Toe in the Water

The Natural Order of Things

The Natural Order of Things

Many years ago I used to smoke. And there came a time when the particular brand of cigarettes that I smoked began to include picture cards with each pack. Each card was one of a series of twenty-five and had a painting of a famous American beauty spot, with some information about the place on the back of the card. The paintings were brightly-colored and clear, nothing special, but quite attractive; a style that we might call "simplified photographic".

I quite liked the cards and started to collect them. Because there were so few in the series, I found eventually that I had several sets of them. They served no useful purpose, unless one considered the information they provided educational. But they were too nice to throw away. My little pile of cards grew from a thin stack to become a fat wad that sat beside my computer, constantly asking the question: What are you going to do with me?

It was a question I couldn’t answer. Try as I might, I just could not think of a use for those cards; yet they remained too nice to just dump in the garbage. I was trapped in indecision. I toyed with the idea of separating them into sets but that didn’t solve the problem of what to do afterwards.

Collecting seems to be a tendency for many people. Sometimes we can give reasons for starting a collection, an investment for the future, imposing order upon chaos, or creating a showcase of beautiful things. But often our collections spring from a deeper urge that is hard to pinpoint. My cigarette card collection fitted the last category, I think. There was no reason for it apart from, umm, it was nice.

Thinking about my motivation has led me to the conclusion that it was part of my liking for order. Life is messy. No matter how we plan and prepare and sort, life has a way of confounding our attempts and insists on being rather more untidy than we expect. There are some people who appear to have mastered this tendency; their houses are masterpieces of neatness and precision, everything having a place and remaining in it. Apart from the fact that one hesitates to enter such a home for fear that one might spoil it, the owners have to be admired for their control of objects within spaces.

Most of us aren't like that. We try, but things take on a life of their own to thwart our puny attempts at order. Magazines migrate from the rack to spread themselves on to chairs and tables and floors, videos multiply and start appearing in unexpected places, kids' toys wander everywhere through the house, tools never stay where you left them but turn up exactly where they're not needed. Our dreams of neatness are soon defeated by the chaotic tendencies of the world around us. We learn to live with it.

Normally I cope quite well with this rebelliousness of material things; I can live with disorder for long periods of time. But deep within me there must be some sort of drive to a better way for, every now and then, I will be overcome by an urge to impose order. The problem then becomes the vastness of the task; the entire environment is too big to be tackled. So I settle on one place where I can make a start and I tidy and clean and arrange until order reigns in that one small corner of the world.

At which point, I stop. The creation of an ordered spot within the whole chaotic universe is sufficient for me; it gives me something to focus upon to escape the general disorder, at least for a few days until things have begun to migrate and rearrange themselves.

It seems to me that my occasional collections of worthless stuff originate from the same impulse, this desire to have some ordered area in a constantly changing world. Take the cigarette cards, for instance. The moment I saw the first one, I knew that it could not be thrown away. A goal appeared on the horizon: to collect the whole series and thus create something that was neat, complete and ordered. The fact that the series was so small meant that I could not stop after completing one set; I just kept going.

And so my need to have a tiny piece of order in the messy universe was fulfilled in that stack of cards. As long as the little pile stayed obediently on one corner of my desk, the rest of the world was safe from my attempts to whip it into line. I was happy and so was all creation.

That's the theory, anyway. It is just as possible that I am merely obsessive-compulsive.

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