Viridian Design & Aesthetic Catharsis
Oh, hi there. Sorry to keep you waiting so long. But sometimes, damnit, you just have to clean your whole life up.
So, I’m back in the mountains of North Carolina, my childhood home, where I’ve been refreshing the mainframe, so to speak. I jumped the gun a little in my last post, but let’s call that the beta release of Curtiss 2.0. Actually, it’s been more like Curtiss 0.8 around here lately, but I digress.
What is all this madness about!? I’m gettin’ Viridian, baby. Mad Viridian.
I’ll let my boy Bruce Sterling tell it:
What is “sustainability?” Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time — time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.
In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbors. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.
That era is dying. It’s not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation — in fact they are *causes* of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.
Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.
It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.
Do not “economize.” Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It’s melting the North Pole. So “economization” is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.
The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don’t seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It’s in your time most, it’s in your space most. It is “where it is at,” and it is “what is going on.”
Oh there’s more…much more, but I wanted to give you, the faceless internet public, an idea of how I’ve been occupying my time at home. I mean, I’ve been doing more, much more of course, but let’s not lose our focus here. Focus…
To say that I’ve been simplifying wouldn’t quite cut it and ‘cleansing’ sounds like I’ve been fasting in one of our bioregion’s many mountain spas. Refreshing, reformatting, partitioning and calibrating perhaps…
Enough self-indulgence. The show goes on next week…
Now an NYC refugee, Curtiss P. Martin serves as a contributing editor of all things clean and green at ScribeMedia. When he isn't out on the road or in the field researching and reporting on controversial science and tech topics, Curtiss can be found communing with the creative kids at the Elsewhere artist collaborative in Greensboro, NC.
Please clarify the statement - do not economize. I suppose I have not understood your idea clearly.