By Dr. Isaac Tylim

For the Herald

Have you ever asked yourself the reason for your collecting objects, recycling them, or merely hoarding them to a point you run out of space in your already crowded home?  Are you one of those who piles up stacks of the Buenos Aires Herald next to your bed refusing to throw the old issues out while vowing that one day you may need the unread articles? Do not despair: Madonna is not the only material being on this planet.

We are living in a material world where every minute a new object seduces us to believe that some obscure and enigmatic desire will be finally fulfilled — some day.  So you say “let me keep containers, papers, shopping bags, and old clothes for the anticipated yet unpredictable time when I may crave that old shirt grandpa Mo wore at his high school graduation.”

Sundays in San Telmo. Thousands rounding the square aiming at recovering lost memories on the surface of other people’s displayed treasures.  A tsunami of nostalgia overtakes the population of collectors who seem to grow at a Malthusian speed.  What is it about old objects that exert such power over regular, law-abiding citizens of all socio-economic classes?

A poem by Pablo Neruda may throw some light on the power of objects

Ode to Things (1997)

I have a crazy,
crazy love of things.
I like pliers,
and scissors.
cups,
rings,
and bowl-
not to speak, of course,
of hats.
I love
all things,
not just
the grandest,
also
the infinitely
small-
thimbles,
spurs,
 
plates,
and flowers vases.

Oh yes,
the planet
is sublime!
.......
everything,
I mean, that is made
by the hand of man, every little thing:
shapely shoes,
and fabric,
and each new
bloodless birth
of gold eyeglasses
........
Mankind has
built
oh so many
perfect
things!
.......
I love
all things,
not because they are passionate
or sweet-smelling
but because,
I don’t know;
because
this ocean is yours,
and mine
........
all bear
the trace of someone’s fingers
on their handle or surface,
the trace of a distant hand
lost
in the depth of forgetfulness
.......
 
Neruda was a gleaner.  He loved to pick up objects washed out by the Pacific Ocean at the shore of his beach house. One morning while having breakfast with his wife, he noticed a piece of heavy wood being tossed by huge waves.  He turned to his wife and said, “Here comes my desk‘.

Gleaners collect ugly and beautiful objects rescuing them from bleak urban or suburban landscapes.

Unlike the poet Pablo Neruda, who sings to the beauty of common objects one may encounter in daily life, a friend or neighbour who is infatuated with chosen objects he or she pursues with an obsession that borders in the pathological. The admired object bears the trace of someone’s fingers or someone’s hands from another time and space.  Browsing at the flea market may be regarded as strolling on memory lane or walking on the boulevard of broken dreams.

A porcelain figure may contain the past in the immutability of its presence. Collectable items are appointed guards that protect us from that which vanishes, or tends to be forgotten.  These objects are like places of memory, which are not mental but corporeal.

Freud was a serious collector of antiquities. He began collecting soon his father died. Collecting objects for Freud was linked to his addiction to travel. Freud’s interests in objects followed repeated disappointment in human caretakers.

Object collecting not unlike travelling are unmistakable related to mourning. Freud often treated the objects he collected as animated things. He liked to stroke animal figures. Moreover, Freud wrote about the blurring of boundaries between persons and things in the protagonist of Jensen’s novella, Gradiva.  In this work the hero falls in love with a piece of statuary, the Gradiva that depicts a young woman with an unusual, high stepping gait. The impact of the Gradiva on the creator of psychoanalysis finds its most striking testimony in the fact that Freud hung a cast of the Gradiva relief at the entry to his Hempstead consulting room.

To many souls objects are needed for survival — that is psychological not physical survival. So thousands roam around country roads looking for auctions, garage sales, flee markets with the hope of finding rare objects. Rare objects harbour the capacity of opening the past in the present; they nurture the illusion that the finder may drink from the fountain of youth.

Bruce Chatwin — author of Anatomy of Restleness, In Patagonia, The Songlines — was an international art appraiser who became disillusioned with how the Western World overvalued objects. He gave up a brilliant career devoted to art objects spending the rest of his brief but rich life travelling around the globe. He viewed art auctions as having the quality of an arcane ceremony of mystic love.  An altar and a pulpit, the missals of service, the priest, his acolytes, the sacrament proffered, the complex relationship between the priest-lover and the suitors, the esoteric numerology — all were to him elements of contemporary auctions: a stage, the auctioneer, the costumers, the sacred object of art, the number/ price.

Here lies the power of objects providing intimations of immortality disguising loss under a veneer of eternal value. Of course, there is something ironic in the fact that most objects will survive its owner, from gold rings, to a pair boots, or even a 2-cent plastic non-biodegradable supermarket bag. Chatwin also wrote: “I have often noticed that in the really great collections the best objects congregate like a host of guardians angels around the bed, and the bed itself is pitifully narrow.  The true collector houses a corps of inanimate lovers...”

Chatwin observed a differential between nomads and settlers relationships to objects. He studied the Australian aborigines and their movements through a labyrinth of invisible pathways known as Songlines or Dreaming Tracks.  Chatwin made a plea for a wandering life. To Chatwin collectors are voyeurs of life who display tender emotions toward objects and coldness toward people. Chatwin describes the morality of the collector as “morality of things” (Chatwin, 1996 p.172). He added, “possessed objects express the personality of their owners,” adding that all civilizations are “thing-oriented.”

Chatwin travelled extensively to the most remote areas of the world with a small bag and a notebook. He would reappear unannounced to his wife in London or Provence. Cook a meal, see a few friends, and take off again. He believed that men should own no possessions but those he can conveniently carry. In In Patagonia, Chatwin reflects on the Yaghan Indians of Tierra del Fuego who were not allowed by their mother to hoard things.

Yet the power of objects continues to rule.

One more time I invoke Neruda to my aid

I pause in house,
streets and
elevators,
touching things,
identifying objects
that I secretly covet:
this one because it rings,
that one because
it ’s as soft
as the softness of a woman’s hip,
that one there for its deep-sea colour,
and that one for its velvet feel.