The Wig

On the eve of moving apartments, a reflection on the memories tied to possessions. (Also, this Wednesday I'll be doing a reading in Taipei.)

I’m moving house this week, again, and realizing how much stuff I’ve accumulated through the years. I suppose it makes sense: I’ve always been a hoarder of memories, and each thing here (that shouldn’t be) is tied to a memory I have a hard time discarding. I’ve known people who are the exact opposite, as unattached to stuff as they are to experiences (let the past lie), as eager to tidy and downsize as they are to forget and unburden. Maybe they’re survivalists in a spiritual sense who understand that the less we carry, the less vulnerable we make ourselves to attacks of sentiment, regret, and the easier it becomes for us to range further and farther into this world where we’re temporary itinerants. Or maybe they just aren’t creative writers.

More likely, I’m being sentimental. Sentiment is to be avoided in poetry, you might remember an instructor saying, because you risk getting stuck in the attic of your own life; to you, feeling around those parts is easy, but others may need a bit more light. And so the advice becomes, reach out a hand for the reader to grasp, illuminate with less presumption. Sentiment is useful in identifying the places or things you’d like someone else to see, but the trick is to evoke sentiments in them, not platform your own.

In my haste yesterday, battered by humidity and shock at all this stuff, I tossed away a bag of hats and a wig. They were all water damaged and unusable — now a biosphere of bacteria, insects, crawlers — but I should have at least taken a picture. Perhaps I can be freed from the emotional vise of possessions if their spirits are transferred to another medium, such as photography. Of course, maybe also writing — poetry, this Substack? The entire point of hoarding is this, isn’t it: to dredge up and reanimate at a later time — now? — a memory that was once warm, dry, alive, beheld, not tossed to the corner of a concrete yard to suffer alone the slings of weather and neglect.

One of the hats, of a cowboy variety, was purchased in Yinchuan as we explored the Huaxia Western Film and Television City under a ferocious sun. There was a fur ushanka passed down, never used. There were two black fedoras, neither of which really fit me but, you know, they’re cool and I was young once. The panama hat, origin forgotten, was previously used in a wine photo. The wig…

In 2021, one apartment ago, Laura and I spent a full day in the living room preparing for a Pulp Fiction twist contest. (You know the dance.) Later that night, at Camera Stylo, the judges said our moves were spot on, but felt we were too stoic, maybe robotic, as if reluctant to cut loose. (Had they watched the movie?!) I can’t remember the pair that won, but theirs was more interpretative, I’m sure, more physical, less true to the original. Who am I to deny our need for the new, especially in a place without sentimental attachment to original source material. It was fun, in the end. It was the only time I wore this wig.

The Wig

Multiple generations
of crawlers now call it home,
they’re twisting in the off-hours,
dancing & dining in the damp biome

before the sudden upturn,
inversion, a mighty swell,
the shake of calamity…
oh Pierre grab your mademoiselle!

We’re slidin’ together again,
we’re movin’, we’re moseying
as if we weren’t being watched
in our socks, fake hair whipping

up here where a gush of air
can make any creature high.
They squirm & scurry
against the invasive light

not knowing where this wig’s been,
what it was before they were alive,
not knowing Uma, Travolta,
the Chuck Berry danced to. That’s life,

you can never tell, can you,
when one moment decides to become
the next; all of us, we hang on
through rock rhyme & hullabaloo

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For those in Taipei, I’ll be reading at Wyatt’s (大安區通化街39巷49弄17號 / No. 17, Lane 49, Lane 39, Tonghua Street, Da'an District) on Wednesday, August 7 at 8 p.m., with books on hand. Come by if you’re around!