Memories? Call 1-800-GOT-JUNK (Patreon)

Tonight, I was catching up with We (or Nous, if you prefer), the documentary by Alice Diop that played in Berlin and ND/NF. At this point in the film -- about 25 minutes in -- I had to stop because I was overcome by a tremendous sense of loss. But unlike so many losses we experience in life -- the passing of loved ones, growing up and leaving home, the gradual dissolution of memory -- this one is entirely self-inflicted. I have no one to blame but myself.

When I am in a particular frame of mind, I throw things away. Usually I do this at a particular phase of depression, when the sense of hopelessness has crested and I am casting about to reassert order and agency. This is an irrational moment in which I throw away objects that I later regret having discarded. But this is distinct from an economic panic that used to grip me, but thankfully doesn't so much anymore, when I would hastily sell some of my most valuable books and DVDs for pennies on the dollar. (Thanks, Half Price Books!) In those cases, I at least have a misguided idea that by parting with long-term possessions, I can put a little money in the bank.

What I am describing now is different. It has to do with wanting to clear away the past, to try to escape my circumstances and start fresh. This is clearly impossible, but the "logic" is that if I get rid of the objects I've been carting around the country for years, I will somehow be able to rid myself of the weight of history, past mistakes, or some unpleasant image I have of myself. It is an attempt to trigger amnesia by erasing the material evidence of having lived.

At times, this impulse is destructive and idiotic, something anyone outside the tunnel vision of mental illness would immediately recognize. Several years ago, Jen bought me a classic Bolex for Christmas. It even had a sound apparatus. But then, while moving, I was angry at the sheer physical ballast of the camera. Lugging it to yet another address struck me as part of a pathetic self-deception, that I would ever be able to make films of my own. The very object felt like a compact embodiment of a lie. Instead of selling the Bolex, I left it in its case, with all the extra lenses and sound equipment, by the side of a dumpster. I convinced myself that someone who really needed it might find it, that I was permitting new films to come into the world. Of course, someone probably just sold it, or threw it in the trash. I'm such an asshole. 

But hey, I was moving, and I had to make tough decisions. Often, the stress of moving becomes an excuse to trash a lot of stuff, objects I've held onto for years. I am moving again, and this time I junked the last of my VHS tapes. My collection once numbered in the hundreds, but of course a lot of those films were released digitally in the meantime. The ones I held onto were films that I was fairly certain had never been released in any medium -- episodes from Alexander Kluge's 90s TV show, a couple of Chytilova films that Steve Erickson taped for me from NYC cable access, and a few rare experimental films I'd snagged over the years -- Robert Nelson, Andrew Meyer, Rose Lowder. 

The reasoning was that I would never actually watch them again, because hooking up an old VHS player was too cumbersome, and I'd never find a way to transfer them to digital. Again, it was the sudden anxiety that I was lying to myself, pretending that I would do something productive with this material when in fact I never would. I'd just continue to carry these things around, prideful talismans of an unhealthy, obscurantist tendency that wouldn't yield any tangible result.

In this most recent sweep, I finally discarded my old Sony Hi-8 camera. I didn't throw it away, though. I put it in a bag and gave it to Goodwill. What I did throw out, though, were old Hi-8 tapes I've kept for nearly two decades. I cannot be certain of what was on those tapes, but it could very well have been scenes from Matt's early years -- learning to walk, talk, cuddling with my dad before his stroke. They might have contained the only remaining footage of some of our cats when they were alive -- our original trio, Ube, Lemieux, and Hollis. Or they might have just been some clumsy landscape studies. I'll never know.

In We, Diop discovers an old videotape that has 18 minutes of family get-togethers, including the last moving images of her mother. As she described the archeological process of watching this footage, poring over it to catch last traces of someone who has left the earth, I felt the sting of my bad decisions coming back to confront me, the regrettable collision of depression and physical baggage. 

As much as these mistakes pain me, I also understand them to be a fundamental element of our fleeting significance, the smallness of the self in the broad expanse of things. I suspect that when I'm dead, my ashes will be carted around by someone, from apartment to apartment, from house to house, city to city. They will end up on a high shelf in a closet, next to some disused sports equipment or a Tupperware bin of winter clothes. And then eventually, they will find their way to the resting place of all memories, where I will be reunited with feet of unwound videotape, bent mementos, broken toys, and the piercing squawk of agitated seagulls. Ashes to ashes. Garbage in, garbage out.