The Room

I realize, looking around my room and trying to construct a memory palace, that I have years of them built up already. Everything in this room has a memory attached to it. Each book that sits in my bookcase recalls a certain time in my life when I read it. "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman was last summer, when my mind was active with both magic and terrible stress. "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov was the summer before that, both new and strange. Many were specifically for classes and are thus tied with the professors who taught out of them. My bookcase alone, with its anthologies of Romantics, Literary Theorists, and 18th and 19th century American authors, with that tome of a Shakespeare anthology, with its cheesy pulp fiction and graphic novels ranging from Batman to Fables to Star Wars to X-Men to Zombies, looms heavy in my imagination. Even the wooden shelves which hold them up is an artifact from my childhood room in Billings, in the house I grew up in.



And the rest of the room is the same way--my dead dog's ashes sit in a clay urn; The leatherman my grandpa gave me for my 21st birthday; The pipe one of my friends bought me when I was feeling low--and the tobacco I still haven't smoked. There is a small laughing Buddha, made from a red material that I purchased from the jewelry store downtown. I remember that I bought a similar turtle, laying on top of pile of coins, for my ex at the same time--I even recall how much it had cost me: $1. On my bedside table there is a lamp, and placed around that lamp's shade is a lei which was used to celebrate my great grandmother's 94th birthday party, a party which would prove to be her last. I am still in possession of a Gideon's Bible those smiling-face-people give to any walker on the mall one day of the year. There are things placed around my room that I would do better letting go of, but I can't. They are too me at this point. This room is an extension of my mind--and the longer you live in some place, the more that place resembles how you think, how you act, the things done, said, the love, the hate, it's all reflected inside your most personal space.



How I manage my bedroom also reflects how I live my life. You see, I will let the clothes on the floor, the feathers from my leaking comforter, the change which falls out of my pockets, collect until I can't stand it anymore and I go on a mass cleaning spree. My mind is a similar way. I let emotions build and build until I have a mental volcano and all the debris shoots out of me like a caldera and people get hurt. But, I am not ashamed of this, I have decided. I am proud that I am like this. Some people float through life not caring about anything, not getting attached to anything, not hoarding the memories (and yes, I am a memory hoarder, I realize that now), and they are psychopaths. And I can tell you one thing, I am not a psychopath. I really do care about people, even when I don't want to. In the end, I would have everybody succeed and live a happy life. Of course, I have instant reactions where I want someone to suffer, but this is temporary, and I rarely hold long-lasting grudges. I am not sure if that is evident from my room or not, but one thing is--I have a very eclectic taste. Graphic novels, Shakespeare, finance, economics, conspiracy theories, crappy Nickelodeon shows that I wished I liked ironically, actions figures, mythology, candy, soda, I am really a bubble gum person when it comes down to it. I like happy colors and sublime showcases with a lot of activity. And I also love how things relate. A single building doesn't interest me too much, but when you put it in a skyline it fascinates me. I think it's also why I love to look at my collected books. They just look good next to each other.



When a Geologist observes earth, he can point out the different layers and eras. My room is sort of like that too, though more chaotic and hard to identify which "era" each individual object came from. I suppose that would be a goal of an anthropologist or sociologist or psychologist, who knows? I find a lot of that nonsense anyway. But to see space as a mythological arena, where stories are told through each hill, rock, tree--the exterior reflecting the interior--is a powerful image. Carl Jung talked about the collective unconscious and how society shares a set of mythological images it uses to relate ideas. These are symbols--every item in your room is a symbol for something greater, something in your mind. My dog's ashes are a symbol for a lost friend, or a lost time. Each book is its own particular idea--a bit more complex. The radio next to my bed, the text books, the iPod, all useful because they are in my sphere of influence but symbols as well, but especially things which hold no functional purpose, a picture, a souvenir, it's all nostalgic, or possibly symbolic. Nostalgia, of course, is something that has plagued mankind from the beginning. The ancients knew they were losing contact with the divine--and we see this in many mythological stories across the world, Noah's Ark, Atlantis, Great floods, tales of the fall into the profane. Post-Colonial theory also deals with this concept--we project images of magic and mystery onto a decidedly unmagical and demystified world. Today, we have fantasy and science fiction because there is no where else to go. We are trapped.

One has to wonder, then, if the way we interact with the world is not somewhat dictated by the environment we are in. We tend to think man controls the environment and that we place our images on it, but what if it's the other way around? What if we were actually a reflection of the environment's will? We come from this earth, are we not bits of earth that are walking around? Anyway, if we are influenced by our environment, and some clearly believe this with things like feng shui, then perhaps we should fill our rooms with happy things like plants and nice memories, not dark ones which remind us of the loss we have felt in the past. Hell, even in the marketing class I took they talked about a store's atmosphere influencing how customers shopped--pop music, tans and whites, people tend to turn right when they walk in a store. I have also heard that being in a larger room makes our minds expand to fill it and we think bigger thoughts. Who knows? I just know I may need to clean soon.