The Heap or the Hoard
I
was reading a collection of Ainu folk tales and came across a story
about a boy who gets sick and is condemned to bed. What is
interesting about this boy is that he has two companions who no one
else can see. They have played with him in the past, but now, when no
one else can figure out why the boy is ill, his invisible companions
become messengers instead of playmates. They speak of an ax that the
boy's father threw away. In fact, these two are the tray and pestle
that the ax, their chieftain, has fashioned. The boy's ailment comes
from an object scorned; the ax has cast a spell, as only a
personified ax can do, and the boy suffers for the wasteful sin of
his father. Only once the ax has been retrieved, cleaned, and the
proper respect given, does the boy recover. The Ainu, an indigenous
people of Hokkaido, Japan, must have put a lot of stock in axes.
Imagine
every time you threw something away it cast some horrible,
retributive spell on your kid. That is, until you brushed it off and
set some symbols around it. Imagine being haunted by that 500 lb tube
television that you inherited from grandma and grandpa. This is the
same television that you left by the dumpster in the alleyway when
you spent that loan money on a new flatscreen.
But
maybe I cannot take it that far. In all fairness, the story is called
“Don't Throw Away Useful Things.” That 500 lb washed out screen
is no longer useful compared to the high-def set that even your less
than coordinated kid could pick up. The older television has lost its
'use' value. We can assume that the Ainu boy's father has not
replaced the slighted ax with a chain saw. The object still has
value, it still has a use, and so he and the boy are punished.
The
question becomes, what is useful and what is not? What belongs in the
garbage heap, and what belongs in the dragon's hoard?
Objects
have a whole different meaning for us, in the Western 21st
Century sense of “us,”, then it did for whatever century the Ainu
folk tale came from. At the risk of making a sweeping generalization,
I would characterize us as being part of a throwaway culture. Sure,
we may still have that band t-shirt from high school, but a lot of
what we own is disposable and ready to be replaced by something
“better” the moment we take it off the shelf. An ax may last
longer than the smart phone, but probably not by much. We have the
ability to get objects easily, depending on the size of our bank
accounts. If that ax gets buried in the snow and dragged into the
vacant lot by the neighbour's dog, you can drive to the store and
pick another one up. The folklore is not an easy match between my
context and the Ainu's.
Our
folklore now, in its fantastic “reality television” form, points
out the extreme of object possession. Namely, people who hoard. They
are stories of horror, brought into the public imagination by the
Collyer brothers in their New York brownstone (google it), and
popularized by the show, “Hoarders.” From an unassuming facade of
the house next door, to an interior littered with feces, dead cats,
heaps of newspapers, rotting food, corridors of stockpiled bathroom
tissue, and collected mounds of bottles and glasses. Sure, we can all
look at our messy basements and cringe, but the stories of those who
hoard speak of showers impossible to access and ovens that have
become storage rather than a tool for cooking. Those things that
define the house have become useless.
These
are the things that belong in the garbage heap. The number of objects
and their age demand that they be disposed of. However, to the person
who lives in it, the stuff is equivalent to the treasure in a
dragon's hoard. You can imagine a great adventurer slaying a dragon.
After brushing off the dust and mourning the loss of his eyebrows
from the dragon's fire, he is greeted by hoarded papers with dead
cats lost in their depths. After all that risk and effort he would do
better to call a junk removal company than try to take any of it
away. But to the creature who hoarded the newspapers and the cats,
they were valued.
I
do not claim to know the mind of a person who hoards, though I have
read enough literature, listened to enough presentations on the
subject, to muse on it. One such study, which I will not be able to
quote or cite, used the example of a bottle cap. Remove yourself from
the perspective that it should be flicked into the bottom of the beer
case or at your friend's head. See it instead as a beautiful work of
human craftsmanship. See its thin metal edges, rippled like the
ocean's waves, its surface catching the light when placed by the
window. Would you throw such a work of art out? Or would you keep it
near so that you can enjoy its exquisite form? It still has value,
even though it no longer contains the beer.
For
the person who hoards to
throw out something that has value, means she will be haunted by it.
She is sick from throwing it on the garbage heap. Take another
example that I will not be able to cite. A therapist takes a man with
hoarding tendencies to a book store and has him pick up a cook book.
Then he instructs him to put it back down again. He must now walk
away. What does it mean for him to not possess the book? It means
that he will not be able to cook, to host a party, and, ultimately,
to not have any friends. This is an odd example because often people
who hoard have actively reduced their social circles anyways.
However, it still speaks of haunting, of consequences, of value lost.
The man is haunted by a future void of dinner parties and companions.
Now
think of our adventurer again, he of the scorched eyebrows and the
dead dragon. Picture him grasping the enchanted sword of the dragon's
hoard. Hear a chorus of angels and see a ray of light upon him. This
sword means a future of dragons slain, a land free of the fear of the
great scaly demons. Then, our adventurer throws it back into the
hoard, walks out, and is quickly burned to cinders by the dead
dragon's understandably upset spouse.
In
our throwaway culture there is very little consequence for throwing
things out. Well, there is in an environmental sense, but we have
very little in the way of stories like our Ainu friends that put so
much value on an item thrown away. Though I do not want to make light
of the very real danger that hoarding can create, maybe there is
something to be said in finding a happy medium between the extremes.
Maybe we should see beauty in things we would normally see as banal,
or valueless. Maybe we would appreciate what we have now, rather than
view things as disposable and always be looking at the next object to
replace it with. There is something to be said for extending the
value of things, and to seeing things in a different way. To see
magic in the mundane.
Chamberlain,
Basil Hall. Aino Folk
Tales,
1888
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