living in small places

A couple of weeks ago I was driving home south along Sixth Street in Berkeley. Parked on the left hand side of the street was a large van, the size of a UPS delivery van. I couldn't see into the back of the truck because there was curtain or large piece of fabric hanging behind the driver's seat. As I drove past, it reminded me of a van much like it that a friend of mine name Lamar lived in years ago, up in Seattle.

There was room in it for a narrow bed, a chair, a workbench, a stereo (well a boombox), and a cooler. There might have been a hot plate, but probably not. I thought it was wonderful, to have your life in a tiny space that you could take around with you. When I was about twenty, I lived in a tepee for a summer. Everything I owned could be put in a backpack (and I did when I finally went out to California).

There was something lovely and light about having so few possessions and needing so little space to live in.

Now I share a house with my partner and I'm in the process of unpacking 30+ boxes that have been in storage for a couple of years. The contents are mainly books and the unpacking gets slowed down because I find myself going, "I forgot I had that!" then sitting down and reading for a half hour. I have a lot more stuff than I had when I did when I was twenty. My life is a lot more complex and undeniably richer, though moving probably means a real moving van by this point.

I was thinking about this during the flamefest around an appropriation of a WOC's work by a prominent (whatever that means online) white feminist blogger. Aside from the sadly predictable, shamefully feeble defense put on by blogger X and her posse, the thing that struck me was what a tiny space she lives in.

I don't know what her physical space is like, but her mental space is incredibly impoverished. Her response is only about her reputation, her career, her feelings. There's not a whisper of awareness that anyone else in the world exists. This sort of solipsism is like living out of a backpack - limited perspectives, limited resources, limited options. It might feel unencumbered and it's easy to move around, but how poor, how thin, how shabby.

The van Lamar lived in wasn't shabby, and she moved on to get a house to contain all the art she does and all the people she knows. I moved out of the tepee to acquire an unnerving number of books, but I think X is never going to move. I think she's going to cover the windows of the truck with aluminum foil and park it in some friend's backyard and there she'll stay.