Kipple

Why do we have to constantly negotiate with objects, objects of human devising?  The phone and its charger, the brush, the comb, the spray varnish.  The keys, the radiator, the spare bucket.  The fork, the other fork.  The organizing and discipline of objects is a chief task in each of our lives; we all work as supervisors but receive no pay at all.
How I respect my friends who have no respect for property!  I respect them but hardly ever let them into my house.  A fine thing, abstractly, to see a man rampage through a room, breaking and rearranging everything at will, feeling himself master at last of his own hideously complicated man-made wilderness.  But an intolerable thing in social terms.
Phillip K Dick talks about the accumulation of "kipple," junk which mysteriously perpetuates itself and cannot be disposed of.  The post-apocalyptic wastes of California are made uninhabitable by toxic fallout but also by a waist-deep sludge of junk which fills every ruined building.  Somehow this is a perfect image for ordinary suffering, the mediocre guilt we endure.  The sure knowledge that we have filled the world with junk.
If only there were one interface, one master machine that met all the demands of civilized life.  All arts and crafts would be applied to it, all written discourse would flow through it.  Are we going in that direction, or are we accumulating more and more specialized devices, even though we finally have the capacity to make a single multi-device to meet many needs at once?
Tonight I am painting on the back porch of my friend's cluttered house, where every day upon waking I have to rummage in my bags, dress, and then go through the rooms throwing away various odds and ends to restore spatial sanity.  No distinction seems to be made, by this individual, between things which are inert and things which rot.  So on the couch I might find a shower cap and an electric guitar, or just as readily there could be a slice of pizza and an open tube of toothpaste.
I should probably not go any further, to the point of mentioning that his disorder has mental aspects.  There is the horrible feeling, when talking with him, that a great number of mental objects are being snatched up from the floor, only to be thrown down again sporadically or perhaps piled into teetering stacks.  The objects are grasped up, listed, named, forgotten - unmoored from any thematic conceit, any meaningful sequence.
Of course, rather than being shocked by his disorder I should be amazed that others can impress me as orderly.  His state is a consequence of handling thoughts as though they were objects.  But we have hardly any experiences that should teach us to find narrative correlations or themes or analogies.  Most of life before civilization was a struggle to manipulate natural objects to our advantage; now we fight to control a vast array of tools and accessories.  We have made a second world purely to suit our purposes, but the second world is no more congenial to the mind.  Maybe it's not inevitable that it should be so; maybe it's a failure of imagination on our part.  We duplicated the perplexity that already existed.
I had the feeling while painting tonight that this "art" was merely another fight against, or within, the mountain of trash.