73. OF NESTS AND PALIMPSEST - Am I Really Making An Aesthetic Choice?
When I was a kid my mother used to tell me that I was like a turtle because wherever I went I carried my home with me. What she meant was that I had a tendency to make myself at home wherever I was, usually with a book or two in my hand, maybe a notebook and pen, and some music in my ears. I wasn’t really bothered if I was in my bedroom, a relative’s house, a car, a train, or on holiday somewhere exotic - I was content wherever I was because geographic location didn’t matter, I was at home in my mind and in the art and ideas that I consumed, not any specific time or place. Which was not to say there weren’t some locational elements to the home I carried on my back. I have always loved chaotic collage and my childhood bedroom walls quickly became an ever-evolving palimpsest of posters, pictures, postcards, photos, and things I’d cut out of newspapers or magazines, their content adapting over the years alongside my tastes but generally maintaining the same ragged aesthetic; an aesthetic initially limited to a single cork noticeboard on a nicely painted wall but eventually sprawling out and taking over everything until, at one mad point, I was even hanging posters upside down on my ceiling, occasionally waking startled in the night as they lost their battle with gravity and came crashing down on my face.
When I left home to go to university, within a day I had transformed my blank box in a Cardiff hall of residence into a fairly similar facsimile of the room I had at home. New images and words, but the same basic idea. The books, notebooks, and music also came across the border to Wales with me. A year later and I had moved out of halls and into a student flat. If you knew me, you knew before even entering my room what the walls would look like. I spent many years in that place on Woodville Road, and again the walls became a palimpsest repository of ideas and interests that ebbed and flowed across my time there until, eventually, my future wife and I returned across the border to England and rented our first house together. I had a study there where I would work. Books, writing materials, music - and the walls became quickly smothered with more of the blu-tacked cacophony that had lost us our rental deposit back in Cardiff.
Today I sit in a different study in a different house. One we own, whose walls I can ruin as much as I want. A single cork noticeboard takes up the wall behind my computer, already on its fifth layer of ever-expanding content. The few properly framed posters I originally put up when we first moved in have gradually been joined by more unruly things, stuck with blu-tack or hanging from nails hammered into strange and off-kilter angles. Around my computer are piles and piles of books. One pile for the ongoing research project I am working on. Another for a book chapter I have been invited to write. A third are just interesting books I hope to read for mere pleasure one day. Music is all around me - the speakers connected to the computer which stores my digital libraries of song; the instruments behind me which I have played since I was a teenager. And the books. Shelves and shelves of the things alongside the piles on my desk. Notebooks too. Journals, ideas, lyrics, stories, memories, jokes. Whatever passes through my mind. My classroom, too, is a collage of posters and words; student work from one year staple-gunned on top of the old student work from last year; a cut and paste fanzine of religious education and philosophy. In the humanities office I share with colleagues, my desk sits beneath a giant poster of Uncle Sam telling me that he wants me to join the US Army. Only, instead of the Army, this Uncle Sam wants me to join the band Descendents, whose logo I have pinned atop the propaganda. A poster for Rancid’s seminal “…And Out Come The Wolves” album is displayed to its side along with the odd bit of terrible student work I have added to an ongoing “hall of shame”. Even this tiny patch of space in a shared office has not avoided my aesthetic transformation.
It seems like my mother was right. I’ve carried this same home on my back wherever I’ve dwelled. A cluttered and creative buzz of ideas, images and sounds. I’ve built the same nest for myself in a range of different locations and circumstances just like the magpies I can see from my window, acting on autopilot as they drag this year’s collection of twigs and branches to the same spot in the same tree that last year’s magpies also called home.
It makes me wonder how much of this is a choice I have any actual control over and how much is embedded within me far beyond any agency. It seems regardless of what I might want, the home I carry within my mind emerges unbidden. I start out with good intentions: clean walls, neat desks, straight lines and empty surfaces. But the creep comes naturally. A sticker stuck absently here, an object placed there without thinking. A postcard on a pinboard. Then another. Something funny in a magazine torn out and put on display. An idea I don’t want to forget. An image that attracts my attention. Maybe I paint something, or take a nice photo and want to leave it up so I can see it? Maybe I find a memento I don’t want to put back in a dusty old drawer? All I know is that I have set foot inside bedrooms, offices, studies and classrooms all around the country, and all across decades, and suddenly found myself standing back - despite my best efforts - in a variation of the exact same room I first felt at home in as a child.
Last weekend, my wife and I decided to take part in the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch for the first time. Beyond the occasional accidental observation out the window, neither she nor I had ever done any intentional birdwatching before but thought it might be a nice break from staring at screens now our jobs have migrated online. And it was. We didn’t realise you were only supposed to do an hour across the three days and mistakenly thought we were supposed to do an hour per day, so had three lovely hours being present with nature and not worrying about the demands of remote teaching. And as we watched, I found it fascinating how habitual the birds were. The patterns they replicated each day, often for seemingly no benefit. So too with the two local cats who stalk our garden. The routines they carry out like clockwork. The important work they carry out in this bush and that patch of grass despite nothing seemingly being gained from the endeavour. Soon it will be spring and the bird and cats will be joined by the bees who, every year, frantically flit from flower to flower, focusing on their honey production without thought as they unwittingly pollenate the world.
A teacher’s work is never done. At some point I had to return to my study and get back to my desk and that ever-present screen. Greeted in the doorway by the same NoMeansNo poster that hung in my childhood bedroom, another Rancid poster, a bumper sticker calling to “Impeach Trump”, photos of friends and family, cartoons ripped out of the New Yorker, a page of my grandfathers’ old headed stationery, my printed out work timetable, art picked up here and there, a stack of notebooks, the first guitar I ever owned, and all those books, I looked at this latest iteration of the same room I have been returning to since I was a child - I looked at my own latest nest - and, no-less robotically than the cat, the bee or the bird, I began to work.
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE and from all good booksellers.