At the end of my street is a three-sided fence measuring 2 x 2m. Its purpose is for piling waste into, which is collected biweekly by the local council. Sometimes I see my neighbour sifting through it, this wire mausoleum, looking for something to lay claim to. Sometimes they are looking for something, but often they are wading through to find anything of use. I know of several of these spaces in the estate, and find it hard to understand how we can let go of so much.
I couldn’t think of anything I have taken, but since I moved here, five years ago, I have left only a few things in the cage; my grandmother’s old slow cooker; a damaged bike wheel; a dozen cigarette butts; 4 large cardboard boxes. Everything else I have disposed of since living here has fit within a standard-issue Southwark Council general waste bag. Still, I look acutely at the indistinct rubble every time I cycle past it. I’m hoping to find a mid-century oak table or a $5000 leather sofa like those fake NYC Reels you see on Instagram. I never find anything; what I am looking for isn’t there, if it is anywhere at all. But I didn’t stop looking. Sartre said forlornness is when we learnt God did not exist and we must learn to deal with it. I hadn’t learn to deal with the fact what I wanted wasn’t real, and so I kept looking.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been clearing out my own flat. I started with a single cupboard, and then I couldn’t control my compulsion to expel everything. The goal was, in my mind, to reduce everything I had to a suitcase. I had no intention of telling anyone this, and I had no intention of travelling. I gave away too much of myself on the Timeline – I loved the immediacy of it. I filled my iCalendar so that I was always on the move. There was no separation between general waste and recycling/reposting, between real and virtual. Everyone could look into it. I found a love for the cruelty of others and it kept me moving from person to person like an old side-table.
All that is exempt from this culling are my books, which I am unable to get rid of even if I have, truthfully, no intention of reading. In fact, my feeling of spiritual loss could be largely attributed to a total lack of reading in the last year since I started working in Culture. Most of my career is centred around a few dozen stale images in a temperature controlled room. Spending all this time hopping between openings and screenings, I found myself feeling entirely inauthentic. When I watch James Baldwin in Paris, it feels like we must learn to abandon ourselves from the anchor of history in order to move forward. I mean this personally, not politically, though it is always political. I gave away too much of myself on the Timeline and when I came back to collect the heap, I found that I had been taken to a thousand places in a hundred rooms.