The Wit’s Guide to Clutter

Or, stuff happens

Detail from The Bachelor, William Kurelek, 1955, probably my favourite painting at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Note that his chosen brand of marmalade is Golden Garbage.

Clutter is in the home of the beholder, arranged on his mantel, piled high on her bedside table, jostling out of their junk drawers. But what if they like it that way? Clutter lends itself to a Russell’s Conjugation: “I treasure mementoes, you collect stuff, they hoard clutter.”

“You ever notice that their stuff is shit, but your shit is stuff?”
— George Carlin

The meaning of life, according to Carlin’s most transcendent bit, is trying to find a place to keep your stuff. Your home is a pile of stuff with a cover on it, which you only leave to get more stuff. A smaller version of your stuff travels with you. Even if the best things in life aren’t things, the stuff of life is most assuredly stuff.

“Does anybody want any flotsam?
I’ve gotsam.
Does anybody want any jetsam?
I can getsam.”
— Ogden Nash

The motto “a place for everything and everything in its place” would seem to disqualify clutter, and yet if the place for that ceramic figurine is the shelf by your desk and it doesn’t have any actual use, is it clutter?

“Intent on avoiding clutter, the Bauhaus Bombers took no hostages but demanded instead that one purely decorative object be destroyed every hour on the hour until their goal was achieved … dozens and dozens of china figurines, clever wall hangings, and superfluous vases were sacrificed to the mysterious cause.”
— Fran Lebowitz

Let’s hold for ​​a moment on the idea of a superfluous vase, as mentioned in Saint Fran’s riff on imaginary terrorists. Aren’t all vases superfluous? It’s not like only the extremely necessary vases serve the vital purpose of propping up dying genitalia of the plant kingdom for your viewing pleasure. They all do that, if it needs doing.

“It’s interesting to see that people had so much clutter even thousands of years ago. The only way to get rid of it all was to bury it, and then some archaeologist went and dug it all up.”
—Karl Pilkington

And so to the empty promise of minimalism, the longing for less that starts out as a welcome corrective to overconsumption and then becomes an equal and opposite compulsion. The obvious metaphor is obesity and anorexia, but I much prefer the idea that Oliver Burkeman unspools in Meditations for Mortals, that “being a finite human just means never achieving the sort of control or security on which many of us feel our sanity depends.” We erroneously default to thinking of a world without clutter like a mind without problems, when in fact a world without mementoes is like a mind without challenges. In other words, you can’t vanquish clutter but you can certainly die trying.

“My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.”
— Erma Bombeck

One of the oldest recorded ways to remember things is the memory palace, a technique used by ancient poets to create a mental dwelling full of imagery that they could run through to literally jog their memories. A method of loci, it’s called now, but if we’re affluent enough to do it with real things, why wouldn’t we? And we do! The wonderful book Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry is Leanne Shapton’s 2009 history of a relationship told through a faux auction catalogue of all all the clutter it spun out into the world, the stuff of life. A memory palace estate sale, where decluttering is appropriately sad.

“Don’t own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.”
— Wendell Berry

In their 2021 paper “Home and the extended-self: Exploring associations between clutter and wellbeing,” psychologists Caroline Rogers and Rona Hart bring a welcome dose of empirical observation to the study of clutter, looking beyond the compulsive hoarders of reality television infamy. Clutter, in their view, is “a subjective experience of possessions (material or other) that inhibit the curation of self-identity at home.” They basically rework George Carlin’s routine as psychology, and prove him right. Or as they argue, “when things are in their place, wherever that might be, and home expresses self-identity, wellbeing is more likely to be present.” We have met the clutter and it is us.

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I have two lightly groaning shelves of Riposte Cards in my office, but they aren’t clutter! They’re talismans! Talismen? Objets d’art! Commemorative keepsakes, for keep’s sake! And should you pay to have me mail some to you, they could be equally valued in your domicile!

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Saw something, said something

Some excellent news to share from Toronto’s Union Station, where the fruits of my pedantry are subtly on display. In passing last summer, I was aghast (not at all ghast) at this detail in an otherwise commendable display of the railway’s history:

Just as you’re supposed to report unattended baggage, so did I report this uncorrected surname.

And last week, a happy correction! Get Wit Quick gets results slowly!

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“Back to the things themselves.”
— Edmund Husserl

Sometimes I worry that I’ve written on all the potential Wit’s Guide topics but then I remember that there are more than 142 things in the world. Also, as Heraclitus reminds us, you can’t step in the same river twice with dry feet.

Get Wit Quick Issue No. 309 was streamlined, fluid, straight to the point, in part because though I love to meander, I always keep it to about 500 words. How off piste can you go with such a small piste? The mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. The ❤️ below always likes a tap.