The Virtual Rambler

Number thirty nine: 20^th August 2013

Possessions

Every generation registers the changing sensibilities and cultural shifts that soon condemn their childhood years to a remote and receding world. A tenderness informing the social conscience of those times began to harden , its arteries fell under the accountants’ knife and hopes that had once seemed invincible imploded like dying stars. As individuals , we live in the forever passing moment and our collective experience becomes equally fleeting as one social matrix transmutes into the next. Something deep within us seems to resent this incessant flux , of experience and time. As an opening gambit on our behalf , it programs us to perceive a consistent self at the helm of our personal biography. In reality there is only an ongoing collection of short stories and transient sensations brought together within the covers of a fragmentary (and often unreliable) memory. Our greatest pride of possession is what we call our 'personality' , an entity complete with enough borrowed opinions to last us through into old age , if we make it that far. This socio-cultural concept derives from the Ancient Greeks’ notion of the four temperaments. Choleric people were characterized as prone to irascibility. The melancholic held a sombre and gloomy outlook. Phlegmatic people were thought to have calm , even sluggish , temperaments. Finally, people thought to have high levels of blood were said to be sanguine and were characterized by their cheerful and passionate disposition.

That car parked outside offers the reassurance that you can drive it off - rather than queuing at a bus stop - any time you choose. This sense of enhanced possibility is what attracts us to possessions and it's why we assemble all those objects which locate us as their unique proprietor. Inside your home are shelves full of books and racks of recorded albums. How many of them will you ever read , or play again ? They are there to remind us of half-remembered first impressions , of music that once animated our teenage soul. The snatched sounds first heard through the flashing lights of a fairground , the sudden burst of laughter we were unprepared for - how could these ever be re-enacted ? There comes a time in many a son's life when he is rummaging through his mother's or his father's possessions after their departure to a hospital or what we euphemistically call a “care home” , where care is perfunctory at best , and then ultimately to the morgue. He puts to one side a few mementos from a life that spanned his own (thus far) and bags up the rest for disposal to a charity shop. The attempt to memorialise a graspable past , via diaries and photographs , is to delude ourselves that we thereby make a part of their lives our very own. All these objects notoriously do is to replace the memories they are supposed to engender and become (like that parked car) fetish objects in their own right.

Founders of what were to become world religions renounced the accumulation of possessions and exhorted their followers to do likewise. True to its acquisitive nature , greed has functioned under many guises , from avaritia (the root of all evil said St. Paul) to “having or desiring more than what is required of a man in order to keep his back straight” (the Islamic formulation). However , in that modern phantasmagoria politicians call the real world , to be dispossessed was to be a failure⁽¹⁾. The pessimistic E.M. Cioran wrote that “the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest will set failure above any success , he will even seek it out. This is because failure reveals us to ourselves , whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves.” By making this point it could be said that the writer is recording himself saying yah-boo to the cultural edifice that is success in order to signify his discernment as superior to that of the hoi- poloi , with their commonplace view of worldly success as a legitimate and laudable human endeavour. And the first one now will later be last ? The original manuscript of Bob's scrawled lyrics for this particular anthem was eventually snapped up at a Sotheby's auction for over $400,000 by a hedge-fund manager in 2010.

Wig

⁽¹⁾ In a Philip Larkin poem of 1955 , he depicts his no-hoper Mr. Bleaney musing in his rented room : 'But if he stood and watched the frigid wind / Tousling the clouds , lay on the fusty bed / Telling himself that this was home , and grinned , / And shivered , without shaking off the dread / That how we live measures our own nature , / And at his age having no more to show / Than one hired box should make him pretty sure / He warranted no better , I don't know.'

Archive

Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13^th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3^rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15^th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15^th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12^th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13^th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6^th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22^nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24^th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4^th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15^th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21^st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27^th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3^rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan & Charles Dickens, 8^th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16^th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16^th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18^th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17^th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16^th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20^th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European Self Importance, 26^th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet Dreams, 25^th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess, 17^th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial, 20^th September 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way, 21^st October 2012
Virtual rambler #30 – On Rambling, 14^th November 2012
Virtual rambler #31 – Gazing Into The Abyss, 18^th December 2012
Virtual rambler #32 – Intellectual Gloom, 25^th January 2013
Virtual rambler #33 – Great Human Achievements, 20^th February 2013
Virtual rambler #34 – Autobiography, 20^th March 2013
Virtual rambler #35 – Your Good Health, 21^st April 2013
Virtual rambler #36 – Deconstruction, 20^th May 2013
Virtual rambler #37 – My Home Town, 19^th June 2013
Virtual rambler #38 – Ancient History, 21^st July 2013