Anodyne
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
 

Lee Bacchus on The Art of Hoarding

"'As though with eyes drained of tears, they stare out silently out of his sentences,' Adorno said of Beckett.

The hoarders, too, stare silently out through the crevices amid their horrible creations, confined by the very 'freedom' and 'control' they compulsively sought through collection, consumption and accumulation. But alternatively, their hoards help bridge (or dam) the vast chasm between a fragile psyche and an overbearing society. Their 'chaos' is the illusion of an order that re-connects them: photographs and clothing to lost loved ones or the past itself; commodities to a promise of happiness perpetually broken. Even the filth — the dust, mold, cobwebs and in one case the skeletal remains of a litter of kittens — is a testament to deep-seated and futile desire (like that of Miss Havisham’s petrified monument to her tragically interrupted wedding in Dickens’s Great Expectations) to stop the inexorable flow of time in its tracks."
- posted by cjb @ 9:36 AM


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