Being online feels like stargazing. It can make you feel small and meaningless, like a drop in the ocean of disinterest. It can make you question your sanity and why would anything you do matter in the vast emptiness. It can make you feel small and meaningful, so that you slow down and appreciate the enormity and beauty of the universe, the vastness of the stars and their perspectives. Stargazing brings meaning. What you attach to it, -less, -ful is up to you.
If being online is like stargazing, then, these words are akin to the voyageur golden record, a “’bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’” according to Carl Sagan. Or was it Françoise Sagan? No, definitely Carl. As I whisper into this void, I hope you’ll find me. This is a message with no particular recipient, a message for you, if you take it on.
I used to feel so much pressure over creating The original thought™, the one setting me apart from everyone. The one justifying why I should write, why my voice would matter. Overwhelmed by which word to choose I would always marvel at the incredible accuracy with which certain writers would bring me into their worlds. Words carefully crafted by skilled artisans in which they would travel so comfortably back-and-forth between the general and the specific, making it look effortless, pulling things in and out of our collective consciousness, subconsciousness.
Time, mind, hive.
They would make me feel so much, like they’ve been more familiar with certain corners of my mind than myself. Showing me corners I didn’t even know existed. While reading those, I would either feel grateful for the insight or robbed of the opportunity to figure it out on my own, on my own time. I was too focused on which words to choose and not enough at which words to feel.
But ultimately, I decided to latch onto it in full. Meaningful, like knowing that a few centuries ago Baudelaire was facing feelings eerily similar to mine At One o’clock in the morning. Across time. Meaningful, like reading a comment capturing that thought that was just escaping you. Across minds. Meaningful, like all of those thoughts thought again and again, connected. Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote Fleabag to say: « with all the love I have for her. I don’t know where to put it now. » And Anne Carson wrote: « you remember too much, / my mother said to me recently. / why hold onto all that? and I said, / where can I put it down? » And Mitski as Marceline in Adventure Time sang: « I don’t know what to do without you, I don’t know where to put my hands. » And Donnie Smith in Magnolia: « I really do have love to give! I just really don’t know where to put it!. » And Emily Dickinson wrote: « we outgrow love, like other things / and put it in the drawer- ». Across Hive.
I latched onto it fully. I feel at home in the lost-and-found section. At home among found objects, found family, profound connections, cofounded communities and newfound affection. I am dumbfounded in empty spaces that breathe no life of their own. In a world where all the options seem to be an overconsumption society and a reactive minimalism that leaves a bitter class unconsciousness after taste – with sanitized spaces not made for living and buying as you go and let go – I want community spaces, community libraries, borrowed tools and borrowed words. Be skeptical, be critical, be selective, be materialistic in the way Juliet Schor argues about “we are too materialistic in the everyday sense of the word and in a way not materialistic enough: we need to care about the materiality of goods.” I use borrowed words and I love them like borrowed kisses, I value them like I value my gracefully borrowed time on Earth.
I don’t own anything.
Accepting that gave me freedom. I shape shift. I’m a raccoon, I forage through the trash, through my phone’s notes and unsent messages, through the comments section, the book abandoned on the bench, rummaging through dead people’s journals and lived experiences, coffee cups and unwanted receipts, through my grand-parents photo albums and drawers.
I now feel at home everywhere, anywhere. I am a collector. A collector of what, you may ask?
I am a collector of imaginaries, images, gems, colors, dreams, slumbers and nightmares.
Of meteors, metonymies, metaphors, semaphores, semantics, senseless hopes, thoughts, quotes, totes, to-do lists, lists, lisps, lips, lusts, losses, wishes and goals.
Of ideals, ideas, passwords, poems, peonies and pennies, of drawings and shapes, of people that inspire me, people I love and people I used to know. Of shiny things, things that bring me joy, books, delicate things, ways to love, words like lace, words that leave a taste, that twist my tongue in new ways, words that belong to each other.
Not a collector as in an accumulator. Not as in capitalist growth, private equity investments and piling up deadlines. Not collecting as in engaging in excessive acquisition of items that are not needed or for which no space is available, as in gatekeeping and hoarding things, words, houses, wealth, resources. Not a collection where we’re required to stack, stock, store. Not where we build a society that seems to limp from one existential crisis to the next, becoming ever more fragile and unstable as a result.
Accumulation only as rainwater collects at the bottom of the barrel.
I mean collecting as in inheriting. Inheriting a wealth of words, wisdom of the people that came before me, and making use of them. To grab and blur the linearity of lineage and ownership. Inheriting from your grand-parents their love for lilies or the shape of your chin, your taste for apple pecan pie from your neighbor and your obsession with water bodies from your pre-school friend. A time capsule of hopes and dreams from the people that came before, from The letter to my future self I wrote at fourteen and The letter to my younger self I wrote at twenty. It’s about finding the delicate balance of intentions and insight, sighs. I think I should write a letter to my current self soon. Intimate knowledge that does not find a new place to fit into your current life, like the lingering knowledge of your childhood friends’ landline numbers. These are people I used to know, I used to be. I do not know them now but once upon a time I did.
Have you ever navigated the Hashtag #mosaic of all the people I’ve loved on Tumblr? How this is such a frequently used hashtag from people all over, all around? Where collecting means we are a compilation of every single person we’ve loved before. And that we live on in every person who loved us. How we pick up the ways of beings, phrases, and little habits of the people we are around, and sometimes those ways of being stick around for way longer than the people ever will?
I’m a collector because I’m an anthology of everything I’ve ever experienced, a combination of every person I’ve encountered, real or fictional. I’m an assembling of every word I’ve ever read and every piece of art I ever laid eyes upon. I am a whole. And you are too.
By collecting we are connecting back to our gatherer roots, our ancestors. Spying with our little magpie eyes a flickering shine, our piqued interest stepping into the painting, picking up flowers, words, trinkets. The ones that then settled and tended to gardens. Import a thought, “a draft or a seed” (Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris in a workshop), plant it in the soil of your mind, tend to it, collect your tears if needed and then use them to water your crops. Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed according to Lavoisier’s principle and appropriately so a reoccurrence of even earlier greek philosopher Anaxogore’s thought. So collect everything and rejoice in the harvest, reaping what you sowed with your bare hands, cared for with your heart and nourished with your mind.
Ursula K. Le Guin speculated that maybe, just maybe, the first human tool was not a weapon but something that holds, a bag, a pouch, a vessel, something for gathering and storing and sharing. She posits that a story is also a carrier bag, that there’s room enough in fiction for every experience, for every little thing and that it is this other story – the life story – that she seeks.
This theory of the carrier bag is shifting ever so slightly the human narrative from violence to safekeeping. Maybe I am a carrier bag. Where collecting means carrying your wounded peers, your words, your stories, your history. Where a war against one is a war against the whole. Where self-care is an act of rebellion in a society that does not want to see you flourish. « Where rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love » as Albert Camus once noted. I can hold within myself multitudes and contradictions, inflections, oxymorons, extrapolations, similitudes, paradoxes, repetitions and reflections.
When I first read in Poetry is not a luxury « poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. » my first visceral reaction was: I do not birth them, I thrift them. I find them, stumble upon them, un-dust them and reuse them, recycle them, up-cycle them, give them a new purpose or a new meaning.
Watch me write black out poetry on a coffee receipt.
I find in other people’s words the ones I was lacking myself. I’ll even make my point by borrowing Mary Schmich’s words in her hypothetical commencement speech: “Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.” But maybe these approaches do not have to exclude each other. Collective mind.
Thrifting can be a delicate and carefully crafted practice. One needs to take their time and wander. Not all gathering sessions will be successful. What does a successful session look like? There is peace within these truths. Maybe you’re looking for something specific – a view on love, how love and intimacy are stored in the tenderness of sharing an orange, but not that poem, not that post either, not that one, that other one that you don’t quite remember but that has been haunting you ever since you read it. So you ask around, post on a forum, try different combinations of words. Maybe find community in the process.
Maybe you’re looking for how to hold grief, how that one actor said that grief is all the unexpressed love, that will remain with us until we pass because we never got enough time with each other or that one author you can’t remember the name of that nailed particularly well that one specific concept that of course escapes you at that moment. And sometimes you stumble upon the most unexpected finds in the corner of that one instagram post, this one video, that one book that caught your eye on the shelf, at that one bend of the path, in that sticker on the bathroom door, that screenshot you took years ago and never revisited.
It can be something valuable for later or exactly what you needed to hear in the moment. Always be on the lookout, not anxiously so, but curiously so. With just a healthy amount of hunger, where you’re almost at repletion – so you don’t live your life only wanting more but in order to keep your inner curiosity for things alive.
It’s almost collecting as in kleptomania. It’s not quite stealing. Maybe it is akin in its manic and frantic and unreasonable way of being.
And that’s not to say that nothing new ever can be. That you can’t try out new things, right? If I dare borrow again from Audre Lorde: « There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves – along with the renewed courage to try them out ». So gather round, gather around, gather square. Please learn from me and do not fall in the pit, the meander and contradiction of trying to find the one original thought, for we are one species re-exploring life over and over again. And we’re going to peel oranges for loved ones again and again, and sing and tell stories, and reach (out) for each other. Again and again. « For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt – of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead – while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths. »
And that’s why collecting is so precious. Because by this archivist work done here and through out a life, by this anthology that a life is, however pointless it might seem at times, something new will be. Maybe in the way light will hit your lover’s face in the morning, that particular space of your collection one Wednesday afternoon, all the facets of what is now will shine with a newness that wasn’t quite there a second ago. Something old, something borrowed, something blue, made anew. World twisters and familiar savings.
Even if you don’t feel like you’ve found IT. That you’ve accumulated, gathered and yet you haven’t found the light. First of all, have you looked in the dark? In the shadows? In the forgotten corners? Second of all, you’re now with a collection that you can donate, give away in full or in part, bequeath or pass onto. This is your contribution to our collective story, subtle community, family, lineage. Timeless.
Collecting as in gathering, as in inheriting, as in thrifting, collecting as in regaining control of oneself, of one’s thoughts, faculty, composure. Good measure. Not in the rigid way that might be expected or asked. But in the way that allows you to find purpose in just being.
Earthbound, untethered, homebound all at once. I’m an amateur collector (from amare, latin for love). Of anything ultramarine, blue, blues, spleen, advices, stories, feelings, unfinished business, unfinished projects, poems, essays, notebooks and notepads, screenshots, letters I never sent, messages I haven’t answered, abandoned hobbies, places to visit, homes, places to be.
And you, who’ve found this self-founded collector’s society, you are welcome. Consider reading this the act of collecting your invitation to please join me and embrace your inner collector.
What kind of collector will you be?