Matches

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Matches

While I was taking the photo series from which this was selected I thought of the Nicholson Baker book, A Box of Matches and his books and how they sustain still life in prose. 

These sit rather snugly here in their purple box-, regal indeed. There's something profoundly satisfying about things ordered neatly (there is an excellent Tumbler site with this title Things Organized Neatly, which deals with this theme) and the effect is enhanced when the things being ordered are identical. 

Excessive order, however, becomes monotonous, and even unpleasant. Germanic.*

I think I like seeing things in boxes, but I am not sure. I can see how putting things in boxes could become obsessive, one of those low key mental afflictions that alters the lives of its subjects in subtle but immensely damaging ways. 

I can believe that there is a pathology associated with boxes and that it starts with cute  jewelry boxes and inlaid Indian caskets and ends up with body parts being found in shoe boxes in semi-detached suburban houses far out on the Metropolitan line.

* My father once explained to m brother that Germany was such an orderly county that car wheels there were square, which of course he continued to believe for years after.

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