Rosneathian
1471
Thanks for sharing these thoughts. Some thoughts below from a man who fell to earth
Jul 10, 2022,20:39 PM
I've been a collector of things for more than 40 years. In so doing I've merely exhibited a behaviour that's been a part of humanity for tens of millennia. Human beings collect things for a whole bunch of reasons that for the sake of brevity I won't theorise here, but let's just say it's a part of our wiring as bipedal apes. It's what human beings do and will always do.
The things I've collected began with Marvel comics in the 1970s and 1980s. It continued before, through and beyond university with books. I delved deep into all the subjects that interested me over the years, from astrobiology to historiography, from paleo-archeology, post-structuralism and post-colonial literary theory, and much, much more. I channelled my inner curator and organised them all by category. Then came artwork and artefacts. I've lived in five countries and worked in more than 40, and have tried to collect something from as many places that I can respectfully display in the spaces available to me. It's not much but they mean a lot to me now. More recently my attention turned to watches.
Each phase of collecting different things or the same thing has peculiarities specific to it. There are also several generalisable attributes. Collecting is enabled and framed by one's circumstance and means. The imagination can and does reach beyond those limits because we are human, but it's eventually constrained by hard material reality.
For some people the collecting bug is a fixed attribute. These are people for whom collecting is a central vocation. For others, there will be periods where collecting becomes a consuming behaviour after which other interests take over to occupy the mind.
While collecting, intellectual curiosity, love, passion and desire drive some people. Social recognition propels others. Some people collect for themselves because collectibles are an ineluctable part of who they are. For these people collectibles are an intimate meditation. Other people collect for more utilitarian reasons, with less emotional investment. Most people have to balance the two during a collecting life. Here I make no distinction between a person with a box full of Seiko 5s, Citizens and Timex watches, and another who owns grand complications, tourbillons and the like from high end producers. Doesn't matter. The behaviour patterns are the same.
Since I've travelled from collecting one thing to another over the course of several decades, I feel a bit like the man who fell to earth. I regard myself as an observer of each milieu without ever wanting to or feeling entirely part of it. This is because the most important part of collecting for me is the critical distance I need to maintain autonomy. Yes, I can gush about watches, and I do that quite a lot. But at some point it's important to know I can step back, and possibly step away altogether.
There's good reason for this posture. My collecting experiences have all had beginnings, middles and ends, Eventually I stopped collecting comics. Eventually my book and art collecting tapered off. I'm at a point now where I'm stimulated, content and proud of the watches I have. I see myself in them. Do I need more? Different? Not really.
The only thing that matters is that we keep our sense of self free and intact. This means keeping fatty branding and heritage marketing lard out of our veins. It means keeping the drone of community noise out of our ears. It means resisting the seductions of our visual culture and the constant bombardment of weightless, glossy images. It means swatting away cod definitions that try to trammel us into pens. It means ignoring throwaway remarks. All of this is easier said than done, but it's important if we want to do whatever the heck we want until it makes more sense not to.