In late 1989, a 67-year-old woman, living alone in St. Paul, let city inspectors enter her home. They found inside nearly a ton of newspapers piled halfway up the living room walls, filling all available floor space save a pathway into the kitchen, where her stove was buried under more stacks. She'd meant, she told a social worker later, "to clip out the recipes, but for some reason I never could get around to it." In February, 1995, as reported by the Star Tribune, a young suburban couple were taken from their garbage house after the sheriff's department discovered "so much clutter and mess that there was nowhere to sit down in the house." According to the complaint, William Pfozer, the husband, admitted during questioning that "things are getting weird" and that conditions inside had "passed beyond hope."
"It's a wonderful notion," Mackenzie goes on, "to hold that the human nervous system, under the conditions we're talking about, may not be evolving at the same speed as technology and information." That we may be living now past saturation level, at overkill. "The question then becomes, where do we look for meaning? How do we create meaning in the midst of all this confusion, this inability to get rid of all we're made to take in? Look, the function of every spiritual model that civilizations have ever created has been to relieve the pain of staring into the abyss. They make meaning out of the chaos. So in this sense, how does one connect it to the woman who saved every newspaper for 20 years, intending to cut out the recipes? It was, I suppose, functional for her--a way to secure meaning. It was a solution once--a way to ensure a future. And then, in time, it became a kind of surrender. With garbage houses, we surmise that the resources their occupants have and the demands of the universe are badly mismatched."
The behavior of garbage house residents, figures Mackenzie, absurd as it may appear in passing news reports, appears to be intentional. "You dive into a dumpster and come out with a pizza box. Is that random? How many monkeys working like that would've done this act?" You could argue, he says, that human cognition is all about organization, about discrimination: This is of value, this is not. But remember, we're talking here about a society in which discriminating between what's essential and what's garbage is nearly impossible. So, he adds, you develop the tendency to accumulate everything--in case it might be useful. It might, on the off chance, be of value, even critical to your existence.
"I tend to work an economy where there's got to be a pay-off, even if it's pain. And the pay-off, for people who collect, must be the security of knowing. Knowing what is the question." That somehow, even if it's garbage, it's a sort of security against panic? "Perhaps.
City Pages news intern Todd Renschler contributed to this story.
