All the spaces created by the fire will be filled.

Speaking with Debra Howell, more on the presence of absence.

Since college, never felt that objects supported me. Fulfilled my needs, made life more comfortable, brought aesthetic pleasure, yes, but never a casonic support. Hence in their absence, I don’t feel that the ground is gone beneath my feet nor that I am lost or unmoored from the world. However, in following from the thoughts above, there is meaning in absence, especially of certain things, and perhaps that meaning comes from thespace that their absence defines.

All the spaces created by the fire will be filled. Now they are being filled reactively, with objects of need and sustenance. Telephones,spices, milk, shoes, band-aids, crock-pots. And I can foresee the next level in which we replace those things that we had come to rely on for the things we love to do. Good knives for cooking, and espresso machine with which to greet the morning. These are the [practical fillings, ones that we know o well and have chosen so consciously to this point, that it is merely a matter of time and cash flow before we replace them.

But the profound part perhaps lies in those spaces that now must be considered anew, to which a conscious choice must be applied as to whether to fill them or not, whether they can indeed be filled, and if so, how?Would we by another wood carving depicting an intertwined couple, one resonant of the Belizean piece we stretched to buy on our honeymoon? This was not a sentimental piece (although it certainly seems that in the writing). We were vaguely ironic about its symbolism, but were genuinely captured by its beauty.Beauty, history, and occasion get so intertwined in some things that it is impossible to unknit their meaning. And so how do you replace it? what did it mean (we never had to think about it and decide, it was enough that it was there, sitting on the shelf over the floor furnace, glowing warmly in its crowd of similar figurines)?

Looking forward it is these spaces, perhaps, that have the most to reveal in their filling, these objects that will end up saying the most about our journey forward.

And still to come, the filling of the house. Furniture,appliances, bedding…all had been assembled collage-like over time, as they could be afforded or as opportunity provided. Will we embark again on a courseof temporal accumulation, or choose to design a new life, one that matches andcoordinates? Will our live gain an overall conception, a codification ordistillation of its narrative, or revert once again to its meandering eclecticways? Is life a picture of desire, or an historical record of having lived?

Nothing is more vulnerable than a house that leaks.

Nothing is more vulnerable than a house that leaks.

It goes against all that is house. So vulnerable and exposed. We trust our houses to keep out the elements. It is why we build them, why we think of them as haven. As the otherwise welcome rains fall in drought plagued Los Angeles, the house has leaks in its roof, small drippy breeches through which the water penetrates with slow destructive power. It soaks the cellulose insulation I had blown into the attic to keep us warm, old recycled newspaper fibres that sealed out the 1920’s drafts. Now the besotted weight will pull down the ceiling over where our bed used to sit. I picture a crew with shovels, loading yet another dumpster with the detritus of the fire.

It would be better, I think, to begin the demolition, the tearing out of the shards of clinging plaster and exposed untapped wallboard to expose the studs and rafters behind. At least that destruction has purpose, intention. It is destruction that is constructive, part of the journey to being once again a place to rest our heads, in dry, warm comfort. This slow, piecemeal and random destruction, the destruction of neglect and elements, feels, as Elicia suggested, like something from a Garcia-Marquez novel, time inexorably wearing down the best intentions and efforts of those that live, turning the inanimate back to the jungle from which it sprung. It is as if, uninhabited and scarred, the house has reunited with the forces of entropy, of disassembly and component-ness.

Is that what a house is? Components held together in a system of organization by the daily presence of humans who generally take it for granted? Does a house remain a house because of the million lightbulbs that get changed and floors that get mopped and pipes that get tightened or replaced. Is it the accumulation of small actions, unnoticed at the time of their completion, that accrete into the idea of house? Or is there some metaphysical force, a living energy, that by its very presence just keeps the parts related?

These are the two sides of my mind, of course, the concrete and practical and the imaginative dreamer. Today though, as the rain falls and the ceilings with it, I feel disabled and at a loss. I have no raincoat, nor umbrella to keep me dry. My hoodies, which I wear beneath a borrowed leather coat for warmth, become quickly saturated, and the chill the dripping rain leaves in the small of my back seems unending and inconsolable, no matter how much earl gray tea I drink. “The grieving feel chilled,” Joan Didion quotes, in The Year of Magical Thinking, from Emily Post’s etiquette manual of 1922, “they need soup.”

It is true, I suppose, if grieving is what this feeling I have is, for there are parts of my body, regions immune to warmth, relaxation, medication, massage, or any of the other traditionally healing things that integrate my easily shattered life. Matija’s grandmother promised me chicken soup this weekend .“You don’t make Chicken Soup in a pressure cooker,” she insisted, when I told her of the demise in the fire of my mothers, the 40 year old Presto in which our soup was always made. She seemed vaguely insulted, in that way that only a jewish mother can. Perhaps her soup, sans pressure, will be the cure I need.

Presence in absence. Objectivity in subjectivity. Material in a material world.

I have told the story many times over the last few weeks, so much that it begins to sound like something that happened to someone else. Part of the telling is always my meditation on materialism. Our TL list, total loss, ran 115 pages with 15-20 items per page, some 1700 items that must be individually priced and catalogs for reimbursement by my insurance company. Martha, the woman who runs the restoration crew, remarked on how relatively large this was. “It means you are not materialistic,” she said.

There are, I have come to think four types of things which which we surround ourselves, or rather four types of relationships we form with those things. there are those things which we assume to define who we are, a certain placing of identity in the objects we purchase, my car, my cloths, my watch. Status symbols of just, more modestly (for it takes no money to enshrine an urban hoodies as a piece of one’s identity) those things that, better than we can with words or actions, we choose to l;et express who we think we are. They serve us.

Second are the object we let disable us, those whose service steals from us small bits of valuable time and identity. The boat you always wanted but now spend 10 hours per week (time otherwise spent with family, books, or friends) to polish and maintain. These are the objects that we serve. (“my work!” Alli piped, when I told her this part)

On the opposite side of the fence is the Buddhist ideal of detachment, that we have things around us but into them we place no meaning or service. They just are. I think I think of my self as aspiring to this, with that curious american recognition that I can’t attain it.

Then there are objects that have no meaning except for the fact that they exist in your life, and have done so for some time. These objects just seem to align themselves with you and gain meaning from little more than their continue presence. Existential meaning, if you will. The mug with my name printed on it bought at the Old Towne Mall in Torrance when I was 12, treasured then for the scarcity of items preprinted with my unusual name, a flowering of recognition at a time when I so desperately needed it. the need is long since gone, with the hormones of puberty, but I have carried that mug through all the moves, apartments, rooming houses, coasts and relationship for little reason other than I had it and it didn’t break. It never broke, its still around. And it carries something with it, something unnameable and irreplaceable. Occasionally, with no more thought than it takes to remove it from a shelf, I drink tea from it.

Or my father’s prayer book. I have, in the inevitable shorthand that emerges from the need to tell a story repeatedly to the many people in your life, seized upon the destruction of this book to convey the emotional weight of some of the stuff that burned (silly, it strikes me in reflection, that we kept so much of the important stuff closest to the floor furnace where if a fire were to erupt, it would surely begin). My father was not a religious man. I never saw him pray, nor even knew that his confirmation book existed until it came to me after his death. My father and I were not close. It was simply this book, but had meaning so being. A thing possessed that, for sentimental or historical reasons (all a cliche if one thinks more than a moment about them), you cannot discard. And then it is gone.

In their presence, these were just clutter, the things of life that surround you without plan. In their absence, these objects gain meaning, pieces of you attached like polyps on the coral reef of story that is your life, barnacles on the hull awaiting the scraping you never seem to have time to complete

Presence in absence. Objectivity in subjectivity. Material in a material world.

epigraph

"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."  -anais nin