Out of Control #2
Compulsive Hoarding and Prodigious Amassments of Crap
The excavation of ancient cities in Anatolia and Mesopotamia involves digging down through compressed and mounded layers of dirt and archeological remains, referred to as Tells. These rise above the surrounding desert as clear evidence of the human tendency to collect and amass objects. Who was it that defined man as an animal with pockets? The results of Homer’s immortal conflict are compressed into Troy VIIa, merely one of many successive cities layered into a single massive mound. Ancient cities rest far below their modern descendants, standing atop deep strata of moulde, the decayed and compacted remains of all previous human activity on that spot. The rodential, insectoidal human tendencies to amass and hoard could not be more plainly demonstrated than by these piles of amassed remains, rising above the plains of the Fertile Crescent, birthplace of our civilization. The heaps of ostraca, the potshards of the Athenians, which served them as a sort of scratch paper, were merely the paltry precursors of the mountainous accumulations of smashed amphorae that built up near the seaports of Rome. Yet even these vast piles of useless broken packaging fade into total and abject insignificance beside the gargantuan, monstrous, billowing masses of useless toxic plastic crap which continually spew fourth from every infected aperture of industrial civilization, inundating the seas, clogging the air, and encrusting the land with inconceivable superabundancies of putrid, virulently toxic useless disjected crap.
Whence this trend? Why these
useless extrusions and amassments of matter? Energy and matter
themselves, the constituents of our universe, embody these tendencies
in magnetism and gravitation. Galaxies hoard suns, suns planets,
planets moons. The Earth erupts, burying forests in layered lava.
Millennia of compacted sediment, swept seawards by rivers, are sorted
into strata and made rock. But it is in passing from the Mineral to the
Animal kingdom that we see how the human tendency to produce and hoard
objects is prefigured not only in inert matter, but also in the deep
genetic imperatives that we share with bugs and beasts. Most anamalian phyla boast a few species that indulge in hoarding behavior. Caddisfly larvae amass and cement detritus into armored encasements in which they live and grow. Spiders enshroud, embalm and inject their prey. Certain woodpeckers collect vast quantities of acorns, each inserted into an individually excavated declivity in the trunk of a deceased tree. Yet, note this curious fact: hoarding is almost unknown among non-human primates (VanderWall 224). Alone among our simian brethren, we humans succumb to the urge to collect and amass objects. Surveying the whole of the animal kingdom, we find many animals with the hoarding instinct, but three groups in particular stand out as exceptional hoarders- rodents, communal insects, and humans. An investigation of hoarding behavior in rodents and insects will suggest that much of domesticated human behavior represents an atavistic reversion to the deeply encoded habits of those animals we most abhor.
The vast megalopolises of the ants and termites, with their specialized castes of workers, farmers and soldiers, perhaps represent the closest animal equivalent to human civilization. Observe the towering constructions of the African termites, crammed with crawling beings, separated at birth into specialized castes, all mindlessly devoted to the single purpose of their bloated progenitor, which is to inundate the environment with copies of itself. Extensive tunneling and exoskeletal encasement are all behaviors uniquely characteristic of humans and collective insects. The metallic pods in which domesticated humans habitually transport their distended bodies, are made of ores and oils tunneled out from deep below the surface. Human cities, scabrous exudations of asphalt and concrete, are seen by satellites, while those of insects appear prominently in photographs taken from airplanes (329).
Hoarding ants fall into three groups: collectors of seeds, nectar and corpses (329). While many species of ants merely “collect nectar and honeydew and transport these sweet exudates in their distensible crops to nests (333),” a few species go far beyond this. “Their abdomens often become so enlarged and distended that movement becomes slow and cumbersome. Individuals called repletes imbibe so much liquid that their gasters become greatly distended, the sclerites of the abdomen are forced apart by the volume of liquid, exposing intersegmental membranes. The gaster becomes spherical and so large that locomotion is extremely difficult (333).” These chronically engorged individuals cling immobile to the ceilings of their dark caverns, where they serve as living storerooms. Sadly, their human equivalents, the burgeoning legions of the morbidly obese, can seldom relish in total immobility, but are occasionally compelled to hoist themselves up from before their glowing screens, heave their globular bulks into transport pods, and travel to the local cathedrals of consumerism. Here at least electrical carts have been provided, to convey them up and down the aisles, lest a single calorie be expended in the loathed and gratuitous exertion of walking.
Communal insects are not the only hoarding arthropods. The coprophagous beetles or Scarabs also indulge in this pursuit, as do the burying beetles (Nicrophorus ssp.), which are among the few species that consistently hoard food items larger than themselves (322). In this respect, they may be classed with Costco shoppers. But while these latter hoard whole pallets of processed, extruded food pellets and pharmaceuticals, the burying beetles restrict themselves to the decaying corpses of animals discovered on their morning perambulations. The burying beetles diligently excavate the earth beneath their carrion fodder, until the decomposing mass begins to sink below the surface. “As burial occurs, the corpse’s extremities are drawn in until the bloating carcass forms a nearly spherical mass (327). The carcass then gradually becomes an amorphous mass of putrefying tissue. After the pair of beetles copulates, the female lays her eggs in a small receptacle at the top of the chamber, and further processes the carcass. Male and female regurgitate droplets of partially digested tissue. If the carefully prepared spherule of putrefaction becomes infested with fly eggs, the Nicrophorus pair will seek out, discover, and transport special phoretic mites that feed on such eggs. But the necrophilic diligence of these beetles, and their subterranean rites of sex and decay are all to a distinct and admirable purpose, and partake of none of the maniacal excess, the unbounded lust to amass to which human hoarders succumb. For a bestial analog to this, we must turn to the rodents.
Most hoarding mammals are rodents (217), probably the most ancient, ubiquitous and successful order of that class.
These
animals, employed without pay by the millions in scientific
laboratories, are our direct ancestors, and their psychological and
anatomical characteristics provide curious analogs to our own.
Obsessive Compulsive disorder (OCD) has many frankly rodential
manifestations, especially excessive grooming and repetitive checking.
One OCD researcher notes that “two of the youngest boys in our study
spend 2-11 hours each day licking their hands, each finger gets licked
in its turn, the order doesn’t change. The atavistic patterns set loose
in these children will probably be replaced as they grow older with
more ordinary washing rituals (Rapoport 197).” The same scientist
elsewhere observes that rats spend one third of their waking lives
grooming (196). Repetitive or compulsive checking is another classic
rodential symptom of OCD. For example, patients will feel irresistibly
compelled to return home and check if they have turned off the stove or
locked the front door. This compulsive checking can greatly interfere
with the course of their lives. Among hoarding rodents, including the
short-tailed shrew Blarina brevicauda “maintenance of caches is
characterized by frequent checking and rechecking (VanderWall 220).”
This reviewing or checking of hoarded objects in rodents is analogous
to the making of written accounts of agricultural surpluses by early
domesticated humans in the Fertile Crescent. It is thought that writing
originated in these attempts to keep track of and document the
surpluses resulting from ancient agriculture. While rodents may mark
their hoards by defecating and urinating on them (220), the early
administrators used carved cylinder seals for that purpose. The domestication of animals has its own curious analog among rodents. Domesticated animals, for example sheep and cows, are notable for their stupidity, dullness and cowardess, compared to their wild progenitors, the mountain goats and the mighty forest aurochs of prehistory. The European mole performs a sort of rudimentary psychosurgery on the animals it captures. They “store large worms and insects in the walls of galleries. The moles prevent the earthworms from leaving by eating or mutilating the 2 to 7 anteriormost segments of the head region… Under the cool temperatures that obtain in soil during winter, injured worms remain fresh and otherwise healthy for months (222).” The hoards of this species of mole sometimes consist of vast accumulations of zombified microfauna. “One of the largest caches contained 1,280 earthworms and 18 cock-chafer grubs, weighed 2.1 kilos, in a chamber embedded in the wall of a segment of tunnel (223). But even this estimable accumulation of lobotomized annelids is only a faint intimation of the vast platoons of enslaved, stupefied beasts amassed in the factory farms of first world nations, where wallowing in their own festering excrement, they blindly gnaw the flesh of their fellows, berserk with horror.
Other rodents too excel in hoarding and amassing heaps of disjected trash. Red squirrel middens, composed of debris and the encasements of harvested nuts, sometimes attain to widths of 7-10 meters and depths of 40 cm (241). But the supreme master of hoarding rodents is undoubtedly the hamster, a wee beast which itself now frequently constitutes a minute subsection of the accumulated possessions of domesticated humans, along the corridors of whose habitations it is to be seen progressing encased in an extruded plastic spheroid. The word hamster derives from the German hamstern “-to hoard.” Its Arabic name means “grandfather saddlebags.” This animal’s cheek pouches, which can double the width of its head, must be manually disgorged (263). Hamsters have been observed to hoard in excess of 90 kilos of food, an incredible quantity for an animal that itself generally weighs about a tenth of a kilo. This would be equivalent to a 150 lb. human amassing tons of possessions. Yet it is far from unheard of for domesticated humans to hoard possessions orders of magnitude greater than this. It would be a difficult calculation to make, estimating the combined gross weight of the average American’s possessions, but anyone attempting it would need to take into account not only the multiple transport pods, washing machines, dryers, refrigerators, televisions, computers, heating and cooling apparatus, furniture, aquaria, and recreational vehicles, but also entire houses, buildings and commercial enterprises, with their innumerable and ponderous appurtenances. Not to mention the often considerable magnitude of their own persons, swollen by undulating accumulations of adiposity, the results of long term, chronic ingestion of synthetic lipids and the charred flesh of enslaved beasts, abetted by a sessile lifestyle spent enthralled to the paltry entertainments afforded by passive, screen-based electronic entertainments.
Taken altogether, the hoarding behavior of insects and rodents seem wise and reasonable alongside the clearly pathological amassments of domesticated humans. In the USA, even homeless people often obtain and transport masses of possessions several times larger than their own personal weights. Their strength is scarcely sufficient to push their rusted shopping carts, which overflow with burgeoning bags of clothes and hoarded debris. These sadly bedraggled individuals provide a sort of degraded parody of the abundances of the rich.
Human Hoarders
A lurking abomination lies hid behind the vinyl facades and trimmed
shrubberies of suburbia. Shrouded by curtains, crammed into obscure
closets, or locked into basements, the horror all too often escapes and
engulphs the residents, subsuming them in an unstoppable tide. In vain
they scurry like rats along the dark, narrow, clogged corridors of
their houses, unaware that they and their entire environment have been
subsumed in a monstrous, atavistic, reversion to rodential psychology
and aesthetics. The name of this horror? -Compulsive Hoarding! While the amassments of modern, domesticated humans are impressive, and put to shame even the most industrious of rodents, we view these deposits with complacency, or envy. No supernatural awe attends the unveiling of an acquaintance’s collection of 537 encoded plastic discs, his 37 articulated, extruded plastic figurines, or his 47 inch personal circumference. But when such accumulations begin to stray beyond certain limits, a sort of unspeakable horror begins to invest them. The line between acceptable consumerism and rampant, compulsive hoarding is easily crossed. The compulsive hoarder’s house becomes filled with such quantities of useless decaying detritus that only narrow corridors remain to afford access the rooms. These corridors represent an unconscious reversion to the tunnels of rodents and collective insects. In more extreme cases, even these corridors fill up, forcing investigators to literally swim through semiclogged apertures near the ceilings, which are often dangerously bowed down from the accumulated weight of possessions in the upper levels. Generally accessing the sofa is futile, and the stove is rendered unusable under luxuriant, enfungated encrustations of conglobulated waste. Where, as is not infrequently the case, domestic animals are present, expansive, laminated, putrescent floodplains of excrement coat those few areas of floor left exposed.
Interestingly, the central problem for compulsive hoarders is not so much that they acquire too many possessions, but that they find it impossible to throw anything away. The daily junk mail crammedthrough the front slot often proves particularly problematic in this respect. The huge quantities of packaging, waste, and outdated possessions that are disposed of by most citizens thus are hidden from view and removed from contemplation. They are thrown “away.” In a closed system such as the earth, there is of course really no “away.” Thus the foul, vomitously stank conditions found in the compulsive hoarder’s home provide a sort of microcosmic mirror of the large scale effects of mass industrial civilization on the planet.
And compulsive hoarding is frighteningly common. Almost without fail, every person with whom I bring up the subject knows of at least one case. The full spectrum is represented. I can remember one childhood babysitter whose house, although otherwise tidy, contained a single room entirely filled with hoarded crap. Upon opening the door, one saw a solid, contiguous wall of useless junk. Perhaps, in accordance with the alchemical motto “As above, so below,” incidences of individual compulsive hoarding increase and grow more horrific in parallel with the burgeoning slew of waste extruded by large scale mass industrial civilization.
Is there not a peculiar species of intermixed horror and awe that arises from the contemplation of a house entirely crammed with hoarded debris? A sort of frisson perhaps is felt. The sight implies the long-term, chronic abandonment of socially constructed boundaries of control, the unfettered burgeoning of tendencies normally suppressed, the permanent and irreversible irruption of latent lusts. For me at least, a certain powerful and undeniable fascination manifests wherever such a dynamic protrudes into view.
The disguised pathology inherent in industrial civilization is freely and openly shown in the behavior of compulsive hoarders. Attempts by neighborhood committees, police, and interfering busybodies to suppress the phenomenon may abate, but they cannot permanently halt, these explosive effulgences of superfluous crap. The nauseating, mountainous, botulized heaps of useless disjected trash which fill the homes of hoarders are the inevitable microcosmic reflections of the insufferable, gargantuan deposits of useless waste resulting from our civilization, the apotheosis of unbounded growth. In planetary terms this manifests as industrial civilization, in domestic terms as compulsive hoarding, and in personal terms as cancer.
The conglobulated agluteriminations and accreted encrustations of useless toxic extruded industrial secretions now
generally much fetishized,
frequently are acquired and disjected with such ceaseless and
implacable vehemence that unsightly inundations threaten the houses, or
menace the apartments of hapless consumers. While some, the hoarders,
are content to permit, or even eager to luxuriate in, the inevitable
enfungated slew of items, others are disconcerted by the incipient
squalor. For these, the widely advertised STORAGE UNIT is available for
the effective sequestration of those objects whose uselessness forbids
retention, but whose socially constructed value prevents the disposal
they so obviously merit. What a different prospect the streets of
American cities might present if such facilities were available for the
burgeoning effulgencies of adiposity now enswathing most bodies. Then,
the rhythmic, convulsive gyrations of consumers, as they strive to
heave themselves out of their transport pods, into the megastores,
where even more superfluous crap is to be purchased, would no longer be
visible. Like the intricate nuptials of mastodons, or the abysmal
combats of trilobites, such displays would then be classed among the
dimly envisioned spectacles of the past. But such is not the case. Hulking near the edges of town, or lurking in the decayed cores of cities, the storage facilities are to be seen, surrounded with razor wire, pretentious festoons that belie the worthlessness of their guarded contents. True seekers rob elsewhere. A certain vacuous numinosity invests these structures, whose long rows of garage doors, cinderblock walls, and asphaltic surfaces are kept blank of weeds by powerful herbicides. Here is a building devoid of living purpose, a constructed extrusion principally serviceable to unused things, a monument to the subjugation of life to its adjunct appurtenances.
Indeed it is not unheard of for people to get trapped in their storage units. A slipping door or jammed lock have been known to entomb a consumer among a selection of their most undesired possessions. Sometimes rescue intervenes, sometimes death. Who knows now how many desiccated mummies await discovery at the auction of their goods, like the Egyptian pharaohs, whose graves were early looted, their expertly crafted golden sarcophagi and amulets crudely melted quick into raw bullion for trade, and their carefully embalmed flesh heedlessly ground into spurious medicines? With what express rapidity are all attempts at physical greatness immediately subsumed into the seething oblivion of constant transformation that characterizes our existence! If anything briefly persists, say the shattered toe of some statue, or the scrap end of a few hexameters below some dull monk’s palimpsest, it serves more as a testament to the absolute futility of human ambition, than to the vain hope of value achieved by renown. The ravaged graves, the monuments, effaced either by time, Muslims, or malevolence, the vague humps and furrows that persist behind vanished cities all indicate the supreme importance of this living moment, in which our full potentials of awareness by immediately be exercised, above the uncertain possibility of fame, which is the supposition of a potential mental state set up in some hypothetical individual in an unknown place and time.
Grim listings faintly appear in obscure subsections of newspapers, quietly announcing the dispersal of the amassed goods of the fresh dead. Prior to the ESTATE SALE, the surviving kin, themselves accelerating towards death, view the musty chattels of the departed, and either squabble viciously over these disjected husks, or paw through them with mixed melancholy, indifference and despair. Visit such sales, reader, on your empty Sunday afternoons, for instruction in the sciences of vanity and the manifest futility of grasping. Wizened crones clog the corridors, scrutinizing flatware. Orthodox Goths like me need no exhortations to attend such events, where we are to be seen with our nubile assistants, seeking old photographs and diaries. Bargaining is possible. Often an unplacable stench prevails, perhaps that of death. At the end of the sale, some few objects may have been sold, and the rest are condemned to the Goodwill, or more likely, to the landfill. The whole event shows that the crap amassed during a lifetime is more noteworthy for the trouble caused by its disposal, than for any supposed value to those still living. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine that the deep layer of stratified toxic plastic slurry that will be the remains of our civilization will be of any real interest to future archeologists, such will be its extent and ubiquity. Rather the real challenge will be to mine it as a resource, to clear it away for the safe cultivation of crops, or, most likely, to search out those few areas where it is not to be found.
Bibliography
Rapoport, Judith. The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing. C.P. Dutton, New York, 1989.VanderWall, Stephen B.. Food Hoarding in Animals. University of Chicago, 1990.
Copyright 2005 by David Drexler
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