Monday, March 05, 2007Life editingI am deep in garage-cleaning mode.Like Han Solo and the Storm Troopers, I have spent much time running away from the evil Darth Entropy, exhausting myself in an effort to avoid his tyranny. But a week or so again, I turned back and attempted a full-frontal headlong assault, screaming my fool head off in hopes of scaring my enemies into submission. It's a monumental task, cleaning a garage. Not normally a huge procrastinator, this is nevertheless a project that has been successfully postponed since I moved into my house over three years ago. Don't get me wrong: it still looked pretty civilized to the civilian eye. But I had managed to stuff as much matter as was humanly possible into the crevices and my surfaces were starting to get overrun. Surfaces are important. When those go, you may as well hang up your light saber and call it a day. I won't go into how tired I was already when I started this garage project, or how much I hated my life when I realized just how much work was going to be involved. And I won't talk about my cursing my decision to pursue a profession that required so many BOOKS. I lugged boxes up and down my ladder; I pulled them out of one shelf and stuffed them on another. I took them off that shelf and tried something closer to the ceiling. In between I pulled out my trusty vacuum, stuck on the "crevice attachment" and crawled up into the crossbeams and under the shelves and behind the workbench, sucking up cobwebs and dirt accumulated over the years, and generally getting myself as grubby and sore as possible without actually killing myself. I really started wanting my life back. I really wasn't loving it. Until one night this last weekend, when we came back from visiting some friends and I found myself at 12:30, standing in the garage and just fantasizing about what was going to go where. Fantasizing. About my garage. And I realized in that moment that I wasn't just cleaning the garage. I was editing it. I was structuring it. I was writing it. Oh wow, I thought. Garage as story: yes. That's what it is. My garage is pretty typical -- from tools and toys to vehicles and volumes. In its recesses are highly charge sentimental items such as my childhood ballet slippers and the cane I bought for my father (which he refused to use). There are party favors from my wedding, crumbling pre-school sculptures, prototypes for my dad's almost-but-not-quite-insane inventions. My oldest son's favorite fire fighter costume from when he was two. Reams of drafts of stories long completed or abandoned. My backstage pass from the Miss California Pageant of 1979. Camping gear, an empty can of 3-in-1 oil stuck in the corner of a shelf, my dad's dried up bottle of rubber cement. Christmas cards taken of my and an old boyfriend on top of the World Trade Center. Souvenir hurricane glasses from a bar in New Orleans. Threads of history that stretch long before tragedy struck. There is also a lot of trash. Many things have long since outlived their usefulness or sentimental value (such as a bandaid I had found fit to save since the mid '80's). Phases that were once critical have been passed through. The memories behind purloined matchbooks have been long forgotten, but the echoes of long-forgotten places remain: Yee Mee Loo's, Lulu Carpenter's, Suehiro, The Rainbow Room. What a lot of stuff we carry around with us! But as I find myself looking around and figuring out where it should all go, I realize that it's very much the same process as writing: I separate elements into piles of what I want to keep, throw away and store for later. What are the prized possessions that we just can't bear to part with, but that actually clutter up the works? What are the words that we once were so proud of but have long since been surpassed by other, better ones? Also, what are details that are so precious that without them the whole piece falls flat? The boxes are like little paragraphs. I move chunks of them around from place to place, putting in areas where they will be most useful. When I get everything where it needs to go, eventually I'll go into each box and pare it down to just the essential elements. Taking out the bad words; keeping in the good. What do we need and when do we need it? Those are great questions to ask when writing any story or cleaning any garage. What are our sentimental darlings that really don't belong? And what are the elements of pure heart that take your breath away, so beautiful and unexpected that you immediately catch your breath in wonder, or laughter, or some resonant memory. We write, and we clean our garages, to put structure around the chaotic and random happenings of our lives. We want to keep our treasured words without being buried by them. We want to have our backstory build us up and lead us into the future, rather than bog us down, miring us in the past. We want to have an order that makes sense, that enhances our story rather than calls attention to itself. A beautiful garage, like a beautiful story, is transparent. It is a place where necessary items are aligned in a certain order, designed for the easiest procural of whatever one is looking for at any given time. A good story doesn't let that beautiful organization distract or impede. Nor does a good garage. For both, moving around should be a joy. At the same time, a garage must always be a work in progress. It should reflect the ongoing activities of life. The current project must always be out, to be worked on and noodled with. The space cannot be too sacred or it risks becoming sterile and hostile to creativity. A balance must be struck between room to breathe, space in which to move around, and an abundance of materials with which to birth new things. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 11:33 PM  
Comments: Post a Comment << Home
|
