack addresses four dominant female archetypes and what they mean for the civilizations that produce and consume them: Venus, the Mother, Damsels and Dead Maidens, and the Monstrous Woman. If you guessed that the home falls into the Mother's sphere of influence, you are correct. 

Aren't we so productive?

I've patted myself on the back for years for how much tidying leans into anti-consumerism, even if it isn't minimalism. But as Slavery and the Culture of Taste drove home to me recently, objects aren't the only things we consume in our modern civilization. We perform -- produce -- sell -- emotions and ideals just as much as we consume them. And let's not pretend that can't be equally damaging as the overproduction of..."goods".

McCormack pointed her readers to Dutch paintings of scenes of domestic bliss: the wives and mothers who were the focus of the paintings were in control of their tidy environment and obedient children. As befitted a proud Protestant household, the subject's prosperity wasn't advertised with an abundance of objects but with the openness and cleanliness of space. For the vast majority of homes, these paintings aren't a reflection of reality; no matter how prosperous, it is difficult to imagine that one woman, caring for multiple children, is able to maintain a home as tidy and organized as the one idealized here.

I squirmed as McCormack pointed out the similarities between these paintings and their visual descendants on Pinterest and Instagram. There, again, is the Mother in scenes of domestic bliss that we can only aspire to: she is forever young, surrounded by obedient children who are the picture of health -- themselves an advertisement for how productive she is -- efficiently going about the business of making the home (usually the kitchen) work. You only think what the picture is selling is the high-tech eco-chic appliance that is tastefully displayed, or the premium food that is being consumed and sure to provide magical healing properties; that picture is really selling an idealized aspect of femininity, and we keep buying. Most of us can't have the gadgets, but we can have a tidier space, and with that, we can enter the marketplace of ideals as producers of our own and start selling. (Why get upset with the economy of attention that runs so many internet sites? It's only making obvious what has always been true.) And isn't being purchased from even better than being in control?

The above insight was uncomfortable, but welcome to adulthood in the 21st century. It wasn't until Slavery and the Culture of Taste that I started stepping back in horror. No, don't worry -- you haven't imagined that the aesthetic ideal of modernity has generally been cluttered with objects, and in many ways is the opposite of the perfectly tidied space. But one special category of the person of culture, the person of taste, always understood that everything has its place and everything must be put in it in order to achieve maximum productivity. Yes, that person was the slave master, and yes, it does imply all of the ugliness of human beings as objects in a greater machine that you think it does.

So why is it that Marie Kondo sounds so similar? Because she -- and many like her -- have as a principle that everything should have a place and the key to order is to put everything in it. Should you fail to do this, she promises that the first out of place item will invite disorder. Why does it make us feel better when she says it but make us cringe when someone who controlled other human beings says it?

Our personal spaces do say something about us, whether we want them to or not. So what is it that we are hoping they will tell everyone about us? What is it we are hoping we can transform about ourselves by transforming our space? Do we want our spaces to embody some kind of domestic ideal that is a safe haven for those who don't spend that much time in their homes, as it was most probably for the real patrons of those Dutch paintings? Or do we want them to be as efficient as a plantation worked by people who needed to be orderly under threat of constant violence? Maybe the bullying I mentioned at the beginning isn't unique to me, and maybe that has something to do with the answer to these questions.

I'm growing more ashamed of the way I've kept my home, and not because it was a mess. I'm not proud that I've made other family members feel as bad about how they kept their space as I was made to feel. I thought I'd kept out the people who made me feel inadequate in my own home, but really I'm not sure they ever left. Maybe I can't do much about them, but at least I've kept some of their friends out by not being on Pinterest or Instagram for the last few years. If I can stop consuming some of those ideals, maybe -- hopefully -- that eventually will be something.

Deb in the City

Staring at the Abyss

I'm in the midst of drafting my series -- almost done with installment fifteen, and then we're onto the finale (wait, what?). I will still, of course, be editing for a while (no, trust me...), so still being in "research mode" isn't inappropriate.

I've read a lot of history, politics, science writing, as well as sci-fi and fantasy, but lately my reading has delved into what we might term the dystopian side of things -- and I refer to the non-fiction. Is there anything more dystopian than chattel slavery? I mean, other than settler-colonialism?

Perhaps modernity itself.

I picked up Simon Gikandi's Slavery and the Culture of Taste in January, and it was only a coincidence that I finished it in February aka Black History Month. It was without a doubt the most difficult book I have ever read. I've whined at length about how hard it was to get through Edward Said's Orientalism, and no small part of that was the sometimes obtuse academic language, and the liberal use of French passages...which I don't speak. That book was easier to read than Slavery and the Culture of Taste. (Stamped from the Beginning was easier to read.) 

 

Not for the faint of heart, but everyone should read it

As I've gotten older, reading about slavery and what it really was has gotten more difficult. It's an increase in empathy in general, but it's also -- and this is a good thing -- other Brown and Black people getting more concerted media attention when they talk about historical experiences and the continuing ramifications. A couple of authors have made oblique references here and there that have stopped me cold, but I could go on trying to understand the shape of history. (And they have shown up in the most unexpected places; take a look at Michael Twitty's The Cooking Gene.) Not with this book.

I have never read anything that so completely described the psychological and psychic displacement that wasn't just attendant to slavery but that made slavery possible. African bodies needed to be transformed from people into objects for the benefit of the slave holders, who, like everyone everywhere, told themselves stories about how good they were, but even though slaves miraculously held onto their sense of themselves as selves and not things, the processes of being displaced, stripped, packed into small spaces as if they were animals, being deprived of privacy, being branded, being regularly, sadistically abused, losing their names, losing their sense of time, and being subject to losing their communities and families at any point traumatized them. As they would anybody. I cried several times while reading the descriptions of these processes, and the only thing that kept me reading was the feeling that I could not do anything to right those wrongs unless I understood it. That is perhaps the most earnest thing I've ever written in this space, and I mean it.

What terrified me was Gikandi's explanation of how the affected psychological and sociological processes work, and how easy it would be to break anyone from anywhere if you did those things to them. I wasn't under any delusions that there was something particularly vulnerable about African captives, but looking out at the world and seeing a planet filled with people that could be as easily broken if as sadistically treated -- and knowing that I was one of them...isn't that part of the horror of dystopian fiction?

(It strikes me how much the dominant community has suffered for ignoring the plight of the people they oppressed. The psychic displacement that African slaves suffered from is not substantially unrelated to what we have seen in other totalitarian civilizations, whether it's the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or Communist China. We can't, probably, expect most people to assert their previous identities in the same ways when Big Brother is watching with increasingly sophisticated surveillance, but those of us who aren't being tormented should be a little less surprised that simply changing governments and material conditions doesn't magically undo years of psychological and sociological damage.)

Spoiler alert, in case you needed one: miraculously, slaves did not by and large break. They not only established relationships and communities, they kept their senses of self, even if they had to redefine that in a hostile setting. They were hyper-aware that they were the negative by which their "owners" and those communities defined themselves -- much as, per Said, Europe couldn't exist without The Oriental Other -- but their psyches stayed intact by asserting their own history (or remembered fragments of it) in whatever spaces were available, whether it was as dance, art, and ritual or in the provision grounds they used to feed themselves. As time went on, many communities also explicitly thumbed their noses not at the stereotypes they were subjected to but the "manners" their owners pretended to. They used performance to mock performance and thereby establish their own identities.

If I'm honest, I picked up this book because I was interested in the concept of "taste", which is coming up more in other books I've read (Culture and Imperialism, Fearing the Black Body, Women in the Picture). I was not disappointed by Gikandi's insights. Intertwined with Taste is Performance, and modern civilization would not exist without it. Before modernity, what many European cultures needed to perform was Goodness, for God and for our communities, but modernity required the performance of Happiness. Keeping in mind the maxim that the medium is the message and eventually comes to alter it, I would say happiness is more suited to performance than goodness, and for that reason has stuck with us for so long. 

And why shouldn't we be happy when we have everything...underwritten by the exploitation of others? It's really not a new insight -- people understood even when they didn't want to that their wealth was coming off of slavery -- and it has been haunting modern civilization since the beginning. As much as people tried to get around it by strictly defining "We" and by desperately trying to convince themselves that other people weren't just that, we never entirely lost sight that our system is based on varying degrees of haves and have nots. Just as we needed to perform Goodness to convince everyone that we were destined for heaven, we need to perform Happiness to convince everyone that we are destined for success and therefore trustworthy with opportunity. 

Fear of damnation is still the real driver.

We read history to understand our present moment, and this was no exception. I continue to seek to understand the emptiness and hypocrisy that can characterize our culture. I know I'm not the only one, and I presume other people will understand when I say that sometimes it feels as if the abyss is looking back at me. Perhaps that is why I really wanted to finish this book -- millions of people have climbed out of the abyss after they were shoved into it. If they can survive, so can we. But only if we acknowledge them as Us first.

Deb in the City

No maps in the uncharted territory.

I read up on the economy as much as I can without being obsessive about it. I've been reading about inflation mostly via The Economist, but also through political and social commentators and activists like Gaslit Nation. 

The Economist does good coverage on a lot of issues, but mostly they make me chuckle when I read these pieces. I picture a lot of people scratching their heads, thinking, "All things being equal, raising interest rates really should work, so why are we still stuck?" Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa are not economists, but when it comes up, they are focused on one aspect -- labor -- and frankly I think they've called it: unemployment is so low because the population of people who would have been working before have been disproportionately affected by COVID. In other words, a number of the COVID dead or disabled were those removed from the workforce.

They don't say this, but I do: economists are willfully blind if they're ignoring that fact, and they are bordering on monstrous if they want to suggest that the stimulus money so many governments spent is what's keeping people out of work. For some bizarre reason, my family got those benefits too, even though my husband was able to work the whole time. I have a sense of how much those benefits were worth, and it's laughable to suggest that as rents are going up and the cost of food is going up that somehow people are able to justify staying out of work because of, at most, a couple of thousand dollars they received a year and a half ago. There were some people who were able to pay down debts with that money, and that probably gave them a little breathing room, but we're past that. 

If people aren't applying for jobs, it's because the people aren't there to do so. The fact that we are doubling down on reducing immigration in the midst of that is only going to make the problem worse.

It should also be said that the benefits wage earners are getting now are, frankly, long overdue. The average wage has not kept up with the cost of living for decades, and if people are feeling the pinch of having to make up (some of) the difference now, this is part of what labor activists were warning about.

But let's not pretend that economics is a science. It is at best a description of "the market", and the market is filled with human beings. On average they're making rational decisions, but please define "rationality" when we live through a deadly pandemic, massive political instability on a global scale (January 2021 insurrection in the US, Russia's vicious war of aggression against Ukraine, growing aggression by North Korea, an increasingly unpredictable and genocidal China, an absolutely erratic wannabe dictator in Turkey, a chauvinistic, bigoted populist leader in India, the environmental and humanitarian depredations of former Brazilian strongman Bolsanaro...someone needs to explain to me why Africa gets all of the ink for problems with dictators and corruption), and the continuing state aggression against BIPOC people all over the world. 

It's a lot to expect that people are going to be logical actors making rational decisions if their time scale is surviving the present, unknown moment and tomorrow seems like a luxury. And it shouldn't be a surprise at all that people are going to treat money and goods like the bricks of a protective fortress, either hoarding it so they'll never have to worry about deprivation, or spending it to prove that everything is the Normal they idealized before disaster struck.

Which is all to say: of course economists don't know what the hell is going on and how to end inflation, because we are in uncharted territory. 

I'll echo Kendzior and Chalupa and advise people to be decent to each other -- sharing what we have could mean the difference for someone else's prospects for survival -- and read up on historical analogues. What were they doing during the 1918 Spanish Flu oubreak? How did people survive the initial onslaughts of smallpox? What mistakes were made when the bubonic plague first spread? Discover your history, and learn from it. History isn't a map, but at least it can be a guide.

Deb in the City

Any morning that finds me here can't be that bad

It's been a crazy morning, which I'm reminded is what happens to me when I
leave my home, but if I get to spend an hour here reading a good book, it's
worth it.

--
Sent from my GO FLIP 3

Food shopping

It's 1) Friday and 2) December, so I can shop without guilt at Haymarket.
(The guilt would be from not shopping at a farmers market, but that season
ends in November.) This is also more than a little bit of a brag, since it
required more than a bit of walking when I don't feel well. But it was fun.

Also getting a thrill more and more from eschewing places like whole foods
- blech - and other big chains. Everything in one shop, blah blah blah, but
it's harder and harder to look at those places and not see exploitation.
Not going to pretend that no one is mistreated in Chinatown or the north
end, but they're not selling themselves to me as the only place where I can
eat my values.

Hard to see with the light (but I kind of like the effect), but this outing
included everything from soap and coffee to cheese and berries. This week
was a little light on vegetables because we're still working through last
week's haul...which might be taking longer than usual since my family
decided they needed to eat lots of baked goods this week. Related?

Hope everyone else enjoyed their food shopping this week as much as I did.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some bread dough to check on.

Deb in the City

A new way to blog?

Trying to see if this method will let me blog more, as well as whether this
photo will come through.

--
Sent from my GO FLIP 3

Modern Hanbok (A poem)

I'd like to know what a modern hanbok would look like

Not the formal kind worn at weddings

Not the kind that float down a catwalk

The kind an everyday woman would wear

If she were going shopping

If she were going to work

If she were playing with her children

It would have to be machine washable, because there are busy women

It would have to be comfortable, because these are modern women

Maybe it wouldn't need a slip

But it would definitely have to work with sneakers --

After all, this is the twenty-first century

And these women would have had all this time

Evolving their fashions to their tastes

They were never told what they could wear, and what they couldn't,

Under pain of beating or punishment or death

They had agency

They lived in a world that flowed with the currents of their times

And more than once altered those currents themselves

They remembered their halmunis laughing about the pictures they saw of other women,

From other places,

Wearing a hanbok but getting the bow all wrong

Sometimes it's the details

Sometimes it's the attitude

Because there were sometimes when those other women

Got it just right

And they were wearing the clothes

Not the other way around

Just as they -- we -- live in a world in which they lived with their history

And beyond it

Not that they lived for their history

As if they themselves were an offering to it

Sometimes the colors are vibrant

Sometimes the materials are subdued

Always, it is a garment that suits their lives

Not a costume to suit a role

This is, after all, a modern hanbok for a woman in a country that has always known agency