"All nomads, professional and otherwise, bring along reminders of the places they have left behind them." This, according to Guy Trebay in t+l this month; likewise, he claims that Toland Grinnell's 2008 installation of traveling trunks--what? you didn't go to the Brooklyn Museum to see it?--"called to mind not excess so much as the practicality of military furniture from an earlier era, ingeniously devised to provide home comforts to, say, Napoleon's army on the Egyptian campaign."
Well. That explains it, somehow. For a military kid who was practically born in the pineapple fields and later lived in Oklahoma, California, New York, Kansas, Stuttgart, Crailsheim, Virginia, Georgia, Connecticut, New York again, California again, and so on and so forth...suitcases and campaign furniture have always been, perhaps, the archetypes I unwittingly long for. And the nomad camper in my heart continues to squirrel away treasures, pining for connection with...what? Lord knows.
"Objects unlock memories," according to the French-American psychiatrist Clotaire Rapaille, who consults for major companies on the psychological underpinnings of consumer goods. "We want to live in an archetype and we want a car and jacket that are also archetypes."
Bring on the suitcase: archetypically speaking, I suppose going somewhere is just where I want to be.
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