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.