Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
— W. B. Yeats
I wanted to unpack Lopate’s moves in “My Drawer”, a brief and memorable essay bout miscellany, junk drawers, the things we can't (or won’t or don’t) throw away, where the drawer is "a weigh station of things” that seem to have untold significance or potential. Like a god in Eden, the essayist begins by naming what is present.
An urge to sort
Lopate, who plays himself (or, at least, the speaker) begins by acknowledging that he comes to the page after having experienced “an urge to make an inventory of the drawer” in an effort to grasp the hidden “symbolic underpinnings” of his own “character,” where the word ‘character’ refers to the person he is in life as well as the person he reveals on the page.
And so he inventories:
3-d movie glasses
a silver whistle
a combo lock whose combo has long been lost
a strip of extra cuff for his white linen suit
a plastic shoehorn and an aluminum shoe horn
a button that says BOYCOTT LETTUCE
an expired pair of eyeglasses
two nail clippers
cufflinks
rusty scissors for child-sized fingers
a windproof lighter that he won at an amusement park
The final item on the list calls to mind a souvenir, or a keepsake memorabilia marking a particular time and place.
Here, Lopate pivots away from delving into the nature of souvenirs by diagnosing himself with superstitiousness. Due to his belief that throwing things away will cause “bad things” to happen, he keeps gifts for which he has “no affection,” just in case such gifts have something to reveal in the future. Gifts, after all, should mean something, and the receiver cannot be blamed for thinking he might have missed an important point if the gift falls flat. Such gifts are kept for the potential future significance. Among them, Lopate lists novelty gists like the “pair of cloth finger puppets” intended to give him pleasure alone on his bed at night. Surveying his collection of novelty gifts, he concludes that novelty is difficult to gift, since “each person's definition of cute or campy is such a private affair.”
Next comes the “jewelry” collection of items saved from the 1960’s, including an elephant tusk-necklace, multi-colored beads, and various “spiritual amulets.” Then Lopate lists the things he “kept to be on the safe side,” including an official bank card, a wristwatch case, a silk drawstring purse, and other objects that could serve as possible future containers.
These objects “live a hidden life in the back street of my consciousness,” writes Lopate. He muses that the drawer might exist to hold things “that arouse only half-digested desires never fantasized all the way through” . . . fantasies so secret that not even their owner has the courage to name them.
Joseph Cornell, The Journeying Sun for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1963.
The logic
Lopate admits that these objects arouse more guilt than desire for him. The objects have hypnotized him with a “promise” to not toss them; the objects have committed him to protecting them, thus granting them the significance of the keepsake.
“I suppose if I were to examine the derivations of each of these keepsakes, many would call up some road not taken, some rejection of possibility,” Lopate muses. Clearly, there is something these objects want to say. Or, this is the story that the collector tells himself. The objects will speak if one can find the “surrealist logic” of their relation. The answer is thus relational, based on a pattern that close study might study, a pattern that must be particular to these objects and their organization.
To assemble the tale story of his “subconscious mind,” Lopate relies on the relational terrain of the nuclear family. Modern psychoanalysis will be the source of his story of origins, which begins exactly where we might expect: in the top drawer of his long-married parents.
The story of origins
Lopate traces the “original top drawer” template back to his childhood, when he would sneak into his parents’ bedroom to “approach their large, dark mahogany dresser, with its altar top composed of the round reversible mirror, the wedding photograph, the stray hair-curlers, and the Chinese black-lacquered music box where my mother kept her Woolworth jewelry.” This is the scene of the original forbidden: the top drawer of the mahogany dresser with its brass handles and tripartite sectioning.
“What was so fascinating about rifling through their drawer?” he asks himself aloud, inviting us into the question. After all, the drawer was always slightly disappointing, packed with ordinary things. In his father’s section, Lopate found “objects of obscure masculine power . . . my father's leather traveling case, a shaving brush, a pair of suspenders, a wallet with photos of us, the children.” On his mother’s side of the drawer, he visited “her bloomers and her gypsy scarves.”
And then, there is there middle part, the section shared by his parents. . .
Utopia
The middle section is the mish-mash of his and hers, that random space created by marriage where two humans join their junk into what Lopate calls “no-man's-land, with elastic bands, garters, pipe cleaners.”
Ultimately, Lopate faces the question of what he sought as a child when rummaging through his parents’ dresser drawer. This question is not unfamiliar to novelists and poets. And part of what makes this essay shimmer is how Lopate addresses it —- which, I should add, is not the same as answering it, for we can address a question without answering it completely, and thus demonstrate our respect for the questions, themselves, which seems like a far more interesting use of one’s time than attempting to be definitive.
It seems that he found a deck of naked playing cards, but the problem with memory is how much we imagine the thing we are seeking, as if the seeking, itself, can give it life. In Lopate’s words:
The paragraph ends in a rather wonderful, multi-layered figuration: “The drawer recorded without explanation the ordinariness of this miracle that had given birth to me.”
Taboo and psychoanalsysis
Then, Lopate returns to his self-examination, using the story of the origins to pry apart his own ambiguities, initially leaning into Freud (calling himself an “Oedipal child”) and then heading straight for the Freudian forbidden:
Having acknowledged the totem and the taboo, and simultaneously carving an opening within the essay for sexual digression, Lopate lopes into the surprise of his concluding page. He returns to inventorying his own drawer: “I keep a box of prophylactics.”
The back of the drawer also has a small collection of “those ads handed to me in the street for massage parlors: Beautiful Girls - Complete Privacy - One Price. ... Tahitia — Gives You Just What You Ex-pect! and an awful color photo of two women in a bubble bath with a grinning curly-headed man.” Lopate keeps the ads “just in case, to be on the safe side,” though the ‘case’ and the ‘safe side’ have lost their explanatory power at this point, which is what the writer intended.
If you hoped that Lopate’s essayed inventory would clarify the intersection of keepsakes, superstition, taboo, and sentimentality, you will be perfectly disappointed. For: “Here is a squashed-up tube of diaphragm cream, with just enough in it for one more go.” This personal item, dripping its singular potential, belongs to his ex. “Kay must have left it behind, as she did this frayed pair of panties,” Lopate tells us, before addressing the reader directly in the most intimate way.
“Do you know we almost moved in together, before we broke up for the very last time?”
How could you know? And who are you, anyway, to be reading this very private examination of a top drawer in a dresser? Consider the dexterity with which Lopate mobilizes this sudden turn away from the inventory towards the direct, personal address which he will expand in this ending locution.
“And finally,” in case you need indication as to what this excavation of the “drawer” intended to accomplish, Lopate flags it.
The most forbidden thing is thinking about and missing Kay, an act which is provoked by opening the top drawer and writing his way through the objects that “all up some road not taken, some rejection of possibility.” There is that heart-shaped button, and his failure to love Kay in the way she had wanted (the way that risked meaning something to her)— namely, by “advertising my heart on my sleeve,” declaring himself openly to be with so-and-so, agreeing to fantasize that desire all the way through. Obviously, I’m quoting one of Lopate’s statements from the beginning, about those “half-digested desires” he mentions, desires to which he returns here… if only to emphasize the way the essay, itself , becomes the object declaring his heart on his sleeve— and it does so more permanently and irrevocably than any pun in the lover’s top-drawer reliquary.
Nothing could be more public than the page. Lopate’s cleverness comes from the way he enriches (and subverts perhaps) the ordinary heteronormative meaning of fidelity in this decision to honor Kay by essay. “I faithfully continue to wear her pin, in my top drawer,” he writes.
As for this post, to properly fill the circle, here is “A Coat” by Yeats:
