Week Nine
Anonymous Gifts
Week Nine of the Reliquary Engine has me following through on the inversion I started in Week 8 — and finding out it wasn't quite the inversion I thought.
The Collision
Can the chaos of a katamari damacy ("clump spirit") serve as a vehicle for remembering? A living archive of collected objects, alive and even growing, rather than dead and entombed?What objects remember best? How do you joyfully celebrate the accumulation of a life — without the celebration curdling into something sentimental or something macabre?
Last week I was after a wearable katamari, tragic and joyful at once: human-scale belongings rolled up with frozen Charlotte doll parts, the huddle from Inside pressed into the clump from Katamari Damacy. I built it. The tragedy came easy — severed porcelain limbs will do that for free.
The joy refused to show up on command. It didn't arrive until I stopped curating and let the bin decide: nearly every included object came from one container of donations to my collective's shared supply pool. Buttons, costume-jewelry parts, half-finished crafts, a green plastic bell next to a silver repoussé medallion. The joy is in the hoard — the magpie pleasure of bright things rolled up indiscriminately — not in any mechanism I could engineer.
Provenance would seem to matter, if this is a reliquary — or, worn, a prosthetic for memory. The objects came mostly from one donor to that supply bin, though I can't be sure of that, and a few are my own. I can't name the former owner, or even prove there was only one. I'm choosing to remember them anyway: raising the objects from their storage-bin reliquary and reanimating them as a rolling huddle, on the belief that there was a someone, and that a someone can be held.