Bookshelf Banalities
Take a look at my bookshelf. Or should I say: take a look at one of my bookshelves. Throughout my newly purchased 1949 house in a lovely Lexington neighborhood near downtown, there are many bookshelves. For one reason or another, I placed these books in this shelf. There is no organizational strategy to my shelving other than unpacking books from boxes, books that sat on other shelves in other homes for the last 17 years or so, and placing them on whatever shelf is nearby. Novels, criticism, cookbooks, comic books, history books, beer books, it does not matter. I just put them on the shelf. They will likely sit in the same place until I move again. Then they may move to another bookshelf.
On a bookshelf, we shelve, well, books. The name of the piece of furniture reveals its usage. You can, of course, place books on the floor, on tables, on top of the refrigerator, in an un-used oven, in a cabinet, and so on. A bookshelf, on the other hand, tells you what it is primarily for. It is where you shelve your books. You don’t oven your food. You cook it. You could table whatever is thrown on the piece of furniture by that name and never look at it again. Though, we also call that “clutter.” The bookshelf, however, declares itself open mainly to books.
Other things, though, get piled up on bookshelves even if they are not books. For whatever reason, and this photograph is not staged, I placed two objects on this one bookshelf. My beret (or coomtah) from my time serving in a Nahal combat unit in the IDF and a small figurine of what is supposed to be Elvis Presley. These figures have nothing to do with one another. Yet, for whatever reason, they were placed side by side on this shelf as I unpacked my life from boxes with the intent to place it on furniture.
Walter Benjamin famously wrote “Unpacking My Library” as a way to think through our relationship to objects, and particularly collections of objects. People collect, among other things, books. Bookish people, such as academics, often collect books. Most people who are in academia and want to write about unpacking boxes of books — either for their workplace office, their home office, their new home, their new life, their new broken life, etc. cite Benjamin’s essay. Why do we save things? For what purpose beyond their utility? Why do we collect? Because, even as markers of memory, nostalgia, hatred, desire, whatever, things serve a utilitarian purpose. If this book I shelve reminds of the time I….that I did X or felt or experienced Y, that is a utilitarian purpose. The book, beyond its content, still does something else. It retrieves past life, life not within the pages of the book in question. Benjamin focuses on this point as well.
“You have a lot of books!” people often say to me when they visit my home for the first time, whether I am living in Tel Aviv or in Lexington, Kentucky. I do. Do I collect books? I do not. In fact, I hardly purchase books anymore. I check them out of the library. I read them online. Or I simply don’t read books as much as I once did. In “Time Enough at Last,” the well-known Twilight Zone episode of an apocalypse, Burgess Meredith suddenly finds himself alone in a world without people, but full of books. So busy in his pre-doomsday life, Meredith never had time to read. Now he does. The world is now full of so many books to read, that is, until he breaks his glasses. Books have to be read to have value the way Meredith’s glasses have value. He can’t read those books without his glasses! Books have to be read to do something beyond their content as well. Once read, the book enters into the network of experience and emotion we call “life.” “Have you read all these books?” people also ask me when they see my bookshelves. “Yes,” I might answer. “I suppose I have.”
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Benjamin champions banality. But in “Unpacking My Library” his fetishization of the books on his shelves feels anything but banal. His books remind him of all the European cities he has lived in. They evoke thinkers such as Hegel. His books remind him of famous collectors and bookshops. Benjamin praises the collector of books whose objects contain spirits within, spirits who insure that “ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” My books are, for me, banal. I don’t live in them, and they do not live in me. They hold meanings, of course, beyond their content, but I seldom think of them beyond their role as objects on shelves I consult for ideas, citations, thoughts, context, etc. I don’t re-read them unless I’m teaching them or writing something that requires my return to the book for a citation or idea. I don’t look at them and think: so and so gave me that book. I once loved her. Now I hate her. I may feel that way about so and so or such and such, but it is not the book that reminds me of these disappointments and moments of disillusionment.
This, then, is not a thought piece on books. Instead, this writing is about the two objects sitting among my books: an army beret and a cheap Elvis figurine. The beret was awarded to me after a grueling hike through the desert during basic training that culminated at the historic Masada fortress where, rather than capitulate to the Romans, the Jews committed suicide. Strength comes not from giving in, the place symbolizes, but from standing strong. The beret is given during a ceremony to honor the completion of basic training. It marks a moment of strength. Militaries are obligated to project strength, whatever they may feel about the concept, toward imagined or real oppression. People, quite often, do the same. The beret, once earned, is placed within one’s uniform’s epaulette. It is not typically placed on one’s head. When it is placed one one’s head, it is worn during other ceremonies, but it is not worn every day. Its utilitarian value is limited, but because different units have different color berets, its usage is in identifying, usually, where one serves. Mine is green. Green is Nahal.
The figurine, I think, was given to me by a girlfriend, many years ago, the culmination of a loveless relationship that ended as mysteriously and oddly as it began. It is supposed to be Elvis, though it barely resembles him. The figurine opens up at its base, and inside of the base is a tiny metallic red guitar. His hand is unable to hold the guitar, so I leave the guitar inside the base. The figurine is not utilitarian. The relationship was not strong. Nobody, I felt, projected strength. If anything, we projected our relationship’s lack of strength upon one another. The relationship was not utilitarian either. It did not function like a relationship. We barely identified with one another. I still have the figurine, though. She knew I like Elvis, I suppose. So she bought me this.
These two objects sat for years in a box. They were not on display in my marital home. I do not know why. When I packed my belongings, I packed the box they were once in. They re-emerged in the new 1949 home and were placed on a shelf. I have a few Elvis objects: an Elvis clock that no longer works, an Andy Warhol print of Double Elvis, a garage sale Elvis velvet painting. I used to teach Greil Marcus’ book Dead Elvis as a way to write about and with appropriation. Pop culture appropriates Elvis for various purposes. Dead Elvis is also a book about collecting: Marcus collects every single Elvis Presley cultural reference he can find. This collection, much like Benjamin’s Arcades Project, represents something significant, for Marcus, about American culture in general. I like Elvis Presley. But I am not the biggest Elvis Presley fan. I don’t fetishize Elvis. He’s banal to me. But so is all popular culture. I love popular culture. I love books. The banal does not mean insignificant or unimportant. It merely reflects the everyday. We need the everyday in order to be strong, to identify significance in ourselves and in others.
What can I say about these two objects that is meaningful? What significant thing do these objects teach me? Why do I want to write about these two banal objects and not something more grandiose about books, learning, literacy, value, etc.? Many of the Medium pieces I write are, in some way, about shelving. Shelving emotions. Shelving memories. Shelving anger. Shelving disappointment. Shelving betrayal. Benjamin talks about collecting books, but he doesn’t talk about writing them or writing in general. We collect objects, but we also write with those objects as well. America, Marcus suggests, writes with Elvis. When I look at the shelf and see these two objects, I want to write about them. When I experience loss, I want to write about it. I want to write the beret and figurine into some narrative. I’m not shelving as in “putting aside” or “putting away.” I’m shelving as in organizing. I don’t organize my physical objects on the bookshelf. But I try very much to organize my emotional objects, particularly those collected after and prior to divorce. Divorce shelved me. It put me away. I had to unpack that experience in my writing. I had to organize myself anew.
A collection is banal. Unlike pain or loss, we can put a collection aside, place it in a box, forget about it, one day unpack it. My beret! I found it again! We can, as well, do the same with pain and loss, but the unpacking looks quite different. I live within my emotional collection, as we all do. How can we not? The last time we were in Tel Aviv, we went to Halper’s, the English language bookstore on Allenby, the bookstore that has been in the same location for at least 30 years, tucked away in an alley off the busy street, discount books marking its entrance. Books are piled high within its narrow aisles. Fans and air conditioning vents flow cool and warm air across the room to keep the store from the smell of must or age often identified in collections. My son sat on a crate in one of those narrow aisles reading a book. I skimmed through the cookbooks. The other two members of our family browsed their own interests. The day felt banal. Not significant. We were browsing in a bookstore, a massive collection of objects bought from others’ collections and now for sale to those creating new collections. Such is the drift of objects Benjamin highlights. In that banality of piled high objects towering all around us, I failed to identify collected negative feelings about me. I failed to identify what I was about to lose. I failed to identify being unloved. I failed to identify anything other than a bookstore outing in another city, in another country, a city not mentioned by Benjamin but one he should have probably escaped to rather than commit suicide in Spain in fear of the Nazis.
Was Benjamin strong in the face of oppression? He killed himself like the Jews at Masada. Have I been strong in the face of whatever it is I’ve felt? What did Benjamin identify as significant when he killed himself? Honor? Life? Collections? It is extremely difficult to separate the significant from the banal. Everything, in the moment we are in, feels banal. Later, when we unpack libraries, metaphorical or real, we identify significance. I bought my son that book he was reading. He read some of it. He stopped. He put it away on a shelf. He never finished it. It remains in the other house, and not in my new home. Collections are like that. We don’t finish them. I could look at my beret and think: I finished a grueling hike and military service! Maybe. I could look at the figurine and think: I finished that relationship so long ago! Maybe. The truth is, unlike Benjamin and his library unpacked, I don’t think about these objects at all. I don’t transform them into significance beyond their utilitarian value — display. Other objets, such as marriage, I do think about, and how they display themselves to me and I display them to others. But these two objects are on my shelf, next to my books. For some reason today, in my quarantined COVID-19 existence, sitting with my children in Lexington, Kentucky, the radio playing in the background, living in this new house, I thought about them. I took their picture. I wrote this essay. I unpacked a little bit of the banal.
