Remembering Apparatus: Poetry and the Visibility of Tools‪.‬

In a consumer satiety like ours, it is easy to find oneself surrounded by material clutter, and a thorough spring cleaning only makes us blink with amazement at the strange collection of possessions, utilitarian and otherwise, that we have somehow acquired. But our lives have become cluttered in a more fundamental way, one that affects our thinking far more than we care to realize. These days, one's head is full to bursting with labels and cross-references that attempt, with limited success, to organize and make sense of our world. Is this simply an inevitable condition in a world of rapid technological change? Not at all -- in fact, this phenomenon is much older than even the most ancient artefact from your basement. RECENTLY I held a yard sale because I wanted to convert clutter into money. I advertised in the paper, emphasizing the range of articles for sale -- furniture, books, clothing, appliances, household items. I put up posters at the university which hinted that Real Finds swam like pike among the weeds, that this was a place where not only might a useful pre-owned chair be acquired, but an objet might be trouve. On Friday I began lugging stuff from the basement and contriving its artful display on planks laid between boxes and that old set of stereo speakers (themselves on sale) in the yard and garage, enjoying the twin pleasures of spring cleaning and junior capitalism, spiced with a dash of gypsy elan. But these mainstream yard sale feelings were followed by a mood that surprised me. Once out of storage and onto the lawn, the clutter looked different: each thing emerged from the general mess into its own identity. It was as though the monetary concern (how much can I ask for a dysfunctional Lawnboy?) triggered a wider sense of value, one that had to do with our connection and shared experience ("lotta grass through the old blade, eh?") over the years. Walter Benjamin claims that ownership is the most intimate relation we can have with things; but I wonder if that intimacy is not, like marriage, shadowed by familiarity's dead hand. Of course Benjamin is thinking of connoisseurship, but I have it on good report that a painting or a first edition can become as invisible as a kettle.