How Possessions Dissolve Our Sense of Self

Yesterday, I was perusing an idea for a story, this image of a rag and bone woman, an idea, which like the woman at its core, cunningly refuses to fully reveal itself. The only truly distinct image I visualize is the image of the witch from the movie, the Dark Crystal, an ugly old hag, with rams horns hidden underneath a bird’s nest of hair, a wrinkled old, gray face, thick lips turned down in a frown, and a set of dark eyes, one open, the other closed, as if she were perpetually in painful thought.

The song “Rag and Bone” by the White Stripes gave rise to the idea, a metaphor waiting to be explored, I thought. The image of persons who sought out items of personalty to collect when no one else wanted them appealed to me, essentially rag and bone men and women. The song exemplifies the soulful jaunt that has come to characterize the White Stripes, a simple guitar rift over which Jack White and his eager sidekick, Meg, speak rather than sing, a kind of rhythmic kind of cadence, wavering between sections of light picking to heavy distorted strumming. It’s the kind of gem which gets hidden between the folds of an album, its true brilliance shining once all the other songs are stripped away and the song can be encountered on its own.

The song’s premise is simple. Jack White and Meg are rag and bone people, seeking items that no one wants, all the while giving a sense of the rag and bone life. The different elements effectuate the theme and tone well, and the listener feels the kind of dirty, ragged, carefree life of the junk man. It certainly grabbed my imagination, so much so that I began, almost immediately, to develop a story around it.

People dispose of so much of their lives in modern times. The modern convenience of curbside pickup of trash and refuse encourages such behavior. Society have long discovered that any object can be severed from one’s life forever by simply placing it in a trash receptacle and wheeled out to the street which passes by one’s house. No one patiently waits for the large garbage truck to coast beside the receptacle to watch it jerkily extend its long arm to lift and pour the discarded into its own large container to be hauled off and buried beneath other refuse.

Electronic devices seem to be particularly susceptible to this phenomena. I bought my first computer when I entered law school, purchased from a newly ordained priest who was eliminating the things he owned, probably in effort to make relocating easier. The computer lasted for less than a year when I discovered its sluggish processing speed. I remember purchasing a laptop computer at Best Buy, which lasted a few years while in law school. Its last few months, it huffed noisily out of its fan irritating my classmates who were trying to listen to the professor’s lecture.

Then graduating from law school, I purchased another laptop, meant to aid me in my work, until it didn’t one weekend when I was preparing for a trial the following Monday, and I had to make a decision about whether I desired to battle with its fickleness, or purchase another laptop which might last me another few years. And I goes the cycle. My home office now serves, at least in part, as a kind of morgue for these deceased machines, each in a laptop bag I purchased with laptop, a kind of body bag which can be unzipped if ever I get around to doing an autopsy.

Think too of the number of cell phones you possessed over your life. In my case, I accumulated a batch of them, a testament to the passing fads in cell phones. I purchased for myself a Virgin pre-paid phone, then a flip phone, Blackberry, an Android phone, and then an Android phone with an updated operating system. Like the laptops, I have accumulated these phones, no longer used, now dead to me, but still a part of me, because I used them for so much of my life.

Ironically, the same personalty that people own for a few years and then throw away defines so much of who they are, especially in modern times when the technological advances have permitted a larger selection in various types of manufactured goods. Take something as simple as a pair of jeans. I recall, when younger, that when you bought a pair of jeans, your selection depended on brand. Individualization depended on the price you paid for the jeans, which became evident when someone viewed the label stitched across the back waist of the jeans, or how you fastened the front, whether by zipper or buttons. Now, jeans come not just different brands but in different colors and cuts. A fit now exists for everyone.

Because of the variety that now exists permitting individualization of one’s style, the items we buy become us, and we them. As I explored in an earlier post, I recently adopted the practice of wearing bow ties, a look meant to give others another understanding of who I was, a definition through association with that item. Although efficient, the practice lacks depth because it relies upon standard (and maybe exhausted) stereotypes, crude and rough, capable of holding so many meanings, some which contradict with each other. Such crude understandings easily create misunderstandings about who someone truly is.

A number of persons who I encounter at work who misunderstand me personally based on the clothes I wear or the way I speak. (Of course, I do not anything to correct any misunderstanding, thinking that such lack of knowledge protects me from being disappointed when standing fully exposed, people see me as the unremarkable person I fear that I am.)

Returning to the example of the computer or the cell phone, we pack away so much of our lives on these devices, literally containing the people we know, their addresses, telephone numbers, even communications we’ve had with them, emails and text messages, even photographs of them. Every time we use these devices, a piece of us gets digitized and is stored. It is no wonder that people feel hopeless, me included, without their phone in their hand.

When you put these two ideas together, that we live in a society wont to dispose of outdated, unfashionable belongings and that every item that we have ever owned contains a piece of us, one conclusion is inevitable: as a society, we have no qualms about throwing away the bits ourselves contained in the items we known.

A number of questions then come to my mind. Should we worry about eventually losing ourselves if we have thrown enough of these items away? Or is there an endless pot of ourselves which we can imbue in the items that belong to us? I believe the self cooks in a shallow pot and not does not replenish.

Many morning news programs and talk shows build at least in part their audience on the makeover premise wherein a person depressed by the person who they have become, rids themselves of the old things that they have acquired, clothes or home furnishings, to try to morph into someone new, someone they feel might feel comfortable in becoming, at least until awkwardness of being finally catches up with them, requiring a new metamorphosis. These people are snakes shedding old identities, except with each skin shed, a bit of their substance is lost forever, disposed and relegate to a trash pile.

And when we dispose of personalty, do we open ourselves to be acquired by someone else, such as a rag and bone man? The number of second hand shops, Goodwill stores, and even Ebay suggests yes. In fact, the more “character” something has, the more value it holds.

Priests often take a vow of poverty, a tradition as old as the Church itself. Even Jesus spoke of the virtues of poverty, stating that it was easier for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to enter into the kingdom. Assuming that the soul is necessary for entrance into Heaven, it is easy to understand the point Jesus was making, that we lose ourselves in the things that we own.

So do we eschew the ownership of all belongings? I think it would hard to live without my tablet on which I am now composing this blog, or my phone through which I interact with so much of the world around. We have crossed over the line of self-dependency so that society is doomed to have the individual soul eroded from us through our purchases. Perhaps, the solution is to recognize that power exists in the mere act of purchase, and that we should exercise such power with responsibility and prudence.