Hemingway talked about his clean, well-lighted place. I´m not too much in it for cleanliness, in fact I think a perfectly disordered room is probably the best metaphor, and so by unreasonable extension, the ideal catalyst for an active mind. Active minds don´t have everything to their place, little plastic fucking storage bins and old used baby-food bottles screwed to two-by-fours holding spare and jangling screws, nuts, and bolts—no, the active mind is cluttered, is a floor where you can´t stand or walk because you´ll trample over something, and odds are that if it isn´t valuable, something underneath the pile is, and just trying to get to the door so you can get a Coke is an exercise in turning over the pile and finding things you´d ostensibly forgotten, and now are just kind of in the way. And you say you´ll clean it all up sometime, find a proper place for everything, but who ever gets around to it? Cuz I don´t. It just all piles up. Soon the whole room will be junk—it will be a cube of junk and future archaeologists will assume the room was built as a shrine or a sarcophagus for the junk, like the close-fitting room that held Tutankhamun. And one little man-shaped hole in the middle, or perhaps I´ll be fossilized in my own pile of detritus, my flesh and bones replaced by spare sheets of paper, computer screws, pop cans, and scraggly books. And will they be able to piece together me from the things that have replaced me? I don´t fucking think so.
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