Robert Wringham - The Occasional Papers

Minimalism is Anorexia projected outwards.

That’s an entry for The Quotable Wringham, I reckon. Here’s another, which I plagiarised from a tee shirt my girlfriend saw in a mall:

I love Asceticism. I can’t get enough of it.

The Plain People of Cyberspace: Stop, our sides are splitting.

But seriously. What if my silly quip - Anorexia projected outwards - is true? What if my ongoing career in simplification is a form of mental illness?

If sanity is statistical, then I am a raving loon. Most other human beings tend to snowball through life, accumulating more and more and more. I do not. The only thing about me that expands, is my definition of “enough”, and so I constantly offload things from those days when I occasionally acquired.

When I tell people that I didn’t watch The Apprentice because I have no television; or that they cannot “text me” because I have no mobile phone, they either think I’m insane or lying. The BBC constantly warns me that “officers may call” unless I pay my television licence. They find it very difficult to accept that someone today wouldn’t own a television.

Perhaps eventually, I will live in a Japanese capsule hotel, owning just a handheld computer and an all-in-one bodysock, each day burning but a single calorie.

You might see such a vision as some kind of satire but for me it is a perfectly feasible future.

Where does it end? Cut to a future in which I’m soliciting for illegal medical operations: “I’ll keep one arm for now, to see how it goes.”

Sane minimalism stops at Body Bonsai.

But it might be an ever-advancing rationale. Perhaps when I am armless (”But I can give you a nasty suck”) and legless (”How dare you? I’m as sober as a judge!”) and shaved bald; and my spleen and appendix have been removed on account of their superfluity I will still insist that I am sane. Perhaps I will say, “Only when I’m a brain in a jar, will I accept the diagnosis of my mania”.

And then when I am a brain in a jar (”Is this spinal chord strictly necessary?”) I will still refute the possibility that I’m mad, drawing the line only at the point of voluntarily downloading my consciousness into a computer.

And then when I am but a digital soul on a server somewhere, tutting at the surplus data in the world recycling bin, I will accept that maybe I have gone too far and would there be any chance of downloading my girlfriend for some cyberloving?

Will it ever be possible to reduce oneself to an odour?

An evaluation: Minimalism is not Anorexia projected outwards. To have modest surroundings will only nourish, never starve: a maxim that won’t make it into The Quotable Wringham on account of it being true and not a stupid verbal handstand.

www.wringham.co.uk

Minimalism, you say? Hah! I wrote the book on minimalism! And 'minimal' was the interest I received from publishers. Hardcore.

In hindsight, I should really get around to reading the book I wrote. In the process of moving home, I've come to the conclusion that I've never owned quite so much stuff.

There's no paradox here. I'm a minimalist with a lot of stuff. Wanna make something of it? Never heard of a paedophile dating adults? Astronauts like to spend time underground too, you know.

"The minimalist movement wants YOU!
Have you got the stuff?"

Seven large boxes now squat in the middle of my living room, packed with my precious stuff and ready to travel. I'm happy to say that almost all of it is in the form of books, records or videos. No 'objects'. No 'keepsakes'. No 'kipple'. Definitely a minimalist approach to having a lot of stuff.

Boxes aside, I've certainly made efforts to travel light. I've even trimmed my toenails.

While packing the remaining copies of New Escapologist magazines, I accidentally scratch my thumb on a protruding staple. Such shoddy craftsmanship. Hard to believe people have been paying £3.50 per unit for this tat. But let us remind ourselves of the magazine's motto:

Molior quisquiliae, tenor sublimis
("Construction shit, contents sublime").

It was bad timing though. Functioning thumbs are vital to the packing process. That's why the lower primates and Japanese POWs travel so light.

It crossed my mind that I should smear some thumb blood onto one of the magazine covers. The buyer of this copy would have something even better than a signed edition. Haemoglobin of the editor would add literally pence to the cover price.

But then: that's the sort of thing a psychopath would do, isn't it?

Flashback to the day spent stapling the magazines together:

I had stolen a stapler from my office. When it refuses to bind the forty top-notch New Escapologist pages with the same enthusiasm as it used to staple financial reports in its former life, I say to it:

"I'm regretting promoting you."

Talking to inanimate objects: something else psychopaths do.

The only things left to pack are my clown paintings and the transcriptions of those interviews I did with Jesus for BBC1.

Excuse me. I'm just going outside to strangle the neighbour's dog. I'm moving house so they'll never catch me.