"Don't play what's there, play what's not there."-Miles Davis (1926-91)
I can never find anything in my room.
I am sitting on my bed as I write, not because in all my splendid nonconformity I refuse to use a conventional hard surface, but because there is not a spot of “surface” left anywhere on my desk. Even the floor is covered with an entire semester’s worth of assignments.
Being organized is one thing. Being organized means not having to rush around the room 20 minutes before school starts trying to find a calculus assignment that the teacher might not even collect, but you know she will ask for the homework the one day you can’t find it. My mom looks at my room probably once or twice a day, and without fail she says something along the lines of it resembling a pigsty.
Thus, “Clean your room!” has become somewhat an overused phrase for my parents. Some part of me suspects that all doctors, when the child is born, hand over the infant to a loving parent’s arms with this bit of essential advice: “Congratulations on your baby girl. Love her well, help her grow, and tell her to clean her room.” In my defense, I assert that in my room nothing is ever misplaced. See, “misplaced” means that I actually had a specific place in mind for said item or paper or sock, but I merely failed in taking the object and putting it there. Furthermore, if I try to find a place for that almost-finished yogurt smoothie container, it would be most likely futile. In these situations, I prefer for the laws of entropy, Dadaist randomness, or even bureaucratic structures to do the dirty (no pun intended) work instead.
I suppose I should clarify and say that the only reason why nothing is ever misplaced is because more often than not things in my room are instead “lost.” Unfortunate items like calculus tests—and yes, it’s always the calculus—disappear into oblivion shockingly fast. To be honest, I usually don’t pine after these—until I actually need them again.
The search begins almost immediately. At times it feels like all I ever do is search. There’s no treasure map to guide me and definitely no big black X on my carpet, which complicates matters somewhat. Despite years of searching, I still don’t tire of it. This man puts it best:
“One of the advantages of being disorderly
is that one is constantly making exciting
discoveries!”
--A. A. Milne (British playwright and creator of Winnie the Pooh)
My most recent discovery came two days ago; when in the midst of looking for my pencil bag, I toppled over a stack of binders to uncover some picture poems my friends and I wrote this summer. It had been nearly five whole months since I last read these poems. To my surprise, as I read them, I could recall quite clearly not only the day when we all shared them but also entire weeks and weeks of events.
Those poems in my room weren’t really lost forever, and neither were the memories written on them. In fact, what was not there, invisible and hidden beneath the messiness in my room now appeared clearly in my mind.
A simple discovery like this one probably won’t register much in the grand scheme of things. What stays with me the most is the realization that my room, once only a source of parental nagging, is actually a blessing. It made me recognize that the act of searching will always be a necessary part of my life. Outside of these four walls, not enough of searching is being done. Not only are people content to absorb information passively, but also they feel it is a burden to ask questions. There are those who demand the neat packages, the organization of a file folder or of a shelf, the manufactured presentation. But doesn’t that make it all too… easy? It’s all just…there. I feel no excitement in that kind of predictability.
Miles Davis wouldn’t accept such orderliness. Organization is too constraining and limited—something neither Miles nor I would enjoy. For Miles, jazz gave him an amazing amount of freedom to explore—to innovate and create beyond the notes on the page. For me, my room, by concealing what is apparent, challenges me to strive to search and to discover beyond the tangible, the easily seen and touched. Somehow, even if I can never find anything in my room, I will never quite feel the need to organize. The chaos of my room isn’t loathsome—it’s lovely. It doesn’t play with what’s there—it plays with what’s not there. Now that is an exciting discovery indeed.
Return to Main Navigation
No comments:
Post a Comment