Maximalisma

Before she died nearly three decades ago at age 93, my widowed paternal grandmother put her modest farmhouse in order, emptying the attic of what I saw as precious artifacts: children’s books and toys belonging to my father and his sister, vintage dresses from John Wanamaker, her 1928 wedding gown, a hooped petticoat belonging to a great-great aunt. She unsentimentally emptied drawers of greeting cards and photographs, gradually consumed the mason jars of tomatoes, peaches, and other bounty she’d preserved in her cellar pantry for decades. She did this not because she wasn’t a caring person, but because she was one. She didn’t want her children burdened with decisions about what to keep and give away after she died.

By contrast, my paternal grandfather’s sisters, Ethel and Ruth—who also lived well into their 90s, although neither of them married—did nothing of the sort. By the time my great-aunt Ruth’s failing health forced her to leave the small apartment where she’d lived for nearly half a century, it was almost impossible to walk down the hallway connecting her living room to her kitchen and bedroom. Rather than throw away anything that she thought might one day be useful or interesting—to herself or someone else—she filled brown paper grocery bags with rubber-band balls, cans of tuna fish, coupons, newspaper clippings. The hallway was lined with these bags, floor to ceiling, several deep on both sides. The living room and bedrooms were similarly claustrophobic, not only with more bulging grocery bags, but also with stacks of books, newspapers, and of course, even more brown paper bags. These were flattened and ready for filling. Unfortunately, my father and his sister (my aunt Joan) couldn’t simply toss the sacks, because mixed in among the used aluminum foil and 1940s A&P coupons were family photos, Daughters of the American Revolution papers, elaborate diagrams of the Russ family tree, and valuable savings bonds. (Ethel at least kept a tidier house, but on her death, my father and Aunt Joan found a cellar heaped with hundreds of unopened sacks of sugar that Ethel had amassed during the Depression.)

In a first-year college psychology class, I learned about Erik Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development. My peers and I were in stage five, a period of adolescence characterized by a need to feel seen by and connected to others by surrounding oneself with emblems of a nascent self—significant souvenirs, nostalgic objects, mementos. I thought of my dorm room, the walls covered with photographs of my family and friends, posters of Botticelli’s Primavera and Van Gogh’s Starry Night, taped-up album covers—The Who’s Tommy, Stevie Wonder’s Superstition, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust—all ways of externalizing some semblance of the person I hoped I was or might become.

Not until I was in my 50s, however, did it dawn on me that I might share more than a little of my great-aunts’ tendency to hold on to things. I was recovering from a running injury, and my physical therapist prescribed exercises to do at home. All you need, she said, is a wall to flatten your palms against and room enough to stretch your hamstrings and adductors. When I got home after that session and began looking for empty wall space, I realized that I didn’t have any. All the walls, upstairs and down, were lined with groaning bookcases and furniture, cut with windows, or cobbled with framed artwork, hung salon-style from floor to ceiling. I finally ended up holding my arms outstretched against my refrigerator, which wasn’t even totally flat—I had to work around the magnets and a defunct ice and water dispenser in the door.

As I stood, palms splayed against the stainless steel, hamstrings stretched out behind, I thought not only about the crowded wall space in my house proper—which, to be fair, is generally clean and airy, just replete with the dressings of a lived life—but also about the attic two floors above, where things—many, many, many things, things within things—had sat untouched since the day we moved in nearly a quarter century earlier, and then of the cellar below (similarly populated), and then of all the drawers and closets and boxes in all the rooms, each full of clothes, letters, cards, drawings, photographs, tools, pots, pans, diaries, you name it. I thought of my children’s rooms, time capsules largely untouched since their departure from home—of my youngest daughter’s pile of middle and high school messenger bags filled, no joke, with other bags. I considered my son’s closet, crammed with old scuba gear and rock-climbing ropes, his stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh, the walls papered with posters of Yoda and Jimi Hendrix. I thought of the books piled on my study floor because the shelves were already crammed. As I type this essay, the desks (yes, three) around me are covered with sheaves of paper—drafts of stories and poems, student work, bills—as well as framed photographs of my children and grandchildren, postcards, our absurd and unmemorizable Wi-Fi password written on a framed Post-it note. The wall above the computer is replete with artwork made by my children and grandchildren; my windowsill is an altar of seashells, photographs, a framed picture of Emily Dickinson, sea glass, dried flowers—all manner of tchotchkes, each one charged with important memories of people, books, and places.

I have to admit, at 68, that all of these “things” comfort and inspire me no less than my college dorm room décor helped me, 50 years ago, feel like the person I wanted to be. At the same time, however—perhaps because I’m closer to Erikson’s stage eight now—I do worry about those who will have to make their way through all of this meaningful-to-me matter if I don’t do it first. It’s not so much that I don’t want my grown children (or worse, my grandchildren) to come upon that small batch of youthful Polaroids (where are they?). Or to plumb the histrionic depths of my teenage journals. Or to dig out, with disbelief, that long-unused bit of lingerie from the bottom of a drawer. It’s that I feel a responsibility, after a lifetime of gathering, to cull those personal treasures.

Much has been written about hoarding in recent years, and the phenomenon has seeped, often sensationalized, into popular culture and imagination—take the documentary series Hoarders or Hoarding: Buried Alive. Originally considered by psychologists to be a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder, hoarding was officially recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition as a separate psychiatric diagnosis in 2013. According to a 2022 article published in Cureus by researchers Ryan A. Chang and Vashisht Sekar,

hoarding disorder is a mental disorder characterized by the significant accumulation of material goods, either as a result of acquiring excessive materials or failing to dispose of goods no longer needed. In this diagnosis, the volume of collected material exceeds any logical rationale. Similar to other medical disorders, hoarding disorder can cause significant disruption in the life of the person afflicted as well as to their associated family members. Individuals with hoarding disorder can undergo significant stress if they fail to accumulate items and tremendous anguish with attempts to dispose of these possessions. The overall prevalence of hoarding disorder is approximately 4.0-5.8%, with higher rates observed in people over the age of 60. Hoarding is also associated with alcohol dependence, personality disorder traits, and specific childhood adversities.

The human tendency to hoard is not new, albeit first understood in financial terms: a hoarder was a miser. King Midas of mythology, for instance, stockpiled gold. In Dante’s Inferno, parsimonious clerics are consigned to the fourth circle of hell, where, as described in the Cureus article,

they spend their days in eternal conflict with wasters, smashing great weights (often depicted as large bags full of heavy coins) against each other. The hoarders scream at the wasters, ‘Why do you waste?’ only to receive in reply the response, ‘Why do you hoard?’ As the weights are equal to one another, the hoarders and the wasters are locked in an eternal battle that neither can win. Overseeing both the hoarders and the wasters is Pluto, the god of the underworld, also considered the Roman god of wealth. The hoarders and wasters are in hell because neither group was able to allocate money in moderation.

From Shakespeare to Dickens and beyond, countless others have also depicted literary characters afflicted by an inability to let anything go. And although hoarding has been a human (and animal) behavior for centuries, experts agree that cases of the disorder have increased in recent decades, in part because of intensifying consumerism but also because of various collective psychological and other traumas. A 2016 Washington Post article estimated that as many as 19 million Americans have a hoarding disorder. In their 2010 book on the subject, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee considered it likely that almost every one of us knows at least one person with a predilection for hoarding. Some research suggests that hoarding may be an intergenerational tendency or even an inheritable trait: according to a 2019 article by Jeannette Cooperman published in JSTOR Daily, “In families with two or more members who hoard, researchers have identified an allele on chromosome 14.”

Considering the extreme cases involving squalor, impassable rooms, and large numbers of malnourished pets, as seen on TV shows, I’m not sure that my reluctance to throw things away and my desire to create little windowsill and bookshelf altars actually count as a full-blown hoarding disorder. Mine is a far cry from a Grey Gardens level of accrual. “Maximalist” is what one of my cousins, who has a similar penchant for “stuff” and rents several storage units, calls it. And though the compulsion to hoard knows no socioeconomic distinction, my version of it is certainly a first-world problem, made possible by privilege—a house to hold all of this stuff, a fulfilling family, a career that has brought with it many storied hand-me-downs, gifts, and pleasures. And most of the time, despite the cluttered desktops and the lack of apparent organization of my bookshelves, I know where things can be found when I need them—a particular book, that winter shawl—though every now and then I stand before my closet wishing I could do a real-life Google search for “blue disco shoes.” I fear they’ve gone the way of the naughty Polaroids—that is, they’re here somewhere, but lost until I undertake some significant physical and emotional excavation.

One of the compelling details I learned from Frost and Steketee’s Stuff  is that my great-aunt Ruth was not alone in “making order” out of, or somehow tidying up, her many things by tucking them away (in her case, in grocery sacks) without regard for separating the truly valuable from the mundane. Some hoarders do this in their vehicles; others on their sofas, in their closets, or in multiple storage units. Andy Warhol was an avid collector who apparently made daily trips to flea markets, antiques stores, galleries, and auction houses, but much of what he collected was stashed away in storage. According to Stuff:

One of the most unusual aspects of Warhol’s collecting became apparent shortly before his death. During the 1970s and 1980s, Warhol preserved nearly every bit of ephemera that came into his possession. He kept a cardboard box beside his desk, and when the impulse struck him, he cleared everything off his desk and into the box, no exceptions. Valuable prints, cash, and apple cores all went into what he described as his ‘time capsule.’ He dated it and stored it along with more than six hundred others. … There seems no discrimination regarding what went into each one—an electric bill, silverware from a trip on an airplane, telephone messages, large sums of cash.

Frost and Steketee go on to talk about the 16th-century European craze for collecting “seemingly unrelated objects in one container … ‘cabinets of curiosities,’ or German Wunderkammers—jumbled collections of strange, wonderful, rare, and curious objects designed to create a picture, if not a wholly representative one, of the world at the time.” These collections were the precursors of early museums. Visitors to both my house and my university office have actually used the phrase cabinet of wonder to describe my aesthetic. One student at an end-of-year class party at my house remarked, in what I chose to take as a compliment, that being in my house was like being inside one of my poems.

This got me thinking about the kinds of poems I write: short, sonnet-haunted lyrics that juxtapose high and low diction, arcane or gnomish syntax, and contemporary slang. My little poems—both tidy and lush at once—are perhaps, like Aunt Ruth’s grocery bags or Warhol’s boxes, a way for me to collect disparate things in one place, to create a kind of order or meaning out of what I notice and feel. John Keats said that poetry should surprise us with its “fine excess.” I love that he pairs the lavish “excess” with “fine,” a word implying something contained, finite, shaped by the limits of form. Musing on this led me to consider the poets who attract me most: older poets such as Shakespeare, Hopkins, and Dickinson and more contemporary writers like Lucie Brock-Broido, Carl Phillips, and Arthur Sze—all poets whose verses are rich and excessive, but also deftly honed and contained, if sometimes only barely.

I’m thinking, for example, of Dickinson’s strict reliance on eight-and-six hymn meter while still incorporating her signature slant rhymes and “variants,” as scholars call them—she would often refuse to settle on one word, instead heaping two or three on top of a line, or adding a plus sign to indicate alternative word choices in a midden heap at the poem’s close; her poems at times seem to shimmer hypertextually beyond the limits of the page. Meanwhile, Hopkins’s hierarchical cascades of sounds, etymologically driven diction, and caudal extensions likewise give his “formal” sonnets an ecstatic torque. In a sense, then, these poems—maybe all poems?—are word hoards. In the case of the poets named here, the hoards are both formally controlled and linguistically wild. (My tastes in music tend to run along these lines as well—I find myself drawn to contemporary eclectic singers like Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell, Florence Welch, and Joanna Newsom, and in early music to the flights and control of madrigals, the riffs and runs and reach of baroque melismatic scores.) I wonder whether engaging with language in this manner—both excessive and formal—has helped me maintain a mostly healthy balance in my life between a tendency to collect and hold, and an equally powerful need to order or pare away.

Of course, hoarding’s opposite extreme—a militant divestment of anything that might be perceived as unnecessary—can be just as unhealthy. That said, I have, since commencing this essay, begun to move more intentionally through my things, sorting and paring them slowly—a drawer one week, a linen closet the next. Keep one pressed red maple leaf from a beloved friend? Yes. But 30 or more, most now in leaf-meal fragments pressed between the pages of dictionary and Bible? No. Ditto envelopes addressed to my first-born in my much-missed grandmother’s handwriting—keep one, recycle the others. Perhaps years of children’s artwork can be photographed and digitized? And just maybe, with luck and time, I’ll be able to protect my grown children from having to make these kinds of choices for me.

Will I succeed? Hoarding literature tells us that even those accumulators who do manage to finally rid themselves of excess, perhaps with the help of a clutter buddy, often use that newly created space and order as an invitation to fill it up again. But one anecdote gives me hope that I might succeed. A few years after the death of my paternal grandmother—the one who cleansed her house of so many things, including my father’s childhood books—I was living in Denton, Texas, where I made a weekly visit to a large, wonderful used bookstore.

On one of those trips, I found myself in a long back hallway where recently arrived boxes of books were waiting to be shelved. On the top of one opened box was a book that made my heart leap in recognition: Beachcomber Bobbie, one of my father’s cherished books. When I picked it up, beneath it was another of his picture books, Children of Many Lands. And beneath that, yet another: A Child’s Garden of Verses, an edition illustrated with flowers, the very same edition that had been stored in my grandmother’s attic.

Coincidence or karmic magic? There was nothing inside the books—no bookplate or signature—to prove that these were the books my grandmother had donated to her church a few years past. Yet how unlikely to find all three together. I stood in the hallway a long time, pondering the possible journey of these books, the felicity that brought them all the way from New Jersey, where my father had grown up, to this particular store in a state far away, in a hallway I happened to pass through.

In the end, I decided not to buy the books. Simply seeing them, holding them awhile, revisiting their pages and illustrations, and then putting them back in their pile, happy to know that they hadn’t been pulped but would end up in someone else’s lucky hands, was somehow enough. The objects had served their purpose for me, reconnecting me in that Texas hallway to my grandmother, my father, my own childhood back on the East Coast. I didn’t need to possess them permanently to know the beautiful truth of that connection.

That said, I still sometimes find myself wishing I’d purchased them. And as for those seven pieces of sea glass from the banks of a brackish river where I’d played as a child and that I can see now, glinting on the windowsill just beyond my laptop screen? Yes, says Maximalist Me to Minimalist Me, they still “spark joy,” as Marie Kondo would say. Them, I’m keeping. At least for now.