Home as Museum

‘Why content ourselves with a mere inventory of our treasures? Let us look at them ourselves, use them and work upon them in manifold ways.’

Novalis

• Systematic collecting: ‘an ostensibly intellectual rationale is followed, and the intention is to collect complete sets which will demonstrate understanding achieved.’
• Fetish collecting: ‘the objects are dominant’; this is an ‘obsessive gathering [of] as many items as possible . . . to create the self.’
• Souvenir collecting: ‘the individual creates a romantic life-history by selecting and arranging personal memorial material to create what . . . might be called an object autobiography, where the objects are at the service of the autobiographer.’

“Both [fetish and souvenir collecting] are part of an attempt to create a satisfactory private universe, and both do this by trying to lift objects away from the web of social relationships, to deny process and to freeze time”

Susan Pearce

‘Systematics is the construction of a collection of objects in order to represent an ideology . . . . Fetishism is the removal of the object from its historical and cultural context and its redefinition in terms of the collector. In souvenir collecting, the object is prized for its power to carry the past into the future.’

John Windsor

Beginnings

"She is the kind of child who feels a protective tenderness towards her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacements to make every effort to restore and preserve - keep things together for their value as remembering objects - a way of fastening herself to life."

Don deLillo - White Noise.

Blue and yellow - horizon to horizon - undulating wheat - man on the moon - a place to be lost - to loose oneself - 1969.

Loss of belonging - of physical continuity - both location, and proximity of physical objects. How much do physical objects mean - how much do they make us: proof of our history - our past. Out of body confirmation of our existence. Otherwise, we are only in our mind. No clues on offer. Nothing to contradict. Can the objects lie?

Do I need a catalyst? And others... do they? And love?

Self as Collage

Narrative, episodes, blogs, short stories, poems, collage... how to gather a life fractured - to form a whole - what glue to use? To gather the shards, to restore meaning to what has been neglected, and to give meaning to what has been ignored or derided.

The glue of Nin's collages is the "I" who percieves, reflects, interacts with others, dreams, interprets her experience, and finally expresses what she has experienced.

Sharon Spencer on Anais Nin

"I allowed myself to live out a mood and see what it would construct. Once the mood is accepted, the mood makes the selection, the mood will give fragments a unity, the mood will be the catalyser. And so, this book, which should have been a novel or another book of short stories, became something else, a collage"

Anais Nin on Collages

"Our lives are a dense network of perpetually reconstituted connections between impressions, feelings, meaning, words - we create ourselves humpty-dumpty like from frgaments - never simple, always complex, contradictory, like Baudelaires Consequences and leonardo's universe, where he saw actual lines of geometry connecting objects."

Proust