Obsession & Wonder
A World of Incurable Poets
I never wanted to be a collector, admits Victor Wynd. I wanted to create, not to absorb other creations. I now tendentiously argue that collectors are artists at the very pinnacle of artistic endeavour. Our palette is everything ownable and our canvas is wherever we decide to put it.
Truth be told—he goes on—I’ve always wanted to live alone in a cottage by the sea and write poetry.
Verena visits for Christmas. We sit across from each other in my office. The room infamously looks like a troll doll threw up all over—custom floor-to-ceiling shelves spanning one wall, the adjacent one punctuated by colorful hamster tubes, everything glitter-gilded in Y2K. Powerpuff Girls, Barbie, Hot Wheels, Barbie Hot Wheels, Powerpuff Girls driving Barbie Hot Wheels through the hamster tube into the pillowy arms of Hello Kitty. Labubu pendants dangle every few feet—Littlest Pet Shop creatures and Calico Critters, regular attendants to the mess.
I examine a whitetail antler shed while Verena flips through Victor Wynd’s Cabinet of Wonders. She turns the book toward me every so often to highlight certain delights among pages and pages overcrowded with delights. We laugh at some things, and remark on the obvious—dodo bones, oversized bugs, scrimshaw depicting naked people. We begin our potentially bad habit of wondering aloud—something towards what kind of people . . . then both start looking around, and I press a tine into the palm of my hand a little too hard. Multiple still-sealed lip glosses glimmer-wink at us behind plexiglass containers.
When I get dressed each morning, I coordinate a modest pair of earrings to whatever athletic aesthetic found its way onto me. Verena, on the other hand, has a modest collection of rings and chains—nothing flashy, just enough shine to draw the eye. She wears these with purpose—a foil to her all-black ensembles. Both collections were curated over time to match our specific, evolving, opposite personalities—neither collection would be featured in a book like Victor Wynd’s Cabinet of Wonders, I think, when considering such substantial jewelry arsenals as that of my late grandmother’s. But modest collections are collections nonetheless; objects gathered from all over the world by an always-seeking raven-brain, brought back to the nest after careful inspection, skeptical consideration, many inner monologues, bargaining with inner demons, and repenting for our countless, varying sins.
Maybe you remember the first time encountering a substantial collection that really stunned you. A whacky aunt who just can’t pass up anything zebra print—or your cool cousin who races vintage pinewood derby cars every weekend, never the same one twice. Or maybe you’re like me—the lucky child of a toy collector. Maybe your town’s Santa raised you, too. My father could be found at all hours scoping the aisles of local supermarkets, turning Hot Wheel car cards over and over in his hands, weighing so much more than simply cardboard and plastic.
Because of this particular upbringing, my relationship to toys has always been complex and probably warped. The first step is acknowledgement, blah blah blah. In the introduction to Cabinet of Wonders, Wynd diagnoses himself as: an addict and hypochondriac; a loner who prefers debased, drunk, and debaucherous company; regretful; lustful; sick beyond help; in so many words, an unreliable narrator to the highest degree. I write this book as a warning to you not to waste your time and money accumulating countless objects, pictures, sculptures, and whatnot, things that normal people call ‘junk.’ What is junk to you—a dull bit of brown, broken bone, say—is to me a piece of the dodo, the most iconic of extinct birds. There are perhaps five people in the world who own dodo bones. Two of them bought theirs from me.
But I don’t believe that some people are simply immune to the thrill of collection; our personal interests drive all humans, on an extremely wide-ranging scale of internal sickness, to collect, to gather, to seek, find, bring back. My earrings, Verena’s chains. People who can’t pull themselves away from the nightly news. Facebook group moderators, stock market chasers. Consider those citizens who diligently read every single print issue of People, or Vogue. Another kind of obsession. Then there’s hoarding—a less mysterious symptom of our desire to have everything.
My childhood home wasn’t overrun with boxes or stacks of paper, yet this knowledge preceded my consciousness: toys are hidden in the ceiling. Toys are hidden under the floorboards. As children, my brother and I were asked to see the world as a separate entity from the lens through which we saw it; what happened in our house was not happening everywhere. Not everyone is paying the same kind of attention that we are. My parents made shit-sure that we understood: not everyone is a collector. This is our hobby. We care about this. Very few people do.
These facts, seemingly contradictory to a developing brain but also realistically co-existing, were innate to some degree—certainly learned from birth—and not foreign to my understanding of the world. But one sunny June afternoon, I went into my elderly neighbor’s house at her behest. Old enough to worry what might happen after following her down the seemingly pristine hallway, but young enough to curiously wander, transfixed—Come, she instructed, waving a gray and crooked finger over her shoulder for me to see, this way. She pushed open the door to a spare bedroom—absolutely packed with baby dolls and stuffed poodles, different shades of pink Beanie Babies, lace and stainless doilies, floral hurricane lamps, tiny perfume bottles, a doll house so full of small plastic dogs, they seemed to threaten a dogslide. A dog lahar. An avalanche of dogs.
What was this?
I knew what we called the habitual action constantly happening around our house: collecting. But if that was collecting, what was this? I don’t remember how I reacted, but in those graceless years of my youth, I probably said something absolutely brilliant like: oh . . . weird.
In trying to recall that particular memory from my mind’s foggy and densely overgrown forest, I remember my neighbor was childless. Her beloved husband had, at that point, been dead for a few years. I remember, just before she died, the yard sale where she gave away all her treasures for basically free. She loaded my arms with varying sizes of Brigette Beanie Babies, sent me home, then called me back to take more and more and more and more. Dolls with fluttering eyelids, dolls with butterflies in their perfectly curled hair. She handed me the most beautiful pink dog. Can’t I give you something for this? I asked, wide-eyed, knowing even then that I was getting too much for far too little. But she just winked at me.
My parents, I suppose, understood the implications. They loved the childless widow who lived across the street. So I did, too. And when she died, her belongings became more than just possessions, but sentimental attachments that have stayed with me through every big life change, every move, every hobby mutation. No matter what happens, I can always locate those Brigette Beanie Babies.
And what, the poet David Clewell writes, exactly, are those salt and pepper shaker people thinking? Many times in my life, I’ve considered abandoning my hobby—pursuing more lucrative, more exciting trophies of my gross American excess. Taxidermy, for example. Rescuing rare furs from Goodwill. Something along those lines. But when I finally get up the courage to throw everything out, I start by staring at my shelves and think: holy shit, but what about . . .
Perhaps my neighbor was fixated on her baby dolls for the same reason that I’m fixated on Hello Kitty and my father is fixated on Hot Wheels: we’re all trying to locate something lost. For my neighbor, I can only speculate that her desire for biological offspring motivated her collection of tiny porcelain children—the physical representation of her dreams. Similarly, my father and I find ourselves in perpetual pursuit of recapturing the essence of our respective childhoods. My father grew up wanting for much; now, in retirement, he’s able to fulfill many of his unresolved childhood wishes. And I—the poet whose parents and grandparents gave her everything—am trying desperately to rebuild the youthful shape of my innocence, piece by plastic piece.
But maybe this isn’t just a physical issue. If Wynd is correct in his hypothesis that collectors are artists, then the inverse might be equally true. Collector, poet, and artist are words we could use interchangeably. All poets—all artists, all writers—are in a constant state of collection. Our obsessions drive our search for meaning, and range from objects to moments to feelings to history and culture and more. I need beauty and the uncanny, the funny and the silly, the odd and the rare, Wynd writes. Rare and beautiful things are the barrier between me and a bottomless pit of misery and despair, my only defense against the world outside. Poets are obsessed with translating both seen and unseen beauties in the world around us. Collectors, obsessed with the endless possibility our world promises. Writers, obsessed with documentation. We insulate ourselves with what we love. We try to capture and recapture the magic in everything, never totally satisfied, never truly finished.
Maybe that’s the magic and mystery of poetry, the poet Danusha Laméris once mused. We say it one way, and though we end up with a good poem, it’s not what we meant to say. So we try to say it again, the way we meant to say it. And we just have to keep trying, because we’ll never quite say it the way we mean to.
We all have our obsessions. Our secret angels. Our recurring dreams. Artists are known omen magnets. Sometimes you’ll sit down to write and all you get is a memory, a sound, a nearby bird. Sometimes you go to sleep and see the bird again. Wake up and the bird is singing outside your window. See the bird on your way to work. Sit down to write a poem about the bird, then it flies into the side of your brick house. Falls down to the ground. Flat dead. Sometimes you think about that bird. Dream about that bird, the sound it used to make—a fractal of the collection of memories you call yourself.
Written by Kate Wylie
Artwork by: Verena Raban