Moving

I'm packing up the house and feeling those Proustian emotions-- pleasure-edged sadness, and brief interruptive transmissions of hobbling anxiety, which the displacement of belongings always seems to liberate. I belong to them as much or more than they belong to me: as if the stable arrangement of baby-ravaged IKEA furniture, books and CDs, the sprawl of toys, the foodstuffs crammed in cabinets, all served to ballast and modulate and temper some kind of primary vertigo, anomie, that cast-away I was at zero seconds old. It's exciting in a way; terrifying as it is, there's an abundance in the spinning compass. I've always hoped that word was related to compassion.

So these things, these products, this greaty bounty, so much trash and ridiculous excess the divestment of which feels like any number of unnameable bodily functions, have been doing the job of narrating my life here in Ithaca for years now. Not ten years to return but seven to leave. They've done a good job, these things, told a good and compelling story, one of loss and delusion, love and more love, propinquity and friendship and meaningful work. But there could have been so many other stories. I see that now. I see that I'm basically a machine for moving, and there's a cruelty in that I'm not sure I can brook.