Clutter images - by Rob Horning - Internal exile

These diagnostic images accompanied a London Review of Books “Diary” essay by Jon Day about hoarders. They are meant to provide an objective baseline for evaluating the severity of pathological hoarding, but they immediately struck me as a metaphor, a time-lapse series capturing the evolving condition of my mind on any given day as it precedes. Usually I wake up with an orderly sense of where things belong and where things can be found, but soon the room fills up with an unruly pile of garbage that I eventually give up on trying to sort or discard. I know there were ideas buried in there somewhere, but I don’t think I will be able to find them, and who’s to say they wouldn’t have just become someone else’s mind trash?

These diagnostic images accompanied a London Review of Books “Diary” essay by Jon Day about hoarders. They are meant to provide an objective baseline for evaluating the severity of pathological hoarding, but they immediately struck me as a metaphor, a time-lapse series capturing the evolving condition of my mind on any given day as it precedes. Usually I wake up with an orderly sense of where things belong and where things can be found, but soon the room fills up with an unruly pile of garbage that I eventually give up on trying to sort or discard. I know there were ideas buried in there somew