Baubles

Hang on

(An amaryllis, breaking open into a red and white explosion of blossom)

I dropped a box of Christmas stuff earlier in the year from the attic to the floor below. The shattering sound it made was oddly satisfying. I think it mostly had plates in it, though doubtless a few baubles were lost too. I don't really remember what was in there. I've been thinking of storage, and what it means to break and to throw out, a process that seems to happen with churning regularity. I managed to knock nearly all of the bowls I own down onto myself and the hard creamy coloured tiles of the kitchen floor, thankfully missing my head in the process. Everything in smithereens! What a glorious word. I looked at the wreckage with nothing to say for myself. The sun came in the window brightly. I swept the pieces up. Most of them were white flakes, near dust.

I think there's a lot to be said for the art of breaking things, the way it teaches you -hopefully not to be so clumsy, but also not to buy things and expect them to persist forever. There is something sick as well as the usual haunting feeling about objects that outlive their owners, even as they possess the magic of antiques, acquiring such buttery words as patina and heritage. They are greasy with immortality, but they themselves remember nothing of what is gone.

Recently I've been thinking about an art installation called Slow Room by Johnathan Schipper, stills and video from which you can see here https://www.jonathanschipper.com/slow-room. (Inserting links on mobile is being awkward). The piece centres on a something that appears like a living room, rigged up with strings which are slowly, minutely, dragging all the furniture and assortments towards and through a hole in the wall. There is some powerful mechanism pulling them towards destruction, though without the glee of spontaneous spectacle.

Perhaps I like the making of a mess when it is myself doing it, perhaps because despite the wince at the cost, and the end of a useful and sometimes nice thing, it clears the way towards something else. A future of different things, which might, naively, be imagined as better things. An order chosen that is different from the other order of haphazard acquisition. Maybe just because destruction is creation [they do say that, but who first? God?]

I think I am skipping over. Christmas, with its timeless, temporary, anxious joys towards the exciting blank of the new year. The old year is breaking in a haze of golden lights and fake fir and food. The new one stands like a white shadow. In this new year will be the hours I need. You too. What sound they will make as we run right through them?