the table is always a metaphor

was talking with a student today about institutional accommodations and gatekeeping of access to said inst, and we developed an interesting analogy which I expanded on and will now share with y’all:

Imagine society is a table. it’s That Table, where all the cruft and keys and lighters and deodorant and todo lists and daily pocket lint ends up, piled on each other and everywhere, to the point where it’s hard to see what’s table (the load bearing concept of society itself) and what’s incense ash (side effects of the society functioning). So you decide to pick up the place a bit and you look at the table and it’s time to make some decisions. Some things you want to keep are balanced on top of weird garbage that you realize you only kept in case you needed it later, and you’d like to use the table top itself. It’s sturdier than precarious cruft, and you probably want to leave a corner for when you make a cup of tea and immediately forget about it after setting it down.

 So you have some decisions to make! 

You might find that the things you want to keep have somehow become defined by what they’re sitting upon, even if that itself is something that really should have been binned originally. It’s taking up space, but you really want the stuff atop it and they’re not really seperable any more. 

Mostly this isn’t true, and you figure out ways to move the things you want onto the more stable surface, or stack them with intention to beauty or function rather than as need arose. You’ll find that the more begrudging pieces seem more out of place than before and you try to minimize the aesthetic damage or gain a desperate bravery and bin them anyway, not wanting your table layout to be defined by the garbage, always routing around it or crowding away. To not do this part isn’t really cleaning up, after all. It’s just shuffling the trash around. 

How does one determine the difference between what’s wanted and unwanted? Through the process of using the table, of cleaning it a few times? Of recognizing and evaluating the origins of one’s desires (why do you desire? is a big question my goodness)? 

But lacking a desire to clean the table is to say that you don’t care to distinguish between the wanted and unwanted, and you’ll either chew yourself to anxiety trying to use it or be reduced to no longer seeing it all.