April 16, 2012

The Institute for Challenging Disorganization (ICD) wants to hear from participants who submitted their objects and stories for this project. To help ICD understand better the dispossession process, we’d like to know:

Why did you choose to donate your possession to the Secret Lives of Objects project?

Did you consider other alternatives, like selling it or giving it to another person or organization?  What made letting go this way the right choice for you and for this possession?

In retrospect, how do you feel about your participation in this project?  Did you find the experience gratifying?  If so, why?  Do you have any regrets, if so, what?         

ICD would love to hear from you!  If you are willing to share some post-experience reflections, please click here:  research@challengingdisorganization.org  

11:19pm  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/21251314720
January 13, 2012

I received the Boa when I was 18 years old from my father.  This gift was not a token of love but of guilt, it was his way of saying I’m sorry. I cannot truly remember the reason for this gift, even then. I remember a fight, feeling embarrassed and sad though I don’t recall if this fight was between us, or them.

I never wore the boa, I didn’t know what to do with it. It has been sitting in my closet for over 10 years. I forgot about it until recently. I don’t know why I didn’t throw it away, why I have I kept it for this long. I couldn’t let go of it for some reason, some unexplainable reason, perhaps it‘s guilt or maybe it’s the remnant of a memory I can’t let go of.

- Gifted Object

7:40pm  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/15799856148
January 10, 2012

My Best Flannel Shirt

I actually owned this shirt for so long I am a little hazy on when I bought it —- which is a rare occurrence for me as I like my clothes. That being said, it was an expensive flannel shirt that I justified buying because I think it was on sale at the Gant store on 5th Avenue. A great color combination tan yellow with accents of white and red.  From there it had a life in the Catskills – weekends that is. It aged well from baking in the sun while fishing to washing and fading as time went on – I’d say twenty years. I really think it’s a source of strength like your clan tartan.

I wore it all the time. I loved to wear my yellow bee shirt under it – as it color coordinated distinctively. In fact it would seem the perfect Ralph Lauren commercial: standing next to one of those old 50’s Ford tractors. I really felt comfortable wearing my flannel shirt.

Now that it’s been called to my attention to think about this object, I wonder if there’s a correlation to when I was a young kid and had a baby blanket - one you didn’t want to part with and dragged around all the time while sucking your thumb! 

-Object gifted by my father

3:14pm  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/15630203595
(No. OF NOTES: 1)
  
August 20, 2011

My house is filled with far too many objects purchased and given.  The objects that mean the most are the ones related to my family and friends.  This iron piece is unlike other objects in my house due to the fact it was found and the deep sadness in invokes in me.

It was a year after Katrina hit.  I went to Pass Christian, Mississippi in June with a group to help rebuild. The devastation was still everywhere clothes hanging in trees, front steps that led nowhere, tent cities near the cemetery and in some areas a stench from things still rotting. Many people had left the area because they were homeless and jobless but the people that did remain were thankful to have people there to try and help them.  What I felt most often from these people was they all wanted to tell their story.  It was a way in which helped them cope.  One women, who reminded me of Katherine Hepburn, was in her 80’s and told the story of sitting on the top of her stairs and watching the water come up to the middle of her staircase.  She decided to chance going down the stairs and grabbing a silver candlestick and special things that belonged to her mother off the mantel.  In doing so a floating chair hit her leg and injured it and she was hospital for months due to an infection.

I found this piece of fencing when clearing a lot with a wonderful ocean view. It made me wonder about the family and their stories, who before Katrina, lived in the house on the beach where the fleur-de-lis fence securely surrounded them.

We all have stories that form our history and who we are.  I left Mississippi being thankful and grateful to be able to go home.  I will never forget the people and the stories told to me and the many one’s I imagined from the experience.

-Gifted Object

11:00am  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/9166179602
(No. OF NOTES: 2)
  
FILED UNDER: Gifted Object 
August 19, 2011

Do you believe objects retain memories?

Nancy Du Tertre’s psychic workshop class did a psychometry exercise using the above object donated to this project. Psychics are able to receive impressions by holding objects in their hands, these can take the form of sounds, smells, tastes and emotions. Their words have reminded me that objects can speak to us and can activate our imaginations. It is also a reminder of the role that touch plays in our relationship with objects.

I will post the story from the woman who donated this object tomorrow. Thanks so much to Nancy and her class!

READINGS BY STUDENTS AT NANCY DU TERTRE’S PSYCHIC WORKSHOP

New York City Skeptical Psychics Society

08/08/11

Psychometry exercise.  Object provided by Corinne Botz.  It appears to be a piece of heavy wrought iron or grill work.  Students were given absolutely no information about the object.   

            I proposed that the students answer ten questions about the object:

            1.  Owner is male or female?

            2.  Age of owner?

            3.  Occupation of owner?

            4.  State of mind/habits/interests of owner?

            5.  Location?

            6.  Origin of object?

            7.  Previous ownership?

            8.  Importance of object?

            9.  Feeling/sensation of object?

            10. What is the connection of the object to the owner?

Yossif:

Owner is female, about 45 years old.  She is the grand-daughter of the original owner of the object.  Location is Boston. 

Ellen:

The owner is a woman.  She is the grand-daughter.  She is 21-years-old and an artist.  The location is near water, a swampy area, country scene.  The origin of the object is an old home that has been abandoned.  Feelings/sensations from the object are fear and anxiety.  She used to play by an abandoned house.  Rumors that the old woman had died there and that it was haunted.  Object was found in this yard or perhaps attic.  Previous owner had some instability and was mentally paranoid.  Her grandmother.  This object is a momento of the old home when it was torn down.

Nawan:

Owner is female, about 25 years old.  Waiting to be a wife or pregnant.  She is involved with singing.  This object is a part of the fence surrounding her house.  Feel it is either British or French origin.  The object is adornment.  It feels peaceful on the outside but there is inner turmoil around the issues of pregnancies.  The object is from the family home or parents’ property.  Feel owner is not ready for adult life – something about her that is not well-developed or aimless.  Object felt fragile.

Olga:

The owner is female.  Attracted by the “lily design” of the object.  It appears antique, very old.  The object may be French.  The object may be part of a fence and trees – summertime.  The object was not used.  It was left.  No one cared for it.  It was picked up.  Have a feeling of a room where no one lived, possibly with a fireplace (old dusty) in an empty house.  Hear a dog barking, like a German shepherd, to protect the house.  The object was the top of a fence.  It was taken down.  It may have been placed on top of the fireplace.  It has ornamental importance.  I hear heavy boots and see dark pants belonging to a man.  I hear the squeaking of the fence.  I see a grey-haired man, untrimmed hair, middle length.

Niseema:

The owner is male and about 83 years old.  He is a doctor.  The owner is in a nursing home.  The object came from his house.  The object was made by his grandfather or father or owned by one of them.  It is a momento of his father.  Very important.  The object is heavy for its size.  I have a strong sensation in the hand from holding it.  There is a feeling of anger coming up with it.  When demolishing the previous owner’s home, this object was found.  Additional thoughts about the owner:  hard edged, angry, sentimental, eats popcorn, likes to listen to birds, knows about birds, classical music is soothing to this person, very intelligent but may be losing his mind.

Jayne:

The owner is male, middle-aged around 45 and is a lawyer.  The owner develops routines easily and does not tend to vary them.  The location is Europe.  War.  This object has spent time in a display case in a building.  This object was originally dug up.  The object may have been repurchased – this is old, 1900’s.  The object is important because of its relationship to architecture.  I get feelings from the object of cool and happy now, although if an object can be said to have had a tough life in the past, this one did!  Don’t understand the connection of the object to the owner.

Nancy:

The owner is probably female, although could be male with feminine tendencies, and middle-aged in the 50’s.  I originally felt it was the remnant of a house where the owner had once lived, like a family homestead.  Feel there is a deep, deep sadness and attachment to this piece of fence or gate that seems to have been connected with the homestead property.  It feels like it is connected to tragedy.  Catastrophic.  Sudden.  Deaths.  Began to think perhaps it is the remnant left from a house that burned and perhaps the occupants perished. There is a sense of loss.  Irony.  No going back.  Wonder if the previous owners were the parents.  More focused on the father.  I am feeling location of upstate New York.  A 19th century early Victorian brick house.  The object has a very strong and clear vibration in it.  I can barely touch it because it is so powerfully packed with deep vibrations.  Feel heaviness in the chest and lungs.  Trouble breathing.  Grieving and wailing.  The loss of an entire history or family or background.  It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps this is not part of the fence around the house but a piece of fence from around a grave site.

1:05pm  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/9127171529
(No. OF NOTES: 2)
  
August 18, 2011

Composite of clothes donated to The Secret Life of Objects: wedding dress, pink suit worn to daughter’s wedding, blue sweater given from mother to daughter, favorite plaid shirt and dress sewn to wear to the 125th Anniversary of a hometown in 1975

From Louise Bourgeois, The Fabric Works:

Very very difficult to get rid of all the clothes I do not use this year

What do they represent: failures, rejects, abandoned

Left because of Guilt. Guilt ties me to them (increasingly, unlived, unwanted, ineffectual)

To remember the failures is a right to complain

Pretext not to move ahead.

Laziness, to like it.

9:13pm  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/9103269742
(No. OF NOTES: 1)
  
FILED UNDER: clothes 
May 8, 2011

My hair and my mother’s hair


In honor of Mother’s Day I wanted to share a quote from my favorite book, Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping. I understand it all too well:

 “Sylvie and I …could not leave that house, which was stashed like a brain, a reliquary, like a brain, its relic to be pawned and sorted and parceled out among the needy and the parsimonious of Fingerbone. Imagine the blank light of judgment falling on you suddenly. It would be like that. For even things lost in a house abide, like forgotten sorrows and insipient dreams, and many household things are of purely sentimental value, like the dim coil of thick hair, saved from my grandmother’s girlhood, which was kept in a hatbox on top of the wardrobe, along with my mother’s gray purse. In the equal light of disinterested scrutiny such things are not themselves. They are turned into pure object, and are horrible, and must be burned.” 

8:00am  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/5301905196
(No. OF NOTES: 5)
  
FILED UNDER: quote 
January 27, 2011

In grade school I caught the bouquet at my uncle’s wedding and this doily was wrapped around the flowers. I clearly remember the moment: I was so intent to catch the flowers when they were thrown and I did so by a fluke, they were thrown from a balcony and hit a beam, thus not going very far but falling to the front where I was standing. My excitement was soon ruined by my older sister who told me that another woman sitting at our table caught the flowers when she was my age and that she had never gotten married; she said the same thing would happen to me. I also remember feeling guilty about catching them because I had the feeling that bride wanted someone else to catch them. So what started out as exciting ended with me in tears.

I don’t think I kept this doily ostensibly to remember this now tragic-comic story from my childhood. I kept it because I saved most everything during the first twenty years of my life. I also rather like it as an object and always have. It looks very old and there is this sort of violent cut and stain in the middle where the stems of the flowers were placed. I have had it for so long (it resurfaces every few years, kept in no particular place) that it would never occur to me to throw it away even though I clearly do not “need” it. It not only reminds me of that memory but also what became of the marriage, which ended in divorce, despite the very extravagant wedding. For me, this object represents expectations and reality, transience and permanence, chance and fate.

- Anonymous Gifter

6:04pm  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/2965441177
(No. OF NOTES: 7)
  
FILED UNDER: G 
January 25, 2011
The above image represents the objects that I’ve collected so far. I’d love to add some more objects to my collection, so if you have trouble letting go of belongings please consider making a contribution.  

The above image represents the objects that I’ve collected so far. I’d love to add some more objects to my collection, so if you have trouble letting go of belongings please consider making a contribution.  

10:40pm  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/2935608261
(No. OF NOTES: 1)
  
January 5, 2011

Two months ago I received a very special submission to this project: a fascinating and rare book, “Twenty-Six Ghosts,” and a 21-page letter (see the above photo). The articulate letter was hand-written on composition paper, the ink varying color over the course of the pages. I read it in one sitting, and I felt as if I was reading a short story in a modern anthology of ghost stories. It was very psychological and as as the writer said herself “open to interpretation.” Here are a few fragments from the letter, the rest I will leave up to your imagination. 

“This particular volume of 36 Ghosts seems to have been part of all kinds of coincidences during the course of its most secret life —, a life which, when I obtained the book I was dying to learn more about. It seemed sort of like the key to understanding several things in my life that were just complete unknowns, and that were causing me to be plagued by a lot of unresolved issues that seemed to be effecting so many aspects of my life. Many of the issues connected with this book are still unresolved, but I think I am coming to a point where I am able to move beyond all that, to resolved the unresolvable, so to speak. It is time to let go. But let me start at the beginning…”

“He went away, unexpectedly and mysteriously, and all he left behind was 36 Ghosts. And there’s me, #11 - the raging serpent lady seeking her revenge. At least that is the way I feel sometimes. Other times I’m just sad to have lost someone I connected with so well.”

10:02am  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/2609543409
(No. OF NOTES: 1)
  
FILED UNDER: Gifted Object 
January 4, 2011

I received a lovely letter in the mail along with “two bits of nostalgic ephemera” for my collection. The following is an excerpt from Virginia’s letter:

…There are lots of emotional ties to so much! Handwriting on a card can tug at the heart. Bill’s Mama had a very distinctive handwriting and I still have padded mailing envelopes with that familiar writing on them! (I do recycle such mailers, but those particular ones tend to remain.) Does this give you insight into why some relatively normal persons hang onto stuff? I have trouble emptying my closet of some remaining garments that I sewed. I used to give them to a good friend, my size, but she has moved to Texas. Oh, and there are advertising items from my Daddy’s business in Atlanta. So many things are reminders. I don’t get all teary and emotional, but there are things that tug at the heart . .  . 


2:08pm  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/2598044646
FILED UNDER: Gifted Object 
December 11, 2010

- Corinne Botz, “Dad’s Den”

One of my favorites passages from Marguerite Duras’ book Practicalities:

Some women can never manage it -they can’t handle their houses, they overload them, clutter them up, never create an opening towards the world outside…They know they’ll never be able to overcome the incredible difficulties of keeping a house in order. Though anyhow there’s nothing to be done about it. That sort of woman simply shifts disorder from one room to another; moves it about or hides it in cellars, disused rooms, trunks or cupboards…They don’t realize that disorder, or in other words the accumulation of possessions, can only be dealt with in a way that’s extremely painful. Namely by parting with them. Some families with big houses keep everything for three hundred years - dresses, toys, and anything to do with the children, the squire or they mayor. 

I’ve thrown things away, and regretted it. Sooner or later you always regret having thrown things away at some time or other. But if you don’t part with anything, if you try to hold back time, you can spend your whole life tidying life up and documenting it. Women often keep gas and electric bills for twenty years, for no other reason than to record time and their own virtues. The time they once had, but of which nothing remains.

12:39am  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/2171833804
(No. OF NOTES: 2)
  
FILED UNDER: Quotes Marguerite Duras 
November 27, 2010

- Photograph Courtesy of Karen Kirchhoff

My grandmother recently died.  Verna had lived with her husband in the same house for over 50 years. When she died at 92, emptying the house was a huge project for her children.  They discovered Verna was quite the hoarder.  Amongst shoeboxes full of letters dating as far back as 1945 (sometimes envelopes without even a letter inside), there were receipts from the dairy farm, sewing store, and old bills.  She stowed many an old magazine under her bed and had dozens of sewing patterns from the decades of her craft… After the many days of sorting and divvying, my mother sent me a few boxes with select belongings of grandma’s.  My mother, being a woman of her own mysterious ways sometimes not to be understood, sent me a few items that had no practical application: like threaded bobbins to a sewing machine 4 states and 22 hours away.  I nearly threw them out, but it seemed so tragic and almost offensive to dispense of them with grandma so recently transformed into ash and atmosphere.  There was a romantic, mysterious aura to these newly displaced and reclaimed objects.  The bobbins are sleek and shiny encircled by unexplained layers of different colored thread—packed tightly like rock stratum— suggesting the archeology of her attire.  Various other sewing tools accompany: old needles piercing their original, quaint and tiny envelope packages; hand knitted laces torn from a garment; a sewing machine foot and screw; wooden tubes that once housed new needles.  These items wonderfully embody Verna and have captured and frozen a history of her motions: wrapping, pinning, uncapping, tightening, unlatching, her hands flowing forward, drawing back like the tides.  Pinching a needle, she wove her ever-aging hand to and fro directing the orchestra.  These are the miniature instruments and stage of her life: the whir of the sewing machine dredging up yards and yards of gold.

- Gifted Object and story from Shinara

10:01pm  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/1709139260
(No. OF NOTES: 1)
  
FILED UNDER: Gifted Object 
November 9, 2010

“My Bronze Bells”

I have been a minimalist in varying degrees since childhood.  I still, however, hold on to a few items.  The image some of these items create for me is not a pleasant one, and I question the need/desire to hold on to them.  My childhood was far from a happy one and, in fact, I do not have very many memories, which could be considered very good or very bad.  I have two older brothers and my parents owned a soda manufacturing business.  When I was born, their first girl and last baby, they gave me away to a couple they knew very little about (the male was their extract salesman).  I really can’t say the exact age I was when this transaction took place, but I ended up staying with this couple in another state not too far away, until I was 10 years old.  From as far back as I can remember, this was against my wishes.  After many crying spells and stiff upper lips, my parents finally agreed to let me come back home.  Helen, the female part of this couple, gave me a set of six bronze bells when I left, along with the thought that I was killing De, the male in this scenario, by leaving.  She told me that when I first came to live with them, I was a baby and they had no toys and nothing to entertain me.  She had fashioned the bells into a crib mobile of sorts by binding them together with green yarn and hanging them across the area in which they kept me.  I have kept these bells for over 40 years, a fact that completely flies in the face of my minimalism philosophy, yet I have never been able to let them go.  Thank you for the inspiration.  I have taken a picture of my ready to purge bells, and continue to keep a stiff upper lip.

10:44am  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/1525573144
(No. OF NOTES: 2)
  
FILED UNDER: Gifted Object 
November 2, 2010

Four years ago at about 8am one rainy day in April, I was struck by a livery van on 9th Avenue at 26th Street in Manhattan.  It was a gray and slushy morning. A perfect day to off set my favorite bright red umbrella!  I had the right of way and entered the cross walk paying little attention to anything, except my feet in the rain puddles.  Then came the smack, the ground, the wetness, and the addled state of mind.  The van stopped, I got up instantly, clutching my umbrella and handbag, and walked, without a word toward the auto repair shop on the corner.  The mechanics took down the driver’s license plate number and information. I wondered if I was ok, as did everyone at the scene. I took inventory of my parts: torn pants, sore leg, sore elbow, wet clothes, faint voice. I didn’t hit my head but the ambulance was called anyway and I went to the emergency room. Within an hour I was sent home with some aspirin and the reassurance that I would be fine. I recall being somewhat relieved having only to recover from the psychological repercussions of the accident. 

 The torn clothes are long gone, the bruises too. The broken umbrella and my fading memory are the only remaining vestiges of the accident. Sometimes I think healing is just a form of forgetting. I guess I’ve kept the broken umbrella in order to remember, like tying a string around your finger.

-Addie Juell

12:32am  |   URL: http://secretlifeofobjects.tumblr.com/post/1459099166
FILED UNDER: Gifted Object 
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