I learned a new word in my German class last Thursday.
Entrümpeln
To declutter.
There is a Turkish entrepreneur in Germany, one Ahmet Eroğlu, who will empty your house for you. Why are you holding on to six broken umbrellas? Or these ancient family heirlooms stowed in wall cabinets, cuckoo clocks, coffee grinders, plate, like the tea service you never use, vinyl LPs you never listen to but keep in alphabetical order – this, according to Eroğlu, a quintessentially German trait. Mr Eroğlu’s warehouse is full of porcelain kitsch. He is something of an anthropologist. He records his removals and posts the videos online. Back in Turkey, the folks, millions of them, observe German customs and mores with astonishment. The wealth! The superabundance! Why would you buy another television set when there is already one in the cellar that could easily be repaired?
I’m all for decluttering, and indeed mending is better than ending, but I’m not sure about the attendant voyeurism. Personal effects are, after all, personal. And getting a stranger to tell you what is worth hoarding, and what is worth dumping, seems odd to me. Some items have a sentimental value. But maybe this is precisely why a professional declutterer can be so helpful, because he is dispassionate. He is rather like a conciliator and arbitrator called in to settle an industrial dispute; or a facilitator, a diplomat, chairing peace talks between nations squabbling over a contested border. Problems always appear so much easier to solve from the outside. Your attachment to some dog-eared school prize you will never read again is as useless to you as your adherence to some outworn custom or tradition whose ancient historic provenance you have long forgotten. Yet still you beat the antique drum.
Actually I’m not too bad at decluttering. I visit my local tip relatively often. It used to be run by a very nice wee man who would survey my discard pile, pick out an item he admired, and ask if he could have it. Well, yes of course. Recycling is a much better option than landfill. He was a Dickensian figure. Sometimes I would espy an old clock of mine on the mantelpiece in his Portakabin office, or a picture of mine on the wall. But he has retired now, and his successor is a slightly intimidating man with the demeanour of a French customs officer, un douanier demanding if you have anything to declare, and then observing whether or not you will nervously lick your upper lip.
My most recent visit to the tip was merely to drop off the bracket of a kitchen ceiling strip light which had, literally, gone on the blink. I would switch it on and it would flash repeatedly like a strobe. It had lasted for 21 years so didn’t exactly owe me any favours. I found a replacement with some difficulty, and tried to fit it myself, but only succeeded in breaking it. My DIY prowess is lamentable. At least I didn’t fall off the ladder. Then, because I have a phobia of hanging around waiting for tradesmen, I lived for some weeks in a culinary twilight, making only occasional visits to the kitchen guided by the light of an open fridge door. Finally I thought, this is ridiculous. I got an LED strip light from B & Q, and an electrician fitted it for me with great facility, and now my kitchen is bathed in soft yet incandescent light.
It’s good to dump stuff you don’t need. Some neurophysiologists believe that decluttering is the stuff that dreams are made of. Dreams are essentially our brain’s way of filtering out junk, rather as we might flick through ancient photographs stuffed into a shoebox, discarding most, but filing a few, assembled in order, in an album. Maybe this is why dreams seem so disjointed, irrational, and bizarre. There is some evidence that sleep deprivation can be a causative factor in various forms of dementia, and that this in turn might be related to lack of dream time. The brain hasn’t enough time to declutter. In other words, dementia might not be an inability to remember, but rather an inability to forget.
Nowadays, of course, people don’t keep old photos in shoe boxes. Rather they store them on their phone. You might say this is the ideal solution to the disposal of junk; but in the context of neurophysiology, is this not just another hoarding habit? People obsessively curate their lives with their devices. They take a photo of their entrée in the restaurant, and put it online. I’d rather occasionally rummage in the shoebox. There’s a poignancy about looking briefly at the past, and realising that you were too busy at the time to notice its preciousness. Vonda Shepard, who worked in the bar downstairs from the lawyer’s office in Ally McBeal, sang a wistful song about looking at old photographs, and realising she never knew she was in love, until the object of her affection left the neighbourhood.
Books are my Achilles’ heel. Frankly, I inhabit a library. I try to adhere to the “one book in, one book out” rule but I don’t always succeed. At least I don’t hoard newspapers. I don’t suffer from Diogenes Syndrome. I once visited a patient in a cottage in a rather remote rural setting. I think it may have been the most bizarre house visit I ever conducted. He was sitting beside a naked flame, in a room filled virtually floor to ceiling with newspapers. A tinder box. He had beside him a loaded rifle. I asked him what the purpose of the rifle was, and came to discover that he inhabited a strange alternative universe. I asked him if he would like to be removed from this situation and “sorted out” in hospital, but he assured me there was nothing to sort out. I took my leave, and then I phoned the police. One of the skills of referring a patient to a professional colleague, usually a hospital doctor but in this case the police, is to press the right buttons, to emphasise the particular aspect of the patient’s presentation which indubitably falls within the purlieu of the colleague’s expertise. In this case it was the loaded rifle. The police could not ignore that. They kindly arranged the psychiatric referral on my behalf.
I could as easily have received last week a visit from my own GP, who might have glanced appraisingly across my packed bookshelves, who might have chanced to espy my deadly Papua New Guinean bow and its quiver of arrows, given me by the lepers at Yampu, barely discernible under the flickering half-light emanating from my kitchen. Would I care to escape from this situation, and spend a few days in a secure facility, while Mr Eroğlu wird meinen Schuppen entrümpeln?
Vielen Dank, but I can assure you, there is nothing to sort out.
jamescalumcampbell 