'In the Wrack of a Lifetime’s Robinsonade'

We can divide our species into cullers and accumulators. Neither group understands the other. The former judges the latter greedy, lazy or neurotic. The latter thinks the cullers are the neurotic ones. Be honest: When you visit an accumulator’s habitat -- home or desk – don't you at first feel pity? How can he let this happen? How can he get anything done? But then uneasiness creeps in. Might this chaos mirror some riotous inner state? In turn, accumulators look at a culler’s surroundings and see poverty – of assets? of imagination? – threatening in its monastic plainness. 

I’ve probably given away my proclivity. I weigh the worth of every possession and throw out, give away or sell what has outlived its usefulness. Too much stuff makes me itchy. I enjoy deleting emails and hauling the glut of lockdown-generated cardboard boxes to the recycling station. I even try to keep my prose uncluttered, fat-free and tight. I have a neighbor, a good friend, who owns two Harley-Davidsons. I’ve never seen either because both are concealed in his garage by a ceiling-to-floor wall of tools, lumber, paint cans and discarded furniture. I confide this so you understand: Yes, cullers and accumulators can happily coexist.

 

In About the Size of It (Anvil Press, 2007), his final book of poems, the late Tom Disch includes a sixty-six-line poem celebrating manic accumulation. Naturally, “Inventory” couldn’t be a haiku. Sorry to say, it seems not to be available online. Here are the opening lines:

 

“Crammed ever tighter, stacked ever higher,

all jammed together, the artifacts

Of fifty years agglomerate in cupboards,

closets, cartons, drawers and shelves

Until one final fatal freebie triggers

the avalanche and the levee fails.”

   

Disch slowly unwinds the comic ridiculousness of metastasizing stuff without delivering another tired sermon on the perils of consumerism:

 

“. . . stacks of paperbacks

ascend on both sides of the toasters

And form a bridge to the ziggurat of stereo

components where a hoard of extras –

White elephants, senile Walkmen, silly

69¢ tshotchkes, unsprung windups –

Re-enact Griffith’s Intolerance . . .”

 

Disch accumulates a generous gush of loving details: “bills paid to vanished / Department stores,” the Defoean “in the wrack of a lifetime’s robinsonade,” the Keatsian “things of beauty, toys forever,” “Trousers that have waited for waists / to match their waistlines.” As a comic poet of the first rank, Disch knows his stuff.