Clothes we wear and other problems of living

I’m writing this so that I can get rid of something.

The summer after I finished high school, I bought a hoodie on the internet. It’s gray with a graphic printers on the front—a modified version of the X Files “I Want to Believe” poster showing a UFO, with the text “I Want to Leave”. I wore it to lunch one day that summer: a friend of my step-father’s asked how I felt about going off; I leaned back to show him the graphic. Laughter all around.

I accidentally ordered two of the things, or anyhow, two arrived. The printing place didn’t accept returns, and it was cheap enough not to be overly bothered. I gave the second one to the girl I dated that summer. She gave it back to me when we broke up in the fall. I gave the same hoodie to the next girl I was serious about—I didn’t ask for it back in the breakup, but I got a terrific tee-shirt from her that I haven’t given back either. I figure we’re even.

In the meantime, I wore the hell out of the hoodie—it’s a perfet shade of gray that goes with everything. By now, five (!) years later, the graphic is almost completely gone, but the garment itself is in great shape: a simple gray hoodie.

The other day, I bought another gray sweatshirt in a vintage store—one of better quality, softer. Non-graphic. No hood. It’s one of those that could almost pass as a sweater if dressed up. Ordinarily, I’d stuff the old one in the back of my closet, but I’m traveling: room in my suitcase is precious and lacking. Even so, I can’t bring myself to get rid of it: it carries so much of my story.

Clothes are part of our body—they are the skin we show to the world. And a garment I wore when I was younger has been part of me for a long time. This is difficult to write because I don’t fully understand it. The buddha taught that attachment to material things is the origin of suffering—he was almost certainly right. But without our material possessions, we lose track of who we are: in a world that changes, a piece of clothing may be the only constant thing outside our own bodies. Nirvana is terrifying: do I want to lose myself in the all-mind? Sometimes, I’d rather cling to the spinning whel of life/death/reincarnation: at least it’s familiar. At least I am I.

This is, ultimately, why I write: it’s a (im)material trace of the “I” that seems to be here—by entering my thoughts in the record, I commit my being to the collective archive of human memory, which will outlive me and my silly clothes. By writing it down, I transmute that pitiful materiality of a gray sweatshirt into an idea—just as I transmute the pitiful materiality of my body into an idea.

But this is all too easy. This body holds this sweatshirt in its lap and remembers their memories together. The garment is my own archfossil: it is the weird material presence of immaterial past. I know it really happened because I have the sensuous thing here, a relic of myself.

I began to write this so that I could get rid of the hoodie: “if I write it all down, then I won’t need the physical thing anymore, because I’ll have the truth of its being in words.” But the opposite is also true: now that I have written, how can I get rid of the garment? It is the physical being of the story of my life I have written down; without the thing, how will I know that my memories are true?

I haven’t gotten rid of the thing yet; I couldn’t, though I have no intention of wearing it in the near future. And it’s not the oldest thing that I have with me: I have a fleece from when I was fourteen, and my teddy bear and blanket from when I was a newborn. The bear used to have a bow around his neck, which is long lost; the blanket used to be a quilt, but the quilted part has seperated from the back and is in tatters, half lost. I suppose I dropped part of it along the way. Somewhere I was collecting the scraps of the blanket that fell off, but then I lost a large half of it. Irony of ironies.

I suppose the old saying is toujours true: tempus fugit, memento mori. Time flies; remember death. It’s more poignant in a language now dead, spoken for two thousand years in one form or another. Maybe in fifteen hundred years my words will be just as archaic, and the old saying will be just as true. Time flies, and no moment lasts forever. I cling sentimentally to the little objects that [decorate] my memories because they are constant: time hasn’t flown so fast. But once I was a tiny infant who curled up under a new quilt with a handsome, bowtied bear; now they’re tatters, and I still drag them from place to place with me. I guess everyone thinks “I’m getting old”—everyone does get old, or dies.

Am I young? I suppose I still am—I’m not yet twenty five. But I am no longer a child, and I’ve lived long enough to notice the things in my life begin to wear and change. I suppose I was going to have this realization at some point, since time moves on for everyone.

So in the end, can I get rid of the sweatshirt? I don’t know—I got rid of a shirt I had ripped today and bought an almost identical replacement at the vintage store, maybe this is the way of things. But I didn’t know that shirt as well as I knew the hoodie; it wasn’t as much a part of me. Maybe I’ll be forced to by the limitations of my luggage, we’ll see. I think that I could give it to a friend—someone who knew who I was and where the thing came from. But I can’t throw it off into the abyss of non-meaning, where it will be just another garment with no story. Perhaps it is selfish of me to want it to keep my story on it: after all, I got it from a manufacturer who certainly had their own story about it. For now, though, I’m going to keep it. An old sweatshirt is the least of the material possessions I’m attached to.