Monday, July 17, 2006
(1:14 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
On Shabbiness
I've always desired shabbiness, deep down. It's strange how this happened -- this desire for downward social mobility. I was always jealous of my friends who had the shabby houses full of shabby furniture, the shabby clothes that they could just wear rather than assemble and display, the friends who never had "outfits," who never had fancy meals, for whom everything was make-shift.My mom, aunt, and grandma owned a furniture and decorating store while I was growing up, called The Country Way (it closed when I was around 12). The style was roughly what you would find in an issue of Country Living (check it out next time you're waiting in the grocery line), but the comparison is inexact. In reality, theirs was a strict orthodoxy, one that I imbibed over the years of going with them on trips to competing country stores, to the trade shows (in Chicago, Atlanta, Columbus, etc. -- I was quite a traveller!). Like most orthodoxies, it's difficult to define positively -- it only really displays itself when contrasted with tackiness. Modern "decorating" is definitively tacky. All these leather sofas, stainless steel crap -- tacky. But there was a lot of country stuff that was tacky, too. The men of the family absorbed it too and made their own contributions. My dad is a skilled painter and is perfectly capable of stencilling walls, creating wall hangings, etc., that fit perfectly with the aesthetic. My grandpa is a great carpenter and would build furniture in his workshop, either for the family's use or to sell in the store. Although I don't have a skill like that, I'm no exception: I'm sure that, to this day, I could go to a country store with my mom, and we would be in total agreement on what represents tackiness. It's not a matter of just knowing "what she would think" -- it's a matter of having absorbed the grammar of it, of "believing in it" myself (for lack of a better term). Even today, if I enter a home that attempts the country style of decoration, I know instantly whether they've succeeded or failed.
Our houses themselves were showrooms -- intensive cleaning every week (including scrubbing the woodwork along the floor, a typical job for me and my sister), complete furniture rearrangement every couple months, etc., etc. I enjoyed the furniture reorganization especially -- I was always excited to see what my mom would come up with, especially for my own bedroom. When I went away to college, I would still move around the furniture in my dorm room every couple months and clean every week or so. Just like with my mom, that tendancy has reduced since I've gotten more and more to do, but the basic tendancy is still there. I've gotten more and more spartan in my tastes -- I can't replace my mom's aesthetic with one of my own (what would I replace it with -- the ready-made aesthetic of Ikea?), so I just go with "no" aesthetic, which amounts to a stripped-down version of what I've always had. I still make my bed every single morning, as if I'm embarrassed that even my roommates will see the bed in a state of disrepair.
Though there was a lot that I embraced, there were also aspects that I rebelled against -- primarily what I saw at the time as snobbery. I'm sure it wasn't snobbery in actuality -- decorating was just important to my family, so they'd ask me quite innocently about my friends' houses. I experienced pressure, however, to submit a judgment, based on our commonly-shared standards. I enjoyed it when it was some rich person I was skewering -- they have all that money, but their house still isn't as nice as ours -- but I didn't know quite what to do with the people who didn't seem to be even trying, or to be able to try.
It was worse with clothes -- in fact, when it comes to bitching about my upbrining, that is the "quilting point." Not the hours and hours of lecturing when I was a teenager, not the hatred of my high school girlfriend, not the pressure to participate in church stuff -- no, it's clothes. My basic complaint is that they bought me too nice of stuff, all the time. I never felt comfortable in it -- it's one thing to adhere to some idiosyncratic but well-defined family aesthetic, but quite another thing to buy outfits based on what the national brands were promoting that year. I normally ended up wearing the same three things over and over, with closets full of expensive clothing going to waste. I never felt comfortable around people who "sincerely" dressed fashionably -- the people I liked best tended to view clothes in a totally utilitarian way, at least as far as I could tell. But it was as if there was some kind of betrayal -- I couldn't quite get my mind around what the problem was at the time, and I don't think I can be blamed for not saying to my mom, "Why don't you buy me shabbier clothes?"
But really: why not? We were living beyond our means, I didn't feel comfortable in that stuff anyway, it always caused a huge problem whenever we went school shopping -- it's as though the struggle over clothing represents every single thing, as though if I could untie this particular knot, everything else would fall into place naturally. My mom and I had a terrible fight about clothes on the drive back from orientation at Olivet -- my sister was in the back seat and almost had a nervous breakdown -- but I couldn't articulate it, couldn't make it make sense. "You never let me pick out my own clothes." That doesn't even make sense -- it's not even true. They would've loved for me to have asserted myself and picked out some stuff that I would've actually worn.
Even today I feel awkward getting clothes for Christmas, as though it's some kind of critique of me, as if expensive gifts are a form of emotional blackmail -- not furniture, not books, not household appliances, only clothes. They wanted me to be the best-dressed kid in the school, they said. Repeatedly. I'm ungrateful -- do I want to dress like that person who has nothing, with their worn-out t-shirts? Well, maybe I do. But I couldn't find the words to say it. I didn't know what I wanted. In a sense, I didn't know how to want -- maybe I still don't.
No, I still don't. I still don't buy my own clothes -- it makes perfect sense to go to thrift stores, to pick some stuff up, but it's as though it would be an insult to my family if I were to do that. In my own mind, almost certainly not in theirs -- I'm sure they'd be baffled if I ever came out and said this stuff, just as they're baffled now with the way my sister is trying to process things now that she's getting close to graduating college and entering the adult world.
Rightly so -- in retrospect, it has to have been built on a misunderstanding, or more likely on unarticulated motivations on my parents' part. Was there class aspiration going on? Almost certainly. And there was probably some anxiety about status more generally, not wanting to be looked down upon by the established families in a typically cliquish small town. (I didn't understand Davison until I lived in Bourbonnais -- as much as my time there drove me to the brink of despair, it was valuable in that respect.) It almost amounted to a self-fulfilling prophecy, that my sister and I wouldn't be "popular," in that quasi-official sense -- but how to want something else? How to want to be myself?
I'm only now starting to learn what that would mean: to embrace the fact that I come from shabbiness, that I gravitate toward shabbiness, that whatever degree of "quality" I achieve will have to come from my own internal standard and not from an official regulating body. That last part is why I can never reject the impulse behind the aesthetic of The Country Way, while rejecting the desire to keep up with corporate culture, which leads only to waste and debt. Similarly, I deeply sympathize with the original impulse behind the Church of the Nazarene and think that my parents were right when they said that they felt the Spirit more in that church than in any other -- but I reject the gutting of that church through "contemporary" worship, with its PowerPoint sermons, with its genericness. It's okay for the Nazarenes to have wanted to be what they were, as far as that goes -- but to want to be "contemporary," I don't know. The Country Way wasn't "contemporary" -- it just was what it was. I'm glad that it was part of my life. It's just a matter of finding something that can follow up on that impulse and be mine.
