THE ARTS OF ONESELF

 

XI   The house I live in was also used as a hiding place for Jews during the war. It is situated on the edge of the Jewish Ghetto as it was established in 1941 in the inner city of Amsterdam. I live here for 23 years and it must have been two decades ago that while cleaning the attic that I found in a crevice between the roof panels and their supporting wall a series of dusty packages in what once might have been brown wrapping paper, containing some personal papers, an agenda, a passport, crinkled photographs, pieces of soap, a package of shaving blades, two lipsticks, a bag with tallow powder and a small box with coffee beans. All these things belonged to L.C., a Jewish man who apparently had been the owner of a music shop and also performed as a kind of clown, as could be seen on some of the photographs and which explained the make up utensils in the packages. Of course I did read and reread all the documents and the notes in the agenda, trying to make sense of it. It hardly did. Especially the notes made in the agenda (a pocket agenda of the year 1942 published by the Dutch branch of Siemens in The Hague) were difficult to understand. It is not clear whether they have any connection to the day sections in the agenda, and their content is most puzzling. There are many single sentences with almost commonplace content in an exalted style, like: "I do not maintain that I usually frequent such kind of establishments" (sunday January 4. 1942) directly followed by "Autumn hues did show themselves, fields became naked" (monday January 5. 1942). While writing this article on personal memoralia I felt the urge to look once more at these traces of people who lived in the same house as me. Up to the attic, finding the dusty archive box that functions as a sanctuary for their souls. Again I am reading the agenda of 1942 and as I skip over sentences that seem to have no relation, now and than I find some that express, over the subsequent pages, despair, agony and fear: "That they were people who acted in horrid gravity"; and "a sinister suspicion flashed through his brain"; and "he was allowed to stay, true only conditional, but still he was allowed to stay"; and one of the last entries "Nature does not care about human crime or human suffering and that morning the sun was shouting more brilliant than ever". This last sentence is written on a page that opens with sunday the 7th of July 1942, so maybe there is a meaningful chronology after all. The rest of the agenda pages remained blank, only in the back, where there is place for addresses and notes, are some scribbles. One is a list of recipes that should be acquired, goulash, macaroni, pancakes with marmalade, ... and the very last page is a packing list. Again I shiver when I read the very small and neat handwriting with over 30 things 'not to forget'. I need not list them all: "small linen bag with darning wool, nail brush, padlock, safety pins, tooth paste, shaving cream, 2 pyjamas, 2 shirts, 2 towels, writing equipment, 5 pair of socks...." Maybe, in all, I have looked five times at these memoralia, and each time I am so shocked. I did not dare yet to try and see if this man or any of his relatives survived the destruction machinery aimed at them. Being an archivist myself, the last thing I would do is adding these humble traces to the huge cemetery of the State War Archives or whatever institute that is professionally accumulating human misery. As long as I live in this house, these disintegrating objects and dusty papers might better remain here so I can regularly pay my respect to L.C. who is still sharing his house with me.         XII     "In the attics of homes all over the world, in the backs of cabinets and bottom of drawers, lie testaments to the lives of many forgotten women. Scrapbooks, books constructed of the scraps of lives, () multi layered records of life experiences." These are the opening sentences of a draft text on 'scrapbooks' by Georgen Gilliam which I found on the Internet while searching for sources for the tales on personal memoralia you are reading now. Gilliam is specially interested in personal scrapbooks by women containing ephermal mementos of a woman's life: "letters, photographs, clippings, invitations, locks of hair, dance cards". () Often there is not much written text in such collections of documents and objects, kept together in a book as a proof of personal experiences and relationships. These scrapbooks may be occasionally shown to others but mostly in an intimate and personal atmosphere. It is during such showings that the meaning of the objects and documents will be told, though some scrapbooks might haven written captions. Georgen quotes many recent studies on the subject, often from a feminist perspective in which the exclusion of this femine form of expression from literary and historical studies and the lack of understanding of gender differences in self-representation is noted. When compared with the favourite male form of self-expression the autobiography "a lack of self-focus" can be noticed in the scrapbooks by women. "They are often a legacy for a woman's family, the creatrix in the role of the family historian." There are several references to the making of 'quilts' by women, a traditional artwork "constructed out of pieces of clothing, scraps and bits gathered from the outgrown garments of a woman's family", and the analogy with the way these scrapbooks, and women's autobiographical writings in general, are composed. The observations of Estelle Jelinek, who studied women's autobiography, on the difference between male and female auto-biography have a direct link to this: "From earliest times, these discontinuous forms have been important to women because they are analogous to the fragmented and interrupted, and formless nature of their lives." (Estelle Jellinek/Women's autobiography; p.19) Another mostly femine form of quilt like construction is the 'Poesie album', still very popular in Germany and the Netherlands were it developed in the 18th century as a companion for young girls, an album in which friends, family and acquaintances from school would write little poems, stories, wishes and wisdoms, would draw picture or donate sticker like pictures for adorning its pages. In an abundantly detailed study on the 'Poesiealbum' by Jürgen Rossin an attempt is made to rehabilitate this stereotypical text form with its subjects of worldly wisdom, virtue, friendship, religion and children's rimes. There would be entries like "Das lachen ist ein Macht, vor der die Grössten dieser Welt sich beugen müssen" or "Das ist ein Land der Lebenden und ein Land der Toten,//und die Brücke zwischen ihnen ist die Liebe//das einzige Bleibende, der einzige Sinn." (p.401) Maybe such texts might sound quiet heavy for young girls of our times, but I am sure that when one would analyze some of the texts of 'heavy metal' bands, that are extremely popular with young girls now, a similar tone can be found. The Poesie Album is a book that will be presented by its owner to others to write down new entries in them, it is meant to be read and reread to internalize its content. Rossin concludes his study with a statement in which he points to the value of these albums as a means by which human ties can be kept over time and sociability/Gemeinschaft can be documented through the use of maximes and captions. In his view these albums are more than just kitsch like, nostalgic or fashionable products, though in the end they are often lost when a girl grows older, as a 'Poesie rime' is documenting: "Hier schreibe ich mich ins Büchlein ein, weil ich nicht will vergessen sein.//Noch lieber aber will ich im Herzen stehn,//weil Büchlein oft verlorengehn." (p.343) We can even go further back in time to find examples of similar usage of personal notebooks, like 'scrapbooks' and 'poesie albums', in the 'hupomnemata' of the Greco-Roman culture: "One wrote down quotes in them, extracts from books, examples and actions that one had witnessed or read about, reflections or reasonings that one had heard or that had come to mind. They constituted a material record of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent rereading and meditation." This is part of an article by Michel Foucault, "L'écrire de soi/Self writing", in which he describes how this form of writing an reading was not so much "a narrative of oneself" but a collection of "what one has managed to hear or read" with the aim of "the shaping of the self" and he quotes Seneca on its function: "We should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged, or it will not be part of us. We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power." (p211-213) While writing this essay I am of course constantly confronted with the problem how to find a balance between neatly quoting from others, and reformulating what I have taken from others, but what in my feeling has become something from myself. Often the distinction between the two blur. You can only create yourself through the others, no divine creation out of void, it is more like an endless reconfiguration of what existed already, but there are so many elements that I myself and others might be under the impression that something unique or new has been created.         XIII     "La lutte doit continuer entre cette part de la parole qui tend passionnément à la diffusion le plus large et une parole qui au contraire veut s'enfoncer, rester dans un cercle étroit, descendre même dans l'intimité de l'individu, pour le séparer de lui-même par le moyen de ce qu'il a de plus collectif, de plus universel, de plus inpersonel, le langage." This is the concluding sentence of another study on this subject: "Les baromètres de l'âme, naissance du journal intime/Barometers of the soul, birth of the intimate journal", by Pierre Pachet. It is unescapable, once the intimate is made public it will become something of another order. Writing because of the need to tell yourself to the others, mostly unknown to you. Reading because you have a need to identify with someone else, or you just like to observe, being invisible yourself. There surely is a strong element of voyeurism and its opposite when the intimate is made public.         XIV     There are also intimate writings, pictures not consciously made public, things one sometimes finds by chance: your heart starts to beat a bit faster, blood flushing to your face, you look and read, feel somewhat ashamed entering the private world of someone else, but still, you will read on... It must have been 1963 when during one summer I lived in a squatted house in the city of Haarlem, while attending sculpture classes at a new experimental art academy. It was an old 17th or 18th century house at the river in the centre of town and with a friend we were staying in a kind of attic, were apparently lots of other people had drifted by. Between the rubble I found a notebook with a series of letters describing an adventurous travel of a man and his girlfriend through the North of Africa. Apparently the letters in the notebook were never send. I have forgotten the details of those letters but not the thrill it gave me to read something that was not meant for me. Seven or eight years later a similar thing happened, also related to belongings left in squatted houses. This time it was in the Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood in Amsterdam at the high time of the hippies making their pilgrimage to the 'magic city'. I still see the hoards of long haired rucksack tourist who would ask "were are the abandoned barracks", as the word had spread in the whole of Europe that there was an area in the centre of town with houses, just for free. The sounds of bongo's and cheap bamboo flutes were mingling with the smell of marihuana and sometimes the siren of the fire brigade mixed in, when not well tended, fires started to devour a house because half stoned city nomads were trying to bake pancakes on an open fire in the middle of a wooden floor. Such incidents and the introduction of heroin in the area by American motorbikers in combination with some opium trade to outsiders by a few Chinese dealers, let to regular razzias in the squats by the local police in search for illegal drugs and unwanted foreigners. That is how I found a collection of letters, photographs and hallucinatory drawings left by some Italian hippies. There were some postcards meant to be sent to their families, way back in the deep south of Italy, in which they explained why they had left home and what freedom they were searching for. It must have been these incidents that have pointed me the way to another profession than that of a sculptor, that of an archivist of modern social movements, whereby my greatest interest have always been to acquire personal archives, be it during someone's lifetime or as often happens posthumous. The ceremonial in which this transfer from the private to the public is realized often has a strong schizophrenic character, on the one hand the person in question or his or her heirs are full of how important for posterity it is that everything will be made available to researchers and the public and on the other hand whole lists of restrictions are proposed to the archive institute to control the content of possible representations to be constructed from this material. There is also the silent disappearance of certain letters, photographs, books, I had noticed during a first visit in a preliminary stage of negotiations, taken away by a self-appointed censor who will give no explanation and often, as an archivist confronted with the heirs of a deceased person, one feels not in the position to ask for the reason why. I remember an extreme case of a political and literary figure who had already published some of his diaries and was handing me the original not before, right under my eyes, he tore out a few pages. Why this drama? He had told me already that he had omitted some parts, in the published journal, he found too emotional and personal. He could have easily tore out the pages before I arrived, so I would not have known. Maybe this ceremonial act was symbolic prove that any biography or other representation of a person by others can not be more than a mosaic on the basis of incomplete information, that identification and imagination of a biographer is needed to cement fragments in a portrait that seems real enough. An analysis by Nelson Goodman, though made for the visual arts, still very well applies here: "..a picture, to represent an object () must be a symbol for it, stand for it, refer to it; and () no degree of resemblance is sufficient to establish the requisite relationship of reference. Nor is resemblance necessary for reference; almost anything may stand for almost anything else. A picture that represents () an object refers to and, more particulary, denotes it. Denotation is the core of representation and is independent of resemblance." (Nelson Goodman "Languages of art, an approach to a theory of symbols", Oxford University Press; London; 1969; p.251)         XV     "I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself." These are the famous openings sentences of "The confessions" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau a text describing his own unique life from birth in 1712 to the year 1765, displaying himself "as I was", both "vile and despicable" and "good, generous and noble". Though he did read parts of this text to small audiences in 1771 it is only three years after his death in 1778 that his Confessions were published. Rousseau is seen by many as the creator of a new genre, the auto-biography, which seems nowadays such a natural form of expression, but it took several centuries of silent and slow development before the writing of intimate diaries and journals developed into this literary genre. Early examples like the 4th century "Confessions" of Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo in Roman Africa, are different from the self-centred writings and personal display of Rousseau. Saint Augustine's confessions tell about his conversion to Christianity after a turbulent youth and the autobiographical elements in the text are mere background for his mystical experience of finding God. There have been of course many writers before Rousseau who did dully note the events of the day, chroniclers who registered with the pace of the calendar what they witnessed, but this differs from the writer of a personal diary who tries to capture how she or he experiences personal change. The French writer Montaigne can be seen as a forerunner of Rousseau, living two centuries earlier and developing a literary form he called 'trials', 'essais'in French: "la pensée spontanée de son auteur, mais sur sa personne même, saisie dans sa dimension la plus quotidienne, la plus privée, la moins surveillée." (NB 22) Montaigne does write about subjects like 'idleness', 'on the power of imagination', 'on friendship', 'on smells', 'on presumption', 'on repentance'. Most of the time his own person is not directly the subject of his writings, but because of this indirectness, this way of 'denotation', we have the feeling to get a better picture, with a better resemblance of the man Montaigne than the one we get from the self-centred, more realistic writings of Rousseau. "Most autobiographers are anxious to build up a personality, to present themselves as more consistent,more resolute, more far-sighted, and built on an altogether grander scale than they would have appeared to their wives or their intimates." This observation is by the English translator of the 'Essays' of Montaigne J.M. Cohen, who compares, the writings of Montaigne with those of Rousseau. He sees the Confessions of Rousseau as the classical example of a "false portraiture", with Rousseau "pretending to emotions that he never had", a man thinking that his "romantic ego was really in control of events" and in the end was not able to "explain away" incidents "in which he fell short of the ideal picture of himself". In contrast Montaigne does not have the need to explain his action "he merely notes them down". In the words of Cohen his personality is "a kind of observer which, although incapable of controlling the complete mechanism of his life, is able to prevent its springing too many surprises on him".(p.12) The writing of essays gave Montaigne some self control, an example of which can be found in his essay "On idleness", were he describes how he tries to find rest in retirement, leaving his mind "in complete idleness to commune with itself". This does not work out as his mind starts to behave "like a runaway horse", "hundred times more active on its own behalf than it ever was for others". Montaigne gets haunted by chimeras and imaginary monsters and notes how "in order to contemplate their oddness and absurdity": "I have begun to record them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of them". (p.28)       XVI     This theme of writing to shame once own mind, to control oneself, is an old one, it can be found with another bishop from the same century as Saint Augustine, the bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius. Michel Foucault quotes a text of Athanasius on the indispensable elements of the ascetic life: "Let this observation be a safeguard against sinning: let us each note and write down our actions and impulses of the soul as though we were to report them to each other; and you may rest assured that from utter shame of becoming known we shall stop sinning and entertaining sinful thoughts altogether. Who, having sinned, would not choose to lie, hoping to escape detection? Just as we would not give ourselves to lust within sight of each other, so if we were to write down our thoughts as if telling them to each other, we shall so much the more guard ourselves against foul thoughts for the shame of being known." (quoted in Michel Foucault; article 'Self writing', part of a series of studies "the arts of oneself" in "Ethics/Essential works" Volume One; Allan Lane/The Penguin Press; 1997; p.207) This proposed daily writing exercise could take only place on the basis of the 'impersonal' and 'collective' device called language, it was a strict private exercise, not meant to be shown to others and still, when writing one had the feeling to be open to the gaze of others, or as Foucault formulates it: "the constraint that the presence of others exerts in the domain of conduct, writing will exert in the domain of the inner impulses of the soul." (ibid. p.208) Expressing one's thoughts in the device of 'language' implies adapting to the embedded value system of the cultural group that uses that language. One might feel free to use any language construction that comes to the mind, but in the end freely moving thoughts, not having any substance yet, need to be cast in the mould of an existing language to be fixed in writing. It is in that process that though alone, one is not really alone, while writing 'the others' are always looking over your shoulder. One wonders if the writing down of haunting images, of devilish thoughts would have an auto-cathartic effect, would function as a purgative medicine that drives out the dark forces within ourselves, a 'katharsis' effect, an act of 'self-art' were one is author, actor and audience at the same time, thus realizing the classical idea as formulated by Aristotle in his treatise on tragedy, the 'Poetics': "..through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions". (EB 13; p.14/1b) In our time we happily go around in the ghostly labyrinths of the inner souls of other writers, who apparently did not constrain themselves, be it De Sade, Lautréamont or Nietzsche, unhindered by the never ending academic debate whether this soul-hiking is just an aesthetical pleasure for the sake of art only, outside the current of ordinary human feeling, or that such darkish expositions will awaken our emotions, will learn us something which is applicable to our own lives. (for a longer expose of this debate see EB 13; p.14-15)         XVII     The writer may show his deepest self to the reader, but apart from the professional critics, the academic discourses and fan mail the reader remains invisible for the writer. "Why can I not see the face of my reader through these seraphic pages" writes Lautréamont in his "Chants de Maldoror" and he laments the "opacity of this sheet of paper" on which he is writing being "the most formidable of obstacles". (quoted in Alex de Jonge "Nightmare culture, Lautréamont & 'Les chants de Maldoror'"; St. Martin's Press; New York; 1973; p.165) It is in personal correspondence that writing paper becomes transparent. We have an image of the other while writing, and can see ourselves when we read what we just have written. A letter thus becomes looking glass, mirror and telescope at the same time. I think that the personal letter, the correspondence between two people is one of the most constant forms of expression through history. "To write is thus to 'show oneself', to project oneself in view, to make one's own face appear in the other's presence. And by this it should be understood that the letter is both a gaze that one focuses on the addressee (through the missive he receives, he feels looked at) and a way of offering oneself to his gaze by what one tells him about oneself." This is Michel Foucault summarizing classic ideas on letter writing by Seneca and Demetrius (p.216) and it sounds like a contemporary analysis of the writing of letters twenty centuries later.         XVIII I am a writer of letters since the time I was a boy. In the beginning I was forced to write these regular letters to my aunts, uncles and grandmother, but soon I developed a taste for it and enjoyed the exercise. I even had, as a boy, sparse correspondence with my father who I did not see for more than ten years because of a bad divorce. So in a way I learned to show myself in writing to people I knew and people I did not know. Writing letters have helped me when travelling alone and studying in other countries, to overcome feelings of loneliness and most of all to canalize the waves of emotion in relationships with women. There were travels, friends, a circle of international contacts, myself living in other countries, my girl friend finding work on an other continent, me staying behind for many months, all letter producing circumstances. I still prefer to write my personal letters by hand, the direct notation of a flow of thoughts, no backspace or delete button as on a each correction or rephrasing visible, with only the radical option of crumpling up a letter and a fresh start. Such a collection of manuscript memoralia is only half a collection, the self, the other half stays with the addressee, and it is only through the sad circumstance of people dying that some of my own letters have come back to me. Such dramatic moments have pushed me to read some letters again. Normally all this correspondence resides in binders, nothing but a warehouse of memories, somewhere in the attic. I rarely look at them, it is sufficient to know that they are there, traces of my life that will enable me to go back on the trail whenever I wish to do so.         XIX     Electronic mail has made correspondence more easy, one can send mail to one or more addressees in a single gesture, the speed of delivery is almost instant, the number of people one regularly contacts increases, but there are differences with the now old fashioned ways of handwritten correspondence. The final fixity of the text when one composes the initial electronic letter is still there, but when one gets a reply something changes. We often get our whole letter or parts of it back in replicated form, marked with some graphical signs, with only short answers after each particular section. Such business like efficiency can have a deadening effect on the quality of our communication, as we are missing the selective rephrasing by the other of our own observations, remarks and questions, seeing ourselves in a mirror through the answer of the other. The speed of communication makes our letters shorter, the exchange of letters more dynamic, with the system of on line 'chatting', interactive writing, as the ultimate written communication form after which we enter another realm, that of telephony. On line chatting, a dialogue over computer networks through keyboard typing, is a way of communication that normally doesn't leave traces, except when one keeps a so called 'log file' open which will capture the complete content of a chat session. That is almost on the same level as taping our telephone conversations, and telephone taping easily leads to telephone tapping. As long as we are not into black mailing or preserving our role as a president of a big firm or a country, it is something that is 'not done'. Of course we will remember our personal conversations, not as proof of law, but through the inconsistent and biased properties through which our mind wishes to remember them.         XX     Dematerialization of electronic communication diminishes the amount of traces that are left, hence the memory function such forms of communication can have. For next generation there might be less personal traces left from the end of the 20th century when the evaporating telephone, fax, email and other electronic communication systems took over, than from the three previous centuries when written and printed communication in ink on paper was more widely used. It is possible to keep 'back-up' copies of electronic documents, but their invisibility, their need of the right kind of equipment and software to make the content of a floppy, tape, CD-Rom, Zip-cartridge or whatever other form of electronic information carrier, audible or visible, the fact that the content of these back-ups can not be spatially spread out for evaluation and deselection, that the only access to these electronic documents is through the small window of a computer screen, means that many of these indistinct back-ups of our memories will be easily lost or thrown away, because one did not realize any more what was on it. In a way we are partly moving back to ancient times when notes for daily use were written on clay and wax tablets or black boards that could be reused, as more permanent writing materials were not abundantly available. Erasing or wiping of the writing surface for reuse as in ancient times, has been superseded by the regular deletion of digital information in modern times.       XXI     Engraving and writing, have always been used in metaphors for the way we remember, how we externalise what was on our mind, how we make a prosthesis for the mind, create 'artificial memory'. It is found in our daily language: something is "engraved" or "impressed on my mind", "stamped on my memory". And with the changing over time of the technology of making notes, of depicting and recording, metaphors for remembering are keeping pace, from impressing a seal into wax, to writing with a pen on paper, painting a picture, photographing, recording with a phonograph, film, video, using a computer. The latest, multi media, computer is a device which allows us to create almost unlimited image surfaces and sound events, representing texts, sound, still or moving images, or combinations thereof. For many people there is a similarity between the working of their own mind and the coding and decoding processes that form the basis of the functioning of a computer. At the beginning of this century Sigmund Freud used in a similar way a device that was called a 'Wunderblock', a 'magic writing pad', as a metaphor. They still exist as a children's toy in a more modern form with plastic sheets and carbon paper instead of mica and wax: a small frame with a transparent top layer, an opaque middle, and a black layer below; on the spots were one writes with a stylus the layers will be pressed together and the writing becomes visible; by separating the layers again, through moving a strip between them, the text disappears from the surface, but physically the traces still exist in the lower black layer where in time they fade away because they are overwritten. In the words of Freud: "Denkt man sich,dass während eine Hand die Oberfläche des Wunderblocks beschreibt, eine andere periodisch das Deckblatt desselben von der Wachstafel abhebt, so wäre das eine Versinnlichung der Art, wie ich mir die Funktion unseres seelischen Wahrnehmungsapparats vorstellen wollte." Freud also uses another metaphor of the mind whereby he sees himself as an archaeologist who studies an imaginary Rome, the city with a long and copious past, "an entity () in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exits alongside the latest one", a Rome where one could admire the Coliseum and at the same time the "vanished Golden House of Nero" that once stood at the same spot. Freud uses this unimaginable and absurd fantasy to explain the difficulty "to represent historical sequence in spatial terms", because "the same space cannot have two different contents" and he concludes: "It shows us how far we are from mastering the characteristics of mental life by representing them in pictorial terms". (p.226) It is good to point to the shortcomings of this kind of metaphors, but we can not do without such analogies, such visualisations when we want to represent the invisible workings of our own mind. Freud has had a life long obsession with archaeology and there is a strong parallel between his interest in this subject and the development of his theories. The "clearing away, layer by layer, of the pathogenic psychical material" compares with the technique of excavating a buried city. The archaeologist uncovers objects, dates them, reassemble them and tries to place them back in their original context, in much the same way as the psychologist tries to uncover the past of his patients. () Freud was also collecting archaeological objects, his working spaces in Vienna were filled with them. He started to collect after the death of his father, in 1896 when he went through a period of self-doubt and self-analysis. These antique objects,mostly rings, scarabs and statuettes were comforting him in this period of grief and he continued the collection till his death when it had grown to over 3000 pieces. Already in 1895 Freud had analyzed why old maids keep dogs and old bachelors collect things like snuffboxes, the first as a substitute for a companion in life and the latter for his need to make a "multitude of conquests". Freud observes something that is also applicable to himself "every collector is a substitute for a Dun Juan Tenerrio", and concludes these kind of things are nothing but "erotic equivalents". () To many of us now such an analysis is too much a value judgement, there is an implicit hierarchy in it, as if there exists an accepted standard of which personal and emotional relations are good and which are bad, we might nowadays feel more comfortable with the acceptance of a wide variety of relational forms, not just between one human and other humans, but also between humans and any other object of affection they choose.         XXII     Personal memoralia can be almost anything, it need not be relics that have been part of, or were in touch with those who were close to us, spaces we lived in, places we travelled to, personal fortune and misfortune. We also can express ourselves through the collecting of objects we fancy, things we choose as personal representatives. It can be artworks, any kind of antique objects, books, gramophone records, cd's, videos, post stamps, coins, match and cigarette boxes, sugar bags, wrist watches, empty or full wine bottles, furniture, houses, cars. Depending on 'your class', the money you can spend and the amount of space you have, it can be 'real things', replicas, reproductions or small scale models, though the last type of objects do have an extra function, giving us a feeling of being in possession and control like a giant, a king of the toys, a god like master of a miniature world. Many people find comfort in collecting objects because one is able to gaze at them, without them gazing back at you. The french writer Jean Baudrillard observes this kind of relationships with another collection item, pet animals, in his article on "the system of collecting". He extends this relationship to any other collectable object and following Freud's observation in 1895 he writes in 1994: "This is why one invests in objects all that one finds impossible to invest in human relationships. This is why men so quickly seeks out the company of objects when he needs to recuperate." (Jean Baudrillard; NB p.14) Some even say that collecting is the chief mode of our culture: "not politics, not religion but collecting". (Sarat Maharaj/NB p15) It is interesting to note how the human urge to collect is represented as an elementary human faculty, in the literature on the history of the modern museum, like Reinhard Brandt did in his contribution to a recent congress on museology: "Wer nichts sammelt, kann nicht leben, sondern regrediert zur Materie und wird selbst gesammelt." A collection always needs to be more then one thing, knowledge is based on comparing and ordering of different things: "Zur Erkentntnis bedarf es die Sammlung". (NB p51) There are others who even specify the dynamics of such creation of knowledge "the plenitude of taxonomy opens up the space for collectibles to be identified, but at the same time the plenitude of that which is to be collected hastens the need to classify." () Baudrillard puts the emphasis somewhat different, focusing on the egocentric needs of the individual who is not searching for knowledge but for himself: "The singular object never impedes the process of narcissistic projection, which ranges over an indefinite number of objects: on the contrary, it encourages such multiplication, thus associating itself with a mechanism whereby the image of the self is extended to the very limits of the collection. Here, indeed, lies the whole miracle of collecting. For it is invariably 'oneself' that one collects." (Jean Baudrillard; NB p.14)         XXIII     Of course such a collection of signs, semiophores, personal treasures, souvenirs, kitsch and tat, diaries and letters, or any other kind of collectibles that we use directly or indirectly to express ourselves, could remain exclusively intimate and private with us secretly or in seclusion perusing these memory objects and recalling inwardly their stories. More often such objects are on show in a house or displayed on special occasions to other people. Now there is a difference between objects tugged away in albums, boxes, binders, drawers, cupboards, cases, private rooms, or less frequented spaces of a house like the attic, and a more open display in the living quarters, on the wall, on the mantelpiece, the sideboard or in a glazed cabinet or showcase, or something as luxurious as a private gallery. The hidden objects need a special occasion, a ceremonial, to be displayed, their stories to be told. The impact of such infrequent showing of personal memoralia and the accompanying story telling is more strong than with objects that are on show permanently. Their known histories are shared by the members of the household and friends and, over the years, these stories get standardized and meaning will wear away. Only new visitors to the house, who wonder about this display of objects, create a fresh opportunity for the stories to be told again. One could say that these objects on display are the attributes of a storyteller: "people who like to recount their adventures () a strange race () who feel half cheated of an experience unless it is retold". (Anne Morrow Lindbergh/NB 36)         XXIV     Remembering is not only an act of the will, often memories come and go on their own, with us being completely out of control. To constantly remember everything is an impossibility. Jorge Luis Borges, master of describing the impossible, tells the story of 'Funes, the memorious/The inexorable memory of Ireneo Funes' who is paralysed after a horse has thrown him on the ground, but also suddenly develops a faultless perceptive faculty and memory. He is confined to a darkish back room laying on a bed remembering everything: "He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once...()... He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: 'I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world'." (Jorge Luis Borges/Ficciones; p.112) The narrator, in this story by Borges, sums up many more examples of the phenomenal memory of Funes but in the end he comes to the conclusion that Funes can not think: "To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details." (Jorge Luis Borges/Ficciones; p.115) The story ends with the death of this memory wonder. From one moment to the next this whole fabulous human storage medium was erased, the container of knowledge broke, its content spilled away.         XXV     Man has been a collector from his very beginnings, not so much a tool maker, a hunter with a weapon. "In collecting food man was also incited to collect information" writes Lewis Mumford in his book series on "technics and the human development" and he notes how the two pursuits went together: "Constantly picking and choosing, identifying, sampling and exploring, watching over his young and caring for his own kind -all this did more to develop human intelligence than any intermittent chipping of tools could have done." Mumford has done some counter speculation in the field of archaeology arguing that the surviving material evidence of stone flints, from which the term 'stone age' is derived, does not give enough value to the much wider use of organic resources in that period. The anthropologist Andreas Goppold uses the term 'fibre age' in his essay on the "morphology of cultural memory systems", be it materials from animals, hair, sinew, leather, or vegetable fibre.() Both Mumford and Goppold mention the copying by humans of the animal arts, nest building, weaving and spinning. Mumford places a special emphasis on the use of containers and he notes how functions of the own body were externalized: hands, mouth, stomach, womb and breasts mimicked in holes, hollow natural objects, baskets and pots, one could even extend this concept to communal containers like houses, towns, canals, ships, railways, airplanes.... Containers to sort, store and transport goods for later use. In the same line of thinking older people can be seen as repositories of the oral tradition and we often find the pot as a metaphor for their memory. It is in this process of collecting, storing and retrieving that the shift from the concrete to the symbolic took place, language developed, things could get other meanings besides their practical use as food or tool. In early times the selection, and associative grouping of things could have been a playful activity that helped to express abstract ideas by combination of concrete objects, generating what we now call 'metaphor', a carrier of meaning.         XXVI     The waste basket in the beginning of this string of tales can be used as such a metaphor, a container to store what we intend to forget before throwing it away, because to be able to know we have to throw, we must make selections, decide for ourselves what we find meaningful or not. Keeping everything is an impossibility, keeping too much makes us a slave of our own collection, keeping not a thing will make us a nobody. The worst thing is when a disaster or a violent act robs us of our material memories, because not only your past becomes less visible, also your vision on the future will be hindered. We can only look at the future by being able to look backwards by contemplating our past. So we need to be decisive, go over our past now and than and choose what is meant for the dustman, for the collective dung heap, to be burned, recycled as electricity, pester for a while our contemporaries with exhaustion fumes (for nothing is lost, everything becomes something else). When we have thus put things outside on the street, neatly packed in grey plastic bags, because even in this final stage one should try to refrain from showing oneself, there are the 'morning stars', those who roam the streets to see what is still usable, just before it is officially collected as waste; some neatly pick something out without leaving a trace, others roughly tear open and scatter the waste bags content over the pavement while looking if there is something for them in it, to be taken home, to begin a new life in a different context, or to be sold at the flea market. A wind blows through my street a little while later and playfully whirls some papers through the air, some with pictures, some covered with writing and looking from my window I see someone making a few fast steps, picking it up, looking, glancing very briefly and dropping it again, a story that failed to be written, but who knows what will happen a little further down the street, out of my sight...      Tjebbe van Tijen      Amsterdam august 1998

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