Lost and Found: A TEDxYouth Talk on Collecting

Lost and Found: A TEDx Talk on Collecting

• Atari Cartridges 
• The Best American Poetry Anthologies
• Blu-Rays
• Board Games
• Cacti
• Cassettes
• Comic Books
• Compact Discs
• Dice
• Dinosaur Books
• Dinosaur Toys
• DVDs
• Encyclopedias of Monsters, Dragons, Fairies, Giants, Demons, etc.
• Fantasy Miniatures
• Fossil Sharks’ Teeth
• Golden Books Field Guides
• Horror Movie Magazines
• Insects
• Kinnikuman figures
• Lego
• Marbles
• Marvel Action Figures
• Official Handbooks of the Marvel Universe (Deluxe and A-to-Z editions)
• Poetry Books
• Science Fiction and Fantasy Paperbacks
• Seashells
• Socks
• Star Wars toys
• Ticket Stubs
• VHS Movies
• Video Games
• Vinyl Records
• Vintage Dungeons & Dragons Books
• World Coins
• Zoids

That was an alphabetical catalog of some of the things I have collected in my life.

When I say collected, I mean found. Found on beaches and in secondhand shops and on auction websites.  Found, and kept, and treasured. I’ve spent a significant amount of money just on supplies in which to keep my collections. I guess you could say I’m also a collector of boxes and jars, trays and cases, plastic sleeves and archival bags.

There's a joke among those of us who collect things that the difference between a collector and a hoarder is a matter of shelf space.

I’ve been thinking and writing about my various collections for long enough now that I know there’s more to it than just space.  

The German philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin, in his essay “Unpacking My Library,” wrote,  “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”

A passion: a fervent love, a single-minded pursuit, an ecstatic emotion. But also, don’t forget—passion means suffering.  So collecting as a pastime is part proclivity, part pain. And Benjamin, I think, is suggesting that for him (a book collector) the love and the suffering come from the friction between the satisfying order of the collector’s shelf and the overwhelming disorder of the collector’s memory.  The difference between an object being lost and knowing exactly where to find it when you want it.  The pleasure of having the rare and the meaningful close at hand, and the pain of lugging it around with you whenever you have to move.

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”

And don’t get freaked out by that word, “chaos.”  Remember, we’re talking about borders.  Passion borders on complete and utter disorder–but it’s not quite there.  When I think about the chaos of memories, I think about predictability. How sometimes we can’t remember something that we desperately need to–someone’s name, a password, where we left those keys. And sometimes memories will come to us completely unbidden, triggered by a smell or a certain slant of light.  

Collecting provides a way to predictably access those random memories, using things.

What I would add to Benjamin’s idea is that the story of any collector and their collection is tragic. Because, sure, I’ll “pass along” my record collection and games and stuff to my kids someday, or sell the stuff to some other collector on eBay, or maybe just leave it at the garbage dump, but these things, these objects, will never pluck those images and scenes and feelings from the “chaos” of someone else’s memory the way they do from mine.

Let me give you an example.

Now, keep in mind–this isn’t a story, this isn’t a cause-and-effect plot. There’s no message, no lesson learned, no clarification. This is what Benjamin means by the chaos of memories, I think. That even as I talk through what I remember when I find an object in my collection, I am remembering a hundred other things too.

This is a fossil shark’s tooth. It’s millions of years old, and comes from an extinct species of White Shark called Carcharocles auriculatus. I found it, one day, maybe 35 years ago, on a beach in North Carolina.

When I hold it in my hand, I can feel the hot, dry sand of Topsail Island under my feet. We had been walking from the arcade and mini golf course back up the beach to our rented cottage.  I can see my friends–Peter, Raitis, Frankie, and my brother Jon–walking way ahead of me on the beach.  I remember actually crying out in excitement when I spotted this enormous tooth in the sand, and trying to get their attention by calling them over the Atlantic breeze and roar of the surf.  No one could hear me.  I just smiled and clutched the tooth in my palm. I made a gesture at picking up the pace, but in case there were more teeth to be found, I slowed again, and took my time to span the few kilometers between the arcade and the cottage.

This is the freedom of summer. The bleeps and blurbs of the Galaga and Ghosts n’ Goblins and Gauntlet arcade machines at the mini golf course. My love for my friends.  My childhood dream of becoming a paleontologist (a collector whose passion borders on the chaos of the memory of the earth itself, it seems to me). The thrill of being the one who spotted the magnificent fossil on an island literally crawling with beachcombers. The amazement that it was just sitting on the surface up on the dry sand by the dunes, instead of in the tumble of surf.  

Back further now.

My mom shook me gently awake.

It was barely dawn. The sunrise reddened the horizon over the Atlantic, and in the dim light, I could hear the waves rush and hiss.

“Good morning! The tide is out,” she whispered, and beckoned me toward the living room of our rental apartment where my flip-flops waited by the door.

Earlier in the week, she had studied the tide table to choose which morning would be best for beachcombing. Mom wanted to go out before all the old ladies with their Wonder bread bags could find all the good shells that had been washed up overnight.

I rolled out of bed and took her hand. A quick brushing of teeth and we stepped out into the salt air and orange light of  morning.

The beach was completely smooth and still cool. Mom walked next to me, carrying her coffee, tracing the sinuous line where the last wave had reached and receded.  When she spotted something, she’d dig with her big toe underneath it and I would reach to pick it up.

We found coquinas, olives, lightning whelks, shark’s eye moon snails.

And one–just one–tiny, chocolate-colored, tideworn fossil tooth.  

I’ve never stopped combing beaches for them, to this day, forty years later.

I found that Carcharocles tooth on a beach in 1989.

We lost Mom on Thanksgiving Day, 2019.

Here’s another artifact. 

This is the first fantasy miniature I ever painted: a hobbit on a pony, made of lead made by Grenadier Models. I painted him with a set of paints originally meant for a paint-by-numbers kit that revealed a zebra on the savannah–hence the limited palette of tan, olive green, black, white, and yellow. I got it for Christmas one year from my brother, as part of a box set of figures for Dungeons & Dragons. The first I ever owned.

When I feel its weight in my hand, I can see my best friend, Raitis, who I’ve known for almost fifty years.  Sitting side by side at my dad’s old office desk, which we’d moved into my bedroom, teaching ourselves how to paint.  Chatting, listening to Q107 on the radio. The song is “With or Without You.” I can see the flecks of dried paint on the tan surface of the desk. Hear the squeak of the matching office chair.

Now, a shift in time and space.

I can see his older brother, Valdis, who was in some ways my older brother too; the three of us are laying on Valdis’ bedroom floor, listening to “Stairway to Heaven” on vinyl. We are not allowed to talk during what Valdis calls a “sacred song.” I can see us staying up way past midnight, telling stories and philosophizing in the midnight kitchen.  We’re eating pasta that we cooked, with butter and salt.  I can see us gathering around their enormous dining table to play old-school role playing games like this one–known among old gamers as “Blue Book Basic D&D.”

I used to pull a copy from Valdis’ collection and study like a textbook from school, memorizing the names of monsters and medieval weapons. 

When I hold that book today, I can see myself standing on the thick blue rug in Valdis’s room, poring over the black and white drawings of mind flayers and rust monsters, pole axes and morning stars.

I found that miniature under the Christmas tree in 1982. 

I found this copy of Blue Book Basic in 1995 at a used bookshop.

We lost Valdis, in 2018, way too young, to cancer.   

Ever since I got a copy of She's So Unusual for my eleventh birthday, I’ve been collecting music. I’ve probably bought and sold or given away more music than most people have ever owned in the first place.

I think that the record that I treasure most, though, is one that I almost never listen to.

It’s this.

The most terrifying thing I’d ever heard, or seen, when I was eight or nine years old.

Mom brought Ghostly Sounds home one Halloween to provide a soundtrack to our trick-or-treat party.  We had a wire record rack that sat on the floor in my Dad’s home office. I used to keep this right in the front, with the cover–this horrifying, cheesy cover–always watching me when I passed by on my way to bed.  

One night, this top-hatted, bat-wing-eared vampire scared me so badly that I screamed in terror when it was time for lights-out.  I was convinced it was coming up the driveway to creep through the window. I remember Dad rushing into the room to find out what was wrong, and his utter bewilderment that I was terrified of this silly record cover.  

“Why don’t you just put it in the back, where you don’t have to look at it?” he asked.  

Because I couldn’t look away, that’s why.

This record was the first cold evening of autumn.  The smell of wood fires in the air.  I can see my grandmother patiently helping me trace the skeletons and trolls on the cover onto onion skin typing paper, to make awkward cutouts I taped in our windows.  It’s the rubber cyclops mask I bought from Dream Wizards. It’s anticipation of the night when we were free to run amok in the neighborhood and demand candy from folks next door.  Mr. Cooper who always gave out dimes or toothbrushes instead of candy.

And I can see Dad, who always took us around to trick-or-treat, waiting patiently at the foot of every driveway, with his powerful red flashlight, smoking and drinking bourbon with his friend Tommy. The same way he would patiently wait for us outside the comics shop, wait through so many bad monster movies, wait as we screamed through Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theater and Arcade at birthday parties.

Wait for me to go to sleep when I was scared of a record cover in the night.

I found this copy of Ghostly Sounds on eBay in 2004.

I lost Dad a few days before my forty-seventh birthday.

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”

So the world, and our lives, always drift toward chaos.  We lose, and we find. We have, and we leave behind.

And maybe I am always looking to find the next thing–the next figure, the next record, the next comic book, to feel that thrill of not just discovery, but recovery.  When I add to my collections, in some ways, I feel like I’m taking something back. 

In the back of my mind, though, it’s still tragic.  My collections are bound for oblivion, just as, ultimately, my memories are, sooner or later. And yet, there’s no stopping me from stooping over on a beach to pick up a seashell, or flipping through a bin of records at a flea market, or scrolling through listings on ebay for vintage games until way too late at night. Because even if all these things will ultimately be lost again, when I can hold a tooth or a record or a beaten-up old book, I can, just for a moment, recover anything, and anyone, I have ever lost.