The Music of the Material

Truck trouble.

I am now officially a resident of Maple Ridge, having acquired a beat-up Ford F-150 this past summer. The truck came to us via my wife's parents, who simultaneously downsized their truck to a tiny Suzuki and upsized their camper to a camper van. We purchased their old truck and camper to feed our yuppy-versus-redneck inner conflicts. Both leak in the rain.

We discovered the rain leak over the holidays, in our quest for a Christmas tree. We hadn't used the truck in over a month, and in our absence the floor had grown a soft carpet of fuzzy mould. A flaw in the seal around the windshield allowed condensation to build up to optimum mould-growing conditions, something which would have happened in the semi-desert conditions of my in-law's city. But mould is a constant problem living in a temperate rain forest. An hour later, after treatment with hydrogen peroxide and a shop-vac, we were ready to go.

If only the truck would start. The teenage "technician" at Canadian Tire confirmed my suspicions: the battery was dead. Another hour and $100 later, a new battery was installed and the truck was ready to go. The kids were surprisingly forgiving of all the delays, but by this time the sun was setting, so we hurried off to the wonderful Alouette Tree Farm to become their last customer of the day. Cost of the tree, plus hot dogs, hot chocolate, and assorted items from the gift shop: $65.

The story is not quite over, though. The next day, on a hunch, I tried starting the truck. Dead again. After recharging the new battery for 6 hours with a plug-in charger, I was able to drive the truck to our mechanic. Another $380 and the truck was humming again -- this time with a new alternator.

What was going on here? I had just spent $545 on a Christmas tree. I'm pretty sure that the truck is useful for things other than hauling room-sized trees, but still... it was nothing that I had planned for. But I pressed steadfastly on, refusing to be deterred from the goal. The decorations had been hauled out from the crawlspace, the furniture had been rearranged, we had to have that tree! And all around me, people were doing the same thing I was doing: spending enormous amounts of time and money attempting to generate a particular type of festive experience. Even the experience of driving a beat-up F-150 is a strangely satisfying joy.

I gave some thought to why this is, and I think I might be onto something. I enjoy music tremendously, and I listen to a lot of it. I find music generates a certain sense of "place" which I can go to -- a certain unique feeling. But as much as I enjoy music, I am almost completely cut off from the production of music itself. The architecture of music is complex and the structures of music are time-consuming and difficult to assemble.

There is, however, another uniquely human activity which does give me opportunity to express myself creatively and allows me to generate a similar sense of "place". It is the assembly and deployment of material possessions to create a tangible experience. It was not the tree that I wanted, it was the experience of visiting the tree farm, the kid's excitement seeing it come through the front door, the joy of decorating it, and the satisfaction of enjoying its glow with hot chocolate and Christmas music. I drained my bank account seeking to generate a certain type of song.

This link between materialism and music is somewhat disturbing to me, but I think it reaches to the core of being human. We are experience seekers. As soon as our physical needs are met, we turn immediately towards anything which might alter our experience of the world in more interesting ways. We play games, we listen to music, we eat and drink to excess, and yes, we buy things we don't need. Up until this Christmas, I had seen this act of buying things not needed as a sort of moral flaw, which could be resolved (thereby saving the planet from our insatiable consumption) through moral arguments. Now, however, I think that most people, whether they are conscious of it or not, are just trying to make some interesting music with the things they buy.

I need to spend some more time understanding this, but this model of the material as musical can be used to build a sustainable aesthetic of the material. Our drive to acquire is only destructive because of the vast quantity of waste we are willing to tolerate in our quest to experience something new. So much of what we consume and throw away is just cheap noise -- adding very little to our lives. What we need is a resurgence of an emphasis on quality over quantity. It is time to develop a new language of the material.