Less Is More
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It's easy to make fun of Marie Kondo, the decluttering guru with elvish good looks. Her KonMari Method, so summarizable in the mantra to throw out everything and keep only the things that "spark joy," sounds the definition of twee. And yet, as the sale of millions of copies of her books around the world attests, she has touched an open sore in our maximalist lives and consumerist societies. What is to be our relationship to our things, which we accumulate so avidly?
It's easy to make fun of Marie Kondo, the decluttering guru with elvish good looks. Her KonMari Method, so summarizable in the mantra to throw out everything and keep only the things that "spark joy," sounds the definition of twee. And yet, as the sale of millions of copies of her books around the world attests, she has touched an open sore in our maximalist lives and consumerist societies. What is to be our relationship to our things, which we accumulate so avidly?
The KonMari Method stresses looking at each category of things in turn, dresses, shoes, books, kitchen utensils, politicians, etc. You can see the necessity for this for we are all too apt to avoid decluttering by looking at our best category and pronouncing ourselves fine in general. To say, for instance, since we're doing well in the economic category, we're doing well too in life. The English word "good" is notoriously slippery since it allows us to take the good life to mean a virtuous one.
The Japanese word for "spark joy" is ときめく tokimeku, which means "flutter, throb, palpitate." Understanding how hard it is for us to part with things, Kondo gives us a test that relies on immediate sensation. If that neo-Brutalist heritage building does not give you a shiver of happiness, tear it down! The English translation hints at that sense of spontaneity by including the verb "spark." The English word "joy," however, comes from Old French joie, from Latin gaudium, from the verb gaudēre to be glad. Sidestepping the pleasant digression that our press Gaudy Boy shares the same etymology, we may make the point that to be glad implies that we are not so at the moment. The root is future-oriented. Not to put too fine a point on it, the present is a winter of discontent.
Less is more! Less is more! Who needs urgently to hear that message? The Singapore Prime Minister earns an annual wage that is five times more than that of the United States President, with accordingly high wages for Ministers, Ministers of State, Senior Parliamentary Secretaries, and top civil servants. Is running tiny Singapore really five times harder than running the most powerful country in the world? Successive prime ministers have defended their wages (who expects them to do less?) by resorting to the old adage, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Marie Kondo will say that is a categorical error. If money has to be compared to peanuts at all, more peanuts surely mean more monkeys. What is fit for human beings belongs surely to a different category altogether.
Of all the literary genres, poetry best encapsulates the notion that less is more. In its economy of language and severity of form, a good poem opens up a world, as the four new poems by Aruni Kashyap promise. I fervenetly hope that Marie Kondo will buy Gaudy Boy's forthcoming winning releases, Jenifer Sang Eun Park's Autobiography of Horse and Lawrence Lacambra Ypil's The Experiment of the Tropics, and rid herself of all the self-help manuals in the house. She will be doing herself a favor.
However, I confess that I have not read, let alone bought, any of her books. All information provided here about the KonMari Method comes from Wikipedia. You see, I have taken her advice to heart and have not bought anything that does not give me a flutter, even if it has given me a laugh.
Jee Leong Koh
February 21, 2019
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