The [Perecian] prosaic life

The hum of the window while the wind cradles it. A half-wet towel abandoned on the chair. The way light bends off a cheap steel spoon. These are the things that never make it into anyone’s newsfeed, never headline the day, and yet they are the stubborn background against which everything else happens. Spectacular events like wars, crises, deaths, disasters get attention, applause, outrage. The big teeth of attention. But these crumbs are the texture of a life. The towel, the spoon, the drafty window. The undertow that moves the visible. Habit is a kind of anesthesia; it numbs you until you stop seeing. You stop seeing. You sleep with your eyes open. You stop knowing. You stop being seen. So I practice waking: counting the clicks of the fan, naming the shapes the light invents on the wall, listening for the seam in the room where wind gets in. Noticing the small is a way of waking up. There is a mother-tongue folk song from childhood I cannot remember fully, only the two lines I repeat with my mother and sister... the rhythm stays, the words have emigrated. My mother’s name carved in faint scratches on the underside of steel utensils. The rhythm of a ceiling fan thudding the same beat, night after night; its unambitious drumline keeping time with nothing. They are nothing, they are everything. The unnoticed holds the weight I didn’t know I’d stored there.

What if the real archive of a life is not in the milestones, but in its crumbs: the receipts that curl in the bottom of a drawer, the dust motes visible only in a certain slant of light, the way the fan clicks just before sleep? I write them down. Not because they’re important, but because they are.

Endnotes

1. “Habit as anesthesia” is a thought I keep meeting and arguing with. Georges Perec once asked, in an essay on the overlooked everyday: Where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space? I’m not answering him; I’m taking inventory. Perec’s inventory isn’t just sociological. It’s psychoanalytic in its hunger. It is about refusing the erasure of desire in routine. Freud would call it repetition compulsion on how the everyday dulls us, but also protects us from being overwhelmed. Klein might see in it the good/bad breast resurfacing in domestic scraps on how the ordinary object (like a towel, spoon) is a stand-in for the “object a” — banal, yet charged with unconscious memory. To name the towel is to name absence, loss, the mother’s body long gone. Habit anesthetizes but noticing breaks the narcotic, lets desire leak through.

2. This post is a page from the same notebook where I stockpile crumbs: bus numbers, spice labels, the names of colors the evening tries on. If it feels like a list, that’s on purpose. The list keeps me awake. So, writing inventories is a defense, a ritual, even a form of free association. Maybe my notebook [this weblog, this diary, this logbook, this corner of the internet] is what Winnicott would call a transitional object where I carry scraps so I don’t lose the self, I pour scraps into it so I don’t pour them out of myself. Which makes me think... Perec’s own obsessive lists were not just literary games but perhaps can be perceived as symptomatic, a way of keeping neurosis at bay: the anxious cataloguing of a man trying to domesticate absence, to turn the infraordinary into a shield.
3. I like to think Perec’s lists were never neutral. Born in 1936 to Polish-Jewish parents in Paris, his father killed in the war, his mother deported to Auschwitz and never returned, Perec grew up in foster care and silence. The infraordinary for him was not trivial but existential: cataloguing chairs, streets, tickets was a way of insisting on survival, of building an archive against erasure. His inventories read like a child’s desperate tally, a proof that the world was still there, and so was he.

4. The digital age complicates this. If Perec longed to preserve crumbs, today the internet floods us with them: breakfasts tweeted, coffees photographed, train delays live-blogged. But instead of waking us, the avalanche numbs us. A parody of Perec is a documentation that collapses into noise. Maybe that’s why the notebook still matters: paper slows the hand, turns noticing back into presence, rescues the crumb from the scroll.