Confessions of a Materialist
by Joy Setton
It would be better if we were materialists, better if we did in fact consume. We call ourselves consumers, we call ourselves materialists, but we obviously have no regard for materials- or how could we stand being so constantly surrounded by such ugly ones as plastic, vinyl, nylon, sheetrock.
And we do not in fact consume, we gorge and regurgitate with hardly any digestion.
Each week, each day, large amounts of things come into our homes, and each day, each week, large amounts come out again. What sort of consumption is that!
A fire consumes that takes a whole forest and leaves in its wake, a little smoke, a little ash. We are more like shiftless bureaucrats, pushing a stack of papers, and the responsibility for signing off on them, from one desk to another. From extraction to production to sale to repudiation to the landfill, these so called beloved material goods, all just get shifted, as stacks of papers are, from one desk to another because no one has the authority to decide and conclude -not the under-manager, not the over-manager, not the CEO and not the shareholders. How very convenient for every one, and yet utterly impractical!
Each day, each week, the goods come into our houses, so-called consumer goods, and each week, each day, out again they go, unconsumed, broken or no longer wanted, mixed up with uneaten food and dirty diapers and carted off to the landfill, wrapped once more for the trip in a shiny new suit of plastic, which almost no organism can digest but that we all ingest nonetheless, even the fish in the Marianna trench, or in a stream that seems so clean in the wilds of Alaska.
What an invention, what a material plastic is! Cheap and durable, what a deadly combination. Cheap enough to be thrown away after a single use, durable enough to never transform, with the help of what lies around it, into something else. The only thing that nature can do to it, is pound and pulverize, divide and not conquer- but scatter and spread it, so that rubbed by wind and water, scoured and abraded off of rocks and sidewalks from shoes, bottles, buckets, bags; spun off synthetic clothes churning in the drums of washing machines, it comes to be everywhere.
Micro-plastics are everywhere, and we all consume and contain them. We are all sullied and impure, as the Christians preach and have preached. How right! How doubly right, metaphorically and physically right. We all participate in the gruesome wasteful system, and we all hold traces of the artificial and the corrupt –this new stink-less incorruptible corruption that will never rot and revert, but just keeps getting smaller and smaller, more difficult to catch and more insidious.
Most of what this so-called consumer culture produces, in such vast quantities, is un-consumable, and therefore ultimately unconsumed, except of course for the entertainment, which everyone consumes at such high volumes, which everyone allows to stream into their heads all day and half the night –allow? They invite it in! They clamor for it and would be lost without it! That gets thoroughly consumed and digested, leaving nothing but a shroud of fear and anxiety on the brain. Thoroughly digested and all the ideals –even if contradictory; very cause of the anxiety and the fear- thoroughly absorbed and embodied, so that the alleged materialist can be made to buy the shoddiest ticky-tacky, hold it in his hands and pronounce it good and solid and valuable; eat the paste-like food and declare it very tasty; not because he can feel and taste that it is, but because he has been told that it is. How very idealized and how highly conceptual! What a complete denial of the material and the sensual!
This, a materialist culture? That can trade in debts and futures as if they were solid tangible goods. A materialist culture? Whose largest fortunes are on paper, which in itself is a symbol of a symbol: paper for bank notes or stock certificates represented gold and gold represented wealth, but nowhere does that gold exist and neither do the banknotes, in that amount. And nothing so tangible and concrete as a profit is even asked any more of a CEO to make his fortune. The fortune exists through the belief, dispersed in millions and millions of heads, that it exists; and that the system of production and distribution that brought it about is, if not the best, at least the most sensible. If not the most fair, then certainly the most free- and besides, the only possible one, the others having been tried and proven inferior -or destroyed, and therefore proven weaker.
By our belief we make the system exist, we make the fortunes inflate and perpetuate; and seeing that we believe, the system proudly puffs itself up and gets bigger and bigger; and then we believe so much more because look at all this corn, look at all these cars, and all these fortunes! So much trust, such immense amounts of belief, that it could practically be shoveled up, poured into sausage casings, sliced up, and sold in pieces or in bulk –which is in fact being done, that is called the financial sector and is the fastest growing part of our economy –speed and size being of course values in themselves nowadays- and is enmeshed in everything we do, and is not at all material.
I deal in materials. I am a true materialist -an idolater of the matter that I hold between my fingers. For hours every day, I handle silk and cotton, wet it and watch the darkness spread as the water is absorbed; wring it between my fingers, and marvel at the thinness of the silk or at how very heavy wet cotton suddenly is.
I immerse the stuff in the mordant pot, inch by inch, so the stuff is not jolted by the temperature change; inch by inch like an alligator sliding into the waters of the everglades, each paw, each vertebrae entering in its own time. I stir the material with a tool, unfurl it underwater with my hands, sheathed in gloves but feeling the heat through the rubber. I rinse the material and set it out to dry. I stretch it on the printing table; pat it, pin it, feel sorry for the holes that I make in it. In alternate panels, I squeeze the ink through the screens, watch the color penetrate and lighten as it dries; watch the repeat join and the pattern form, how thrilling. Most of this could be done by machine, but then I wouldn’t see and feel it.
When I wear the silk, of course, I feel it right against my skin, which is very pleasant, and I get pleasure from watching others wear it too. How beautiful are the valleys of light and shade created when shoulders, arms, thighs, move within the shimmering stuff; beautiful in motion, and beautiful stilled and mediated through the eyes of the old masters, those painters whose regard for the matter of flesh, for the matter of fabric and the matter of canvas and paint, is still palpable at a distance of centuries.
Painters and sculptors seem like materialists to me, idolaters of the matter that they see and hold and represent; and Indians from India seem like materialist to me, many of whom still possess the knowledge to transform matter, to shape clay, spin, weave etc. –knowledge that we gave to the machines, so that the only jobs left here, practically, are to cook and serve the paste-like food, to smile without ever looking into the other person’s face- smile, and say “have a great day” -whether it is 7 o’clock in the morning or 11 o’clock at night. Indians from India, who drink chai out of clay cups on railway platforms –and how can so many Americans drink so many coffees out of so many paper and plastic cups! Half of the pleasure is stolen! Are these drinkers really able to separate the taste of the coffee on their tongue from the burning plastic on their lips; or from the thought of that horrid lid object enduring for all centuries in the landfill? I am not. Indians from India still do, as Europeans used to, wear something till it can’t be worn anymore –till it is threadbare, that is consuming! And after that threadbare cloth is done being a sari or a shirt it can be a kitchen towel or a patch in a quilt. A polyester tracksuit, or a sports bra from Lullulemon, will never wear but it will come apart at the seams–and who would take the trouble to repair it, or even know how to anymore. It does not wear, but goes straight to the trash heap nonetheless because no one either would ever choose to make a quilt out of a patch of tracksuit.
Rather than relentlessly pursuing and spreading the persistent, the resistant and the un-wearable we should in fact be weary of what does not wear, what cannot be consumed by other organisms: plastic, polyester track suits, or enriched uranium! Consuming is digesting, and digesting is transforming, a creative action.
Consuming is wearing something to the bone, to the threads, burning the thing up in the fire of your love for its shape, its purpose and the labor of those who made it. And materialism is care for the materials by which we are surrounded, how they look, how they feel, how they are treated, where they come from and where they end up.
To be heaped by tons of trash -methane producing trash in the landfills, and trash in the making in our homes- is not to love the material, it is to be in thrall to cheapness and advertising.
JOY SETTON
is a Franco-American writer, musician and textile designer and the founder of Setton, J. Textiles which produces fabric printed by hand in the U.S.A -using only natural dyes.
