Ownership and the cosmos..

The question of ownership has been disturbing quite deeply lately. Questions such as, what can we really own? Why do we care about owning things? Is it right to want to own so much stuff? Why not let it all go?

It all began a couple of weeks ago, although in another sense, it has always been there. I met a former student who is making a documentary about compulsive hoarders. There are more hoarders about than you might imagine - in London there is even a hoarders' 12-step support programme. It seems that many people (often as a result of traumatic experience) have a fear of letting anything go, to the extent that their living spaces become warrens, with narrow canyons of space carved out of mountains of clutter. He showed me some of his footage: one woman could not bear to let go of the cotton pads she used to wipe off her make up each night. And so, in her bedroom, there is a huge fluffy pyramid of cotton pads, each with a stained dot of makeup in the centre. Another could not bear to bin her plastic bath and shower soap bottles. Her bath is ringed with half full containers. She has to gingerly displace some of them each time she goes to bathe, placing them back carefully afterwards..

The question of why people get stuck in the compulsion to hoard begs another question as its mirror opposite: why does anyone want to take ownership of anything? What does ownership pushed to its extremes tell us about everyday claims of ownership? Why do we want to consume and gather round us more than we will ever need? Do we really need that many pairs of shoes, that many jackets, that many adornments parading themselves around us?

It reminds me of the time my parents sold the house I grew up in from the age of 10 to 18 - a large rambling farmhouse in the village (Church Farm). I had the third floor to myself, as well as an outbuilding (talk about spoilt for space). And then, one day, it was not ours anymore, and I was bereft; struck with the feeling that in fact we never really owned it. Someone had lived there before us, and someone before them, and generations unborn would live in it in to the future. Anonymous lives going about their business, across time, in a space I had thought was exclusively ours! What delusion.

At the bottom of this sinking feeling was the dawning understanding that no one can ever 'own' anything. All that can be done is to entreat some kind of custodial care upon things from within the inner sphere of one's world. Everything we own, we will have to give up, to others, either for or against our will.

And at the bottom of this new extraordinary knowledge was the even deeper intimation that we delude ourselves into the belief that we can own things simply because at some inner level of being, we are afraid to accept the reality of our own eventual demise. We cling to ownership as a way of clinging to life. We fear death, and so we decide to own. We do not allow ourselves to realise that the world must slip through our fingers, as sand pours down through the hour glass of our lives.

What to do with such mordant realisations? One could simply baulk; move away from these disquieting thoughts and feelings, let them slide. One can continue to maintain the enjoyment of one's possessions. After all, isn't it rather lovely to have a well stocked wine cellar, a long library of books, to have that vintage guitar in the corner unstrummed yet loved by simply being there, that treasured collection of Fela vinyls, that 100GB collection of MP3's spanning all of human music in time and space? In these ways we condense culture within our grasp, and allow ourselves to be persuaded that we are doing our small but valiant preservational bit for the collective culture..

I am therefore drawn to the bourgoise comforts of ownership. But I am equally pulled or pushed into the seduction of giving it all away. What freedom there would be in owning nothing, of letting everything go, of giving it all away. I imagine being on a ship, and tossing everything I own, one by one, into the ripping and curling water below. What lightness of spirit it would be to set forth with nothing for the rest of one's days; of going walkabout, singing the landscape back into enchanted being; of becoming a sanyasi, covered in chalk, a humble mendicant..

This freedom is even more compelling when I think of all the people out there who could be reading the books that I hoard but no longer read, listening to the music I no longer have ears for: of all the minor inspirations I am withholding through this selfish yet illusory claim to own those coagulations of dust that surround me. All was dust, all will be dust.. The only thing that is not dust in the cosmos are the moments of meaning between all the objects that surround us in our multifarious presents:

The intricate cadences of someone laughing from the belly of their soul at a joke - Ellison's homeopathic laughter; the sound of an alto saxophone played by someone whose combination of 10 hours practice per day every day and a sublime spiritual tension produces the most divine squeaks at the higher registers (I'm thinking of David Murray); and of walking, on an autumnal day, with one's love, scrunching the leaves of the park underfoot..

All we have are these moments of magic. All the stuff in between is, just stuff. We should let it go, I reckon..