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Interlude on Salvage

Created: 2024-06-12 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-05-27 (18:21:23)
Status: completed

I originally wrote this in the midst of reading Tove Jannson’s Notes from an Island. In that book, Jannson, her companion Tuulikki Pietilä, her mother Ham and their carpenter-sailor friend Brunström are in every chapter salvaging things from the sea, from other islands, or that have simply washed up on their home shore of Klovharun.

“We gather driftwood, especially in spring. Exasperatingly, incomprehensibly, none of it comes ashore on our island, it all sails by just out of reach. We gather it on other shores, a mixture of work, play and ritual […] we bring it home and sort it - logs, timbers, planking, lumber, odds and ends - and, in a separate pile, whatever we don’t have the heart to burn, pieces we can still use or that we admire and that musn’t be confused with firewood. This great sorting is very important” (58).

I love this about the book, the emphasis on the things the ladies find and hold onto over the years. It reminds me of my own things found over the internet, at the Green Shed, out and about, and held onto for years… the bundle of metal and wires I somehow came home with when I was very young, after a nighttime visit to see the Mount Ainslie beacon, that inexplicably panicked me. The tiny, polished machine component found by Googong Reservoir. Acorns and sticks. Wattle leaves and four-leaf clovers stuck between pages of my books and immediately forgotten.

Sitting in front of me is a first edition hardback of The Mooring of Starting Out, collecting John Ashbery’s first five books of poetry. It’s a beautifully designed book in itself, but what really made me coo in delight as I unfurled the packaging on it was the code pasted to its spine - 811.54 Ashbery - and all the stickers and stamps and handwritten notes throughout establishing that this copy once belonged to the La Jolla Branch of the San Diego Public Library.

Of all the versions of a book to own, one that once circulated through a public library must be the most pleasurable. I have another book belonging formerly to the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education, which still has the loan slip with all its stamped check-out dates. Pleasure is the right word for it, for the feeling of leafing through these books and reflecting on the unlikelihood of their being printed, circulated, discarded and crossing the ocean - to me!

I’m a materialist through and through. I love my old marked up books, smelling their decaying pages. I love hugging the stuffed cats I buy from the senior’s centre fête each year, and which other people have now begun buying me too. I love my bicycles, my shiny new one but also the Avanti Hurricane I found at the recyclery, with its layers of accumulated filth and its unreliable chain.

The things I love most are the things that were given to me. A bright pink and fluffy jacket my sister found for me, which makes me look like Abby Cadabby. the glory box my mum assembled over the course of years and gifted me, not when I got married, but when I moved into my own apartment. Books, movies, drawings, figurines. Then the things preowned, or handmade, or salvaged from who remembers where. The library books and stuffed cats and furniture. Things bought new that have since developed a patina of years and grime.

Grime and filth. “Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile - a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore” (Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto). Not that the stuff I’ve found is somehow less culpable in all this. People still had to assemble it all. But at least they’ve had more time to reacquaint themselves with the earth, with earthiness, before or after they found their way to me.

Late in Notes from an Island, Jannson’s reflections shift to an awareness that they will be leaving Klovharun, and not returning, and what is there to do about all the things they have come to own? “We tried to imagine certain things we had inherited, captured or found on the beach - treaures we held in great respect for far too long - brightening up entirely new places” (73).

I worry about this too. My parents are far more prolific than me at this kind of thing, and when I visit, I can’t help but think, a bit selfishly, about thirty, forty years down the line when it will fall to us their children to figure out what to do with all the empty terracotta pots, paving stones, books, cds, dvs and tapes, the sealed caravan full of asbestos and obsolete electronics, bricabrac, curios, tchotchkes. Mostly likely it will involve scattering a great deal of it back throughout the city, returning all these items back into the material flow of the world from their temporary repose in a suburban back garden. The ones that haven’t already been reclaimed by the earth, at that point.

(Not the caravan. The caravan may have to be sealed in concrete, buried, a zone of exclusion erected on the site. It may in the end outlive us all.)

And then what about, seventy, eighty, a hundred years down the line? Tove Jannson and Tuulikki Pietilä’s cabin at Klovharun is a museum now. You can visit it, visit the cellar, flip through the Mumintrollen on the shelves. Selfishly again, I like to imagine all the things I’ve gathered and created winding up in some dusty archive. All my grubby sketchbooks and journals, my library, my bicycles. (This is a dusty, but roomy archive. They will fit somehow.)

I will by that point have collected and been gifted hundreds of stuffed, knitted cats. They will not fit even in my imaginary archive, and along with the fluffy pink jacket will accompany me back into the earth.

See also

References

Endmatter

Tags: @completed @material-things @reflections

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