Pack Rat-itis

Many of us know people who are hoarders. True hoarding is considered to be a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I was reading of some food hoarders; the story said that people that hoard food between wars are not really hoarders, since it is hard to get food in wartime.

(That was a lot like reading books from the future - a Orwellian 1984 touch about constant wars and what goes on between wars. I tried to find out more about who wrote it, but there didn't seem to be a lot of information.)

Were a hoarder to throw something out, they would feel a deep, personal loss tearing at them; that's why they can't do it: their self has extended out into the object world, and their surrounding objects have taken on part of the aura of their Intimacy ..."Intimacy" being defined as the set of intimately felt things, whether a body part or a loved one.

So it is with creativity. When we create, we extend ourselves out to the world.

When we have social relations, we extend ourselves out.

Even the smallest interaction is an "intimacy"...that's why our ancestors used to call "interpersonal actions" by the name of "intercourse". Nowadays, we are overwhelmed by the "intimacy" suggested by the word "intercourse", and we have pretty much abandoned it to health care professionals.

In this post-AIDS age, we have been turning against intimacy, as evidenced by the rage of texting and messaging: others call it instant contact, I call it lots of contact, but at a safe distance; it tries to make up in quickness and frequency  what it lacks in intimacy. One of the reasons that our public discourse is so vindictive and hateful is our rage to protect our Intimacy against intrusion from outsiders. On a national level, speaking of national communications using the large media, we display a profound distrust, which does in no way reflect the true intimacies which exist on the local levels, in small groups and families, where people do reach out and converse.

Our national media are dysfunctional, and they are exhibiting hoarding behavior: they extend a communication and an invitation to intimacy, but their message never actually makes it out into the sunlight; they remain constipated within their own nest of hoarded objects and ideas. Their objective has become more and more to take rather than to give, and what they do give is coldly calculated to increase the odds of their taking...that's the goal of all their advertising.

Hoarders are artists thwarted in their art: singers who have no voice, painters who lack co-ordination, chess players without a clue...at least in their minds, they think they are so lacking. So they latch on the the bits and pieces of real life as it has been lived, and store it in a depository of their Life: the examples of their creativity.

They wish to extend themselves out, but instead of relating to humanity, they create the prostheses of belongings wrapped in plastic bags, and piles of newspapers stored on the stairs to the basement, and the garages bursting at the seams...all museums of their peculiar art.

All men have been designed in the image of God, and therefore it is their destiny to be free to create, for as God is creator, so must mankind be.

We actively work to help individuals afflicted by hoarding. We must also work on the national level.

The  problems of our national political discourse demonstrates that - at least on the national level - we cannot function as a creative nation any more.

We must act to free ourselves on the national level. When we go to visit Uncle Sam, we don't want to have to climb over all the tanks on the front stoop anymore; we don't want to have space programs going nowhere in particular taking up the dining room; we don't want to have to duck out of the way of drones; we particularly don't want to watch while he goes out back and yells at another neighbor and threatens to invade his backyard.

All our creativity in fighting for freedom has been lost, and this process has been summed up in the Afghanistan War:  go to war, fight, win, give it away over the next 8 years, fight again...

It is dysfunctional, it is no way to interact with other peoples, and all of our genius has been turned into bodies stuffed in bags, and dubious headlines in the newspapers which form the labyrinth of our Living Room.

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Creative metamorphoses of hoarded objects:

Watts Towers

Detroit's Heidelberg Project