My Chair Problem

1. The streets of NYC are littered with chairs. Everyone is throwing chairs out all the time. Having experience in making furniture I would look at all these chairs—destined for the landfill—and see potential; I began to rescue these chairs from being shattered in the garbage truck. I would fix the chairs and sell them. I avoided the shitty Ikea chairs and would take the mid-century-modern walnut chairs, Eiffel chairs, Herman Miller chairs, boutique chairs hand-made in Portugal; I grabbed any random well-made chair. Finding so many chairs, I learned how to bicycle in traffic while holding a chair. Slowly I repaired the chairs; I began to paint some of the chairs pink. Meanwhile I found more chairs. I had developed a fascination. Chairs! Such a strange ergonomic object, the shape of the folded body at rest. A chair is very much body-like. Every chair is unique and chair design is a multiplicity of styles and modes that range over culture and history; and yet all these various chairs serve the same universal function: a platform on which to rest your ass.

2. Soon I needed a storage unit for my chair collection. Even so in my small apartment I had at least a dozen chairs. I had a few dinner parties to utilize these chairs but once the pandemic hit my social life fell apart and then I was alone with my chairs. As the pandemic months fell into years my social anxiety got the better of me and I became lonely and depressed. The chairs began to gain inertia. I could not take the time to fix them, nor could I get rid of them. The chairs were like angular moons in an ecliptic orbit, they exerted a gravitational field on my psyche, as if my ragged ego would otherwise drift away into the cosmic void. I tripped over the chairs. The chairs were stacked in piles that would occasionally fall on me. The unfinished chairs continually demanded attention that I was unwilling to give. When company did come over, I moved all the chairs up to my roof. Storms raged across the city and my chairs became rain-stained and wind-battered. When the company left, I brought the weather-beaten chairs back into my apartment. “These chairs are ruining my life!” I told myself as I paid my storage bill for another month. “Am I going crazy?”

3. It’s a good question. Mental instability runs in the family. I have an uncle who, diagnosed with severe obsessive compulsive disorder, remains a ward of the state. He also likes to hoard things: DOS computer equipment from the 80s, several decades of the Washington Post (neatly stacked to the ceiling), VHS recordings of TV shows, carefully sorted recycling; he still plans on reading the Post, no matter how old they are. Lately he has been exhibiting schizophrenic delusions, hearing voices that speak to him from the air vents etc. My mom is more socially functional but she also has a basement heaped and crammed with all manner of stuff that she refuses to part with. These behaviors are historical; never before have we lived in a world so full of stuff—much of it unnecessary.1 And yet the ego has always had the tendency to displace itself onto objects2; these possessions that we own serve not as signs of identity, but as identity itself. Eye-glasses, shoes, jewelry, vases, books, chairs. These things index the self, becoming a tangible and visible ego that you and anybody else can see and touch. “Oh so you like chairs?” My friends ask. “Hell yes I do.

4. Because the line between garbage and non-garbage is dubious, the line between obsession and possession is likewise strange. All possessions have the power to possess, and yet at some point they achieve critical mass and revert to obsession. From the outside it appears that the obsessive compulsive hoarder is clinging onto garbage, but every hoarder has an emotional argument as to why what they hoard is not garbage. These emotions are justified by the physical presence of what they hoard. As for me and my chairs the feelings that they generate is both stability and stagnation. Though my conscious mind admires the design of these chairs and dreams of quick turn-around, up-cycling and sales (economic stability) my obsessional mind deploys these chairs as a magic spell of inertia against change. The world may be changing rapidly and for the worse, but me and my chairs will never change. The physical mass of the chairs, generating real inertia, fixes the ego in a static position against the hellacious vicissitudes of modern life. The chairs became a defense against anxiety through dead weight. I prefer to sit on these chairs rather than repair them. Eight hundred pounds of the Washington Post, that you still plan to read, retain a physical past in which you can enclose yourself as if it were a bunker.

5. I have spoken to my analyst about my chair problem; she seems less interested in it than I am. Before speaking with her I was ashamed of my chairs and the shame aided the inertia; I had not spoken to anyone before about this chair problem; I had taken pains to hide it. Everyone owns some chairs, but multiple stacks of chairs? I didn’t want my house guests to think I was crazy. Having now spoken of it at length to my analyst I became relieved. This relief is as profound as it is mundane. I have since worked up the courage to sell some chairs, I have released some others to the curb (sad emoji); yet others I have sanded and refinished. Next week I will be doing some upholstery. Though I have come across perfectly fine chairs in the street I have declined the urge to take them. In the meantime I am in the laborious process of disburdening my storage unit, for I refuse to pay for it anymore. I dream of a life with as few possessions as possible; I am not yet sure if this dream is attainable. For some people (my uncle) their possessions are all they have. I do not begrudge them this last defense against oblivion; some chairs are pretty nice.

1550 Chairs Stacked Between Two City Buildings, 2002, Doris Salcedo