Moving Life of the Butterfly Collectors

“Oh fuck it. Just burn all my stuff, just burn everything if it means I don’t need to pack anymore of this shit”.

It’s always been a favourite late night game of mine for a while now- to prepare myself for a fire evacuation by scaling my personal possessions down to just 3 items to take out of the burning establishment whilst everything else gets burned to black ash, never to be seen again- almost like they never existed in the first place.

There is a disturbing sense of catharsis in playing these kinds of games…. Not merely because I give a lot of my possessions a bit too much sentimental value, therefore anything that bears as much of a whiff of re-organisation and re-consideration is mentally harrowing, but also because late nights (always) call for an existential crisis- and this is how I solve them:

By somewhat manically looking through my cupboards, under my bed, through my desk, occasionally venturing out to the rest of the house, through photo albums, cabinets and cupboards, scaling my materialistic nemesis down to just three things to solidify one’s current existence…if that’s even possible- This is a game after all.

I need to ask myself- why do I need these 3 items to last for me, to escape the flame right now? Of course every time I play, I often change my mind about what I would take. The ever-evolving consciousness repositions it’s acquiescent self to any shape or form we wish to take on, seeking peace and perhaps personal improvement.

Would it be the three single most used items in my life? - laptop, ipod and phone. The three most irreplaceable in sentimental value? The three most literally irreplaceable (last photographic evidence of a granddad you never met) ? Or Irreplaceable certificates and qualifications? Do any of these things really mean anything to me and how really is it possible to separate the metalmarks from the swallowtails and decide which ones we really want to keep? After all, they’ve all gathered as much materialistic dust as they can manage, and I wanna spare these redundant sunavabitches the wrath of a burning building.

When I play my little fire evacuation game, and it’s been a hard day I try and make things easier on myself and the items count increases from 3 to as many as I can carry with my bare hands or otherwise a small carry case. All these things came to mind when I was packing for moving house 2 weeks ago, and I also thought about how, if I had to escape in a fire, those 3 items I should take is a hilariously bold move with a room that needs 12 brown boxes to house it’s contents. I might as well stay in and burn.

Moving isn’t anything new to me, i’ve moved 5 times before between continents, but it actually gets harder every time. Growing up in a family of ardent lepidopterists does that to you….My dad has kept possibly every replaced battery once used for his alarm clock, and also, all the pretty letters my mum has ever written him, received through transatlantic travel They were neatly placed inside the brown leather saddlebag he used to carry around. My mum keeps a ‘bottle of love’ I gave her when I was 6- a jam jar with a random assortment of (terrible) paper scrawls. As well as all every doll, or toy horse I loved and betrayed. I keep a conch that I took from a fisherman and sometimes I curl up on my bed with it pressed to my ear, listening to the waves of the shore I stole it from, and willing it to suck me inside. Some things we’ve had for so long, that we can barely remember those memories that used to flap and beat in our minds. Just ordinary things, too, and it’s all the more depressing to see when they’ve long lost their colours and have remained lifeless for years.

I don’t think Materialism is something that should be feared, it’s a way of holding onto life, holding onto our own sense of self and where we belong in this big wide world.

And for that reason, a movie I saw recently “Bunny and the Bull” by Paul King made me smile a few times. Obviously I let my preconceptions about it being made by the Boosh director dull any real expectations. It was indeed highly decorative, and visually rich, but it was also a very sensitive movie, centred on a painfully sensitive character- Stephen, whose life appears dominated by materialism, categorisation, organisation and perhaps OCD, to the point where he is terrified of leaving his own front door to a horribly unstructured world. What a nightmare!

Stephen’s home is wallpapered top to bottom with brown boxes, categorising almost everything he has ever used, owned, touched or produced (he stores his urine). One day when his meticulous daily routine is disrupted, he turns to the items in his boxes to recreate his unorganised past, hidden well from his consciousness through careful organisation of the present.

(This paragraph is a bit of a spoiler for the film so skip if you wish) The core of Stephen’s rather strange past story and strange current circumstances is only revealed at the end of his reminiscence when his bold, charismatic and close friend Bunny dies, leaving poor, shy, sensitive Stephen devoid of the safety and comfort he found through the abrasive Bunny. Were Stephen’s hoards of useless ‘stuff’ representative of his need to fill the emptiness he felt in bereavement? Does it represent a need to stay faintly attached to ‘real life’ through ‘real items’, providing closure through the comfort of knowing that most things can be kept safe and close to us always, even though Bunny was lost. Does it represent a coping mechanism, which allows him to structure his life at his own pace and in his own way than faltering for the unreliability of reality? In the end, Stephen manages to overcome his inner demons and begins to leave his house into the cold, inner city air. If Stephen were real, I would have liked to have asked him at that very moment, which 3 items he would salvage if his house were to burn down right behind him.

I should imagine it would be his scarf, hat and gloves.

It’s how we work- If only we didn’t attach ourselves so deeply to pretty, engaging, yet essentially useless items! They would still have wings, and would have just flown from a burning building. Maybe we’d see them around some day.