Memo 40: Consuming, Part 1
what goes around...
On the whole I am not a fan of daylight savings, but it is useful in its own way. It can make me more crabby, withdrawn, depressed and sluggish, but isn’t that great for self-reflection? Now that I end up hibernating by 6:30pm, I have plenty of time to take stock of what I’ve been holding onto subconsciously over these past few months. In the tote bag of my subconscious, here are some pennies and gum wrappers that have stuck around.
A few months ago for a PowerPoint presentation, I came across Katamari Damacy, a 2004 Japanese video game that has reached cult status. Loosely translated to “Clump Spirit,” the lore to the video game is this: the king, drunk one night, destroys all of the stars and the moon. He askes the prince (also known as Dashing Prince or the Prince of All Cosmos, if you want to get formal) to return the stars by rolling up objects into a single ball, a.k.a a katamari, as quickly as possible.
The objective of the game is to roll various things around into a big ball, which is as deliriously simple and fun as it sounds. Here is a snippet of the gameplay; I recommend watching it, if for nothing more than to hear the brain-massaging music. I end up liking most silly games, but Katamari Damacy struck me differently. Underneath the game’s vibrancy is a heavier matter: the idea of holding on. We’re being asked to take everything we see and keep it all with us, within eyesight, in our care. Oftentimes, holding on like that becomes a burden. But in this world, it’s nothing more than a joyous mission filled with light music and rewards. That’s a control freak’s dream (I would know; I’ve been there).
But what is the real weight of things? When I visited the Hammer’s Together in Time exhibit, one of the pieces that stayed with me was Eleanor Antin’s Renunciations, which is simple in execution and could be easily overlooked (I would know; I did at first). The piece is a few blown-up prints, filled with Antin’s listings of various daily items and activities — getting groceries, bus fares, cleaning supplies, a lipstick and comb, what have you. Each item gets totaled up to exactly $8.
This was Antin’s submission to the L.A. Artists’ Publication, an alternative magazine in the 70s. An editor from the magazine reached out to Antin, requesting her to submit a piece; they said don’t worry, it’s free to submit, expect for $8 that all artists have to send in so the publication could print each piece. In her own cheeky way, Antin made a list of many items worth $8 that she would have to give up for that month if she wanted to use $8 towards her submission instead. That was the list I saw hung up in the gallery.
Antin’s piece highlights that you can’t have everything - that’s not just how budgeting, artistic endeavors, or life works. When you take in something, you’re giving something else up; it’s maybe not as even of a swapping game as $8, but it’s give and take. In a way, consuming never just requires taking in; there’s always letting go.
Maybe it’s not as much of a binary as I’m leading myself to believe. This is where I get to segue into one of my favorite things I’ve read in a while, an 80s piece by Ursula K. Le Guin: her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. She winds through the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution, which argues that the first cultural device used by humans was a bag for carrying food, and connects it to different forms of storytelling (primarily linear conflict vs. nonlinear musing).
I don’t agree with every part of the piece, especially as it talks about conflict — this post does a smart job of highlighting that — but a good amount of the piece resonates with me or, at the minimum, prompts thought. It feels almost silly to rewrite someone as sharp as Le Guin, so I have the luxury of including one of my favorite parts of the passage below:
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again--if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all.
The spirit of Le Guin’s piece is that holding on isn’t clumsy or fearful; it’s needed so we can connect things that seem disparate at first glance. Holding two things close together can lead to three things. Consumption is in every echoed layer we move through in life; it’s not good or bad, it’s simply how it is. But that can make it easy to believe that what we are what we take in.
Are we merely what we carry? There is something seductive in thinking that (I would know; I think that sometimes). Maybe a slight tweak in my approach gets me farther. Along the way of holding on and letting go, there’s meaning involved. But meaning could kick in at any stage. Could it come when we let go? Do we carry, consume, hold on just so we can lose what we have? This feels even more dour.
A slight tweak in my verbiage instead, though, and this melodramatic questioning all breaks open: it’s not losing, it’s giving. We carry and amass in order to give. Like the ideas we patch together from the materials in our bag, like the items in our rolled-up ball or in our laundry list of expenses, things are never really ours. They just stay with us for the moment before changing shape, with or without us.
By giving, we never lose nor truly hold anything. The sun left so early today; I wish I could hold onto it. But that’s not really something I can do. I would know, I tried.
And because there is always more to consume, here are some LINKS from this past week:
This was the week that everyone decided to go warp speed on AI, apparently. Among the updates, releases and news — Grok, the AI service for X, can spread misinformation; the EU just agreed on new details for its AI Act, which was conceived over 2.5 years ago; and Google faked its Gemini AI demo.