recently, i've been thinking about the concept and process of hoarding. according to the american psychiatric association's diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, the clinical definition of hoarding is the "persistent difficulty of discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value."
a few months ago, a house around the corner from where i live went up for sale. built in 1940, it never left the family of the man who had constructed it. up until a few months ago, his son still lived there, but he had gotten sick and his mother had been convinced to sell it. a realtor filmed a quick walkthrough of the home, and people recoiled at the interior—a sea of cigarette butts, mail piled at the door, dirty dishes lining every surface in the kitchen. hoarding seemed to be the consensus.
in her book, the lonely city: adventures in the art of being alone, olivia laing writes, "people who hoard are often socially withdrawn. sometimes the hoarding causes isolation, and sometimes it is a palliative to loneliness, a way of comforting oneself. not everyone is susceptible to the companionship of objects; to the desire to keep and sort them; to employ them as barricades or to play back and forth between expulsion and retention."
when stripped of its clinical context and taken out of the realm of disorder, hoarding is simply collection. rationally, it almost seems indulgent; living amidst your own excess. ultimately, it's a way of making meaning in the world by relying on a seemingly random and possibly worthless collection of things.
when the pandemic began, i developed an intense compulsion to write—i would be standing in the shower, or cutting vegetables, or walking around my block, and an idea would bloom in my head. i often felt that i had to catch it midair. at one point, the process made me feel physically ill, as though if i didn't write what i was thinking down, didn't digest it in some way, i would actually vomit. i was constantly nauseous.
in may, i had to buy another notebook and now, nine months later, it's nearly full. but many of the sentences are impossible, nonsensical, or devoid of meaning. combinations of words that felt nice in my mouth—"turmeric stained tea towels"—or lists of things or places i'd started longing for. when i read laing's previously mentioned paragraph, i was struck by recognition but in reverse. my isolation caused a different kind of hoarding, one what was indeed palliative to my loneliness, but instead of objects, i was comforting myself with words.
in her 1967 essay "on going home," joan didion writes about returning to her native sacramento to celebrate her daughter's birthday. about halfway through the piece, she opens a drawer and decides to clean it out.
cataloging the drawer's contents, she writes, "a bathing suit i wore the summer i was seventeen. a letter of rejection from the nation, an aerial photograph of the site for a shopping center my father did not build in 1954. three teacups hand-painted with cabbage roses and signed 'e.m.,' my grandmother’s initials. there is no final solution for letters of rejection from the nation and teacups handpainted in 1900. nor is there any answer to snapshots of one’s grandfather as a young man on skis, surveying around donner pass in the year 1910. i smooth out the snapshot and look into his face, and do and do not see my own. i close the drawer, and have another cup of coffee with my mother."
in german, there's a word for this kind of thing, a wunderkammer, which roughly translates to a "cabinet of curiosities." originally describing a room rather than a single case, it was a place to gather and store treasured items. a personal museum where one could be surrounded by objects that they love. didion's drawer is one of these cabinets, full of items without monetary value—"answer" and "solution," in her words—but thick with the film of feeling.
over the past year, i've come to think of journaling and other extraprofessional writing as some kind of mental wunderkammer. in my mind, i collect a particularly well-composed movie scene, the closing sentence of a chapter, an idea uttered during a podcast episode. last summer, i became obsessed with fragmentary novels—books written in such a way that to read them felt like wandering through a gallery of thoughts that were all somehow tangential. perhaps this essay is a wunderkammer, drawing on different kinds of media, allowing me to build an environment of ideas that i can revel in and make sense of.
writers and artists have always been collectors of the world, of words, images, and sounds. like hoarding, writing is often a compulsive act. it relates to my obsession for reference, of seeing things that often feel invisible. i remember the revelation of an art history course i took in college and the feeling it gave me—unearthing what felt like the secret language of creation—knowing that one artist was pointing to another with the help of a certain medium or color or technique.
last night, i watched finding vivian maier, a documentary about a woman who hoarded hundreds of rolls of film and mountains of negatives from photos she took on the streets of chicago while working as a nanny in the 1960s and 70s. her talent is apparent with the help of a quick google search. maier died without any family or many friends, and without showing her photos to anyone.
throughout the documentary, the filmmaker interviews a handful of people who knew her—adults that she once babysat as children, former employers, people who met her by chance. they all remark on the sadness of not knowing about her art.
but who’s to say she didn’t use her camera as a way to understand and arrange her own world? as a person with a nearly nonexistent social circle, how else is one contextualized? i was struck by the number of photos maier took of her reflection in mirrors or shop windows. of course, i thought, she never meant to show these pictures to anyone—she was just looking for herself.