LOST PROPERTY
Our relationship with objects as extensions of one’s self can be the source of great anxiety, always prefigured with the fear of loss. Mnemonic prostheses are perhaps the most worrying: those places where things are scribbled, filed, stored, sorted … the big ideas, the small thoughts, an address, phone number, sketch … then in a moment, gone. Stolen, misplaced, or swept into some wormhole somewhere. Walter Benjamin’s mysteriously vanished suitcase is one of these missing, exquisite corpuses of thought, memories, ideas. The bag never found, its contents remain mysterious: the why? the what? forever hanging in a cloud above Port Bou.
Vilem Flusser’s yellow leather bag equipped with a zipper also comes to mind. Flusser’s bag was stolen, yet returned with the contents intact. This defilement - through the bag’s snatching as much as through the apparent disinterest of the thief - saw Flusser meditate on the contents of the yellow leather bag, recognising it as part of his memory. In Nachgeschichten he enumerated these items, the many folders of essays, art critiques, phenomenological exegeses. Flusser, in an echo of Borges’s Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, bestows a taxonomy upon the contents of his bag, of his portable memory device …
The first two categories are semantic and syntactic. The meta-level is syntactic:
[A] Dialogues (the correspondence folder)
[B] Discourses to others (lectures and manuscripts)
[C] Discourses about myself (documents)
And subsequently, or in fact in parallel, semantically:
[A] Factual information (documents, sections of letters, lectures and manuscripts).
[B] Interpretations of facts (lectures and manuscripts)
[C] Expressions of emotion and value (letters, and beneath the surface in most manuscripts)
Beyond this, or in front of it, is a three-level structural system:
[A] Chronological arrangement
[B] Logical arrangement
[C] Disorder
And finally, in relation to the memory receptacles, how they conjoin with the yellow leather bag, and to the mind:
[A] Folders that are in the bag so that they can be kept in mind.
[B] Folders that are there to keep things that are not there in mind.
Flusser’s intimate relationship with his bag represents a melancholic fear of imminent loss of self, yet at the same time a vehicle with which to interrogate his self. And then … he points out that the article which explains the bag’s contents was in the folder of published papers … and thus becomes a self-referential map of the bag within which it is, and thus of the mind. Flusser speculates on how the bag’s contents, and its various systems of taxonomy, might have led the thief to come to certain conclusions, yet he never knows whether or not the thief even looked, letalone bothered to attempt a make sense of what he found … to read Flusser’s mind.
And what of bags that are accidentally exchanged, the trope of bags collected in error from luggage carousels and the ensuing sagas of inheriting another’s property, becoming them. Or in W G Sebald’s account, in ‘Il ritorno in patria,’ the final story in Vertigo, where Dr Piazolo and Father Wurmser both rode motorcycles and carried rucksacks. Dr Piazolo’s rucksack contained all that he needed for his medical visits, while the priest’s bag contained the requisites for the last rites: “consecrated oil, holy water, salt, a small silver crucifix and the holy sacrament.” In error they each took the wrong rucksack when seated side by side and “Dr Piazolo drove off to his next patient equipped for the last rites whilst Father Wurmser brought the doctor’s instruments to the next member of his congregation who was about to expire.”
And sometimes the things we lose — property, people — return. The lost property is found again. Such events are often remarkable, and imbue that object with even greater significance than it ever had before.
