Now for something completely different. Longtime visitors to this blog may remember Richard Bready's evocative poem "Times of Sand" from 3 August 2009; many of you will have noticed his erudite comments on various posts — very often a learning experience for me as I follow in the directions his encyclopaedic knowledge points to. I've been pestering him to write another guest post for quite a while and he has finally succumbed to the pressure, inspired by Kate Clover's remarks on sand collecting.
So, without further ado, the return of the polymath whose multiple interests conveniently happen to include geology and sand:
It Sorts, They Gather, We Collect
A biscuit tin filled with dirt: poorly sorted alluvial sand and clay, red with iron oxidized by the Triassic atmosphere. How did an object so undistinguished enter the collection of a museum in Baltimore, Maryland, USA? Answer: this dirt was gathered at the spot, also in Baltimore, where Babe Ruth first stood to bat as a professional baseball player. And the museum occupies Ruth’s birthplace.
“Why do people collect?” asks Kate Clover. Association provides one reason; this dirt matters to people because it once bore a hero. A bottle of grains gathered on a Hawaiian beach holds the time spent there, a stopped sandglass. The souvenir urge is so strong that Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona prohibits all removals, however small, while local superstition warns that illegal petrified wood brings bad luck. Fortunately, sand is typically plentiful.
Further association, with other similar items, brings a change in status. Your bottle of sand, my bottle of sand, are souvenirs; together, they form a collection and invite others to join. We can discuss them, note similarities and differences, offer them for exchange. We can try to understand what we have picked up. So we become collectors.
Virginia Woolf wrote a story, Solid Objects, about a man who abandons a promising political career to seek stones, broken bits of china, lumps of glass. He does not know why he seeks them so obsessively, or even what he seeks until he finds it. All he knows is that each new treasure embodies its own kind of beauty, making the quest worthwhile. He is an artist, but he is not a collector.
The true collector values objects but swears by categories. Satisfaction requires the objects to belong to a pre-existing classification. Do not expect the specialist in hand-blown pre-Prohibition whisky bottles[1] to thank you for any other empty. Some collectors possess only memories and lists: birds seen in the back yard, seen from the car, seen on television. Lists mark the true collector.
Except to artists and innocents, information defines the collectible’s value. Consider Antiques Roadshow: “What you have here is not just a tattered piece of cloth but a cockade worn at the coronation of Queen Victoria”—yes, I am making this up—“and so worth buckets of money.” Though Woolf’s treasure hunter would not have the shabby thing in his rooms. Collectors in a new category know that the value of their holdings, and the prices of new acquisitions, will shoot up as soon as someone publishes a book or creates a Web site explaining and classifying these objects.[2]
Children of collectors, my brothers and I spent more time in shops than we enjoyed. To amuse ourselves, we would study some randomly chosen piece, wait until the proprietor was near us, pretend not to notice, then murmur, “I wonder if they know?” And leave the shop.
Pursuit of possessions, pursuit of information, bring the collector together with the scholar, and both with the obsessive. Is there a better portrait of the collector who needs one item to complete his set than “the monomaniac old man,” Captain Ahab? “His delirious but still methodical scheme” to find Moby-Dick leads him to chart “all tides and currents” until he can predict the migratory patterns of whales around the world.
Unlike accumulators, collectors love arranging their collections. Their need to classify, to create and fulfill taxonomies—shouldn’t we speak of OCO, Obsessive Compulsive Order?—may display in dramatic ways a quality central to intelligence, even to life itself: improbability.
You could gather newspapers by keeping them every day, but the sense of accomplishment would be limited. Copies of successful books are not hard to obtain.[3] The comic strip Doonesbury depicts a wealthy rock musician collecting stamps: “Send me Belgium. Yes, everything.” The collector’s categories make acquisitions more rare and more thrilling. The collector’s triumphs are black swans, white whales—singular events among a widely distributed average. (As mathematicians say, one person’s mean is another’s Poisson distribution.)
The study of probability began in questions posed by 17th-century gamblers, who presumably knew like gamblers today the psychology of intermittent reward on an unpredictable schedule: it’s hard to quit. Reporting Catherine Winstanley’s experiment to recreate gambling behavior in animals, the writer notes:
Reward systems in humans and other animals evolve to help us learn how and where to get and maintain access to primary rewards like food, shelter and sex. "When we gamble, that network is hijacked by that extraneous -- that is, non-essential -- reward," Winstanley said. "Then all of our behaviours become focused on attaining that [gambling rush or win] rather than on the things that help us to survive."
Research into human learning suggests that intermittent rewards fuel behaviours that are harder to extinguish than predictable rewards. Since you never know when the next reward is coming, it could be the very next card that brings the rush of reward. Or it could be the time after that.
As Dorothy Parker lamented, “Some men, some men, cannot pass a book shop.” Because any book shop might contain an autographed copy of Poe’s Tamerlane (not a successful book, fewer than 30 copies known to exist, only two signed)—or that long-sought, not-on-the-Internet, needed-to-complete-the-set volume of Tintin. Or it could be the book shop after that.[4]
Evolving as hunter/gatherers, humans grew steadily better at finding and recognizing their quarry. They grew better at remembering where and when to look for what they needed. At the peak of natural selection, a collector can recognize a single unique flower in a field. Or note, as collector Charles Darwin did, special features in the beaks of finches.
The foraging hominid, the lepidopterist, the professional gambler, needs to be more than a good noticer. “You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” Survival, fame, and big money depend on pattern recognition, pattern exceptions.
Intelligence orders experience. It selects, and thinks of Nature as doing the same. Intelligence gathers (intelligent has a possible source in Latin interligare, tie together); it separates (or in intellegere, to judge between things). Intelligence recollects: Robert Trivers, Steven Pinker, and others suggest that social animals need to recognize each other readily so that they know who in their gatherings is likely to help them, and who will try to cheat.[5] The word category comes from agora, the Greek marketplace, linked to Greek verbs meaning “to speak in public” and “to gather.” Social animals exchange goods and ideas.
Life orders matter. As if they were Maxwell’s Demons, foraminifera selectively gather the glass sheets and flakes they use as integument. Researchers are grateful: “They effectively concentrated the glass samples for us!” Organisms combat entropy’s jumble with genetic information and physical form, “evade the decay to equilibrium” by “continually sucking orderliness” from the environment (Schrödinger, What Is Life). Ilya Prigogine argues that recognition of self-organizing entitities and systems, acting beyond determinism, is a fundamental advance in our concepts of biological and physical science.
Many physical processes do yield surprisingly orderly results. Sorting, for example. “Sand, like all granular materials, dislikes being mixed and will find endless ways of sorting itself out into its components.” Self-organization, for example. “Systems displaying this behaviour exist on the boundary between stability and instability, order and chaos, . . . definitely not characterised by randomness.” Saltation, for example. “Why did [dunes] absorb nourishment and continue to grow instead of allowing the sand to spread out evenly over the desert as finer dust grains do?” Ralph Bagnold’s question explicitly likens the organized to the organic. In the other direction, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson collects a myriad of organisms to display “the mechanical phenomena which are profoundly associated with Life, and inseparable from our understanding of Growth and Form.”
In my own pursuit, order makes rhyming formal verse more interesting to me than free verse. Formal or free, the language of poetry is highly organized and highly improbable. Consider: Zipf’s Law states that real-life word usage frequency follows a power law distribution.[6] Rare words are very rare. Among the most popular poems in English, however, the word darkling, elsewhere as scarce as an American robin surrounded by British twitchers, is practically standard.[7]
Poems and novels, dramas and stories and movies, organize experience and give it the appearance of pattern--or sometimes the self-conscious irony of disorder, pattern denied.[8] Popular fiction, sold by category, delivers payoff in recognition: disease diagnosed, crime solved, case closed, neat and tidy. “Now produce your explanation, and pray make it improbable,” wrote Wilde. He collected blue and white china, a carefully sorted clay[9] colored with cobalt.
(This is the first piece Richard Bready has written specifically for a blog since he retired.)
[1] My father. These are now in the Maryland Hall of Records.
[2] I am not making this up. As reported in Private Eye Number 1285.
[3] “The book jackets often are as expensive as the books themselves, conveying the idea of pristine purity--which of course means sterility as far as the cognitive content of the book is concerned, because the less read it is, the more valuable it becomes to collectors,” observes economist Michael Hudson.
[4] Woolf expresses this fixation:
...the determination to possess objects that even surpassed these tormented the young man. He devoted himself more and more resolutely to the search. If he had not been consumed by ambition and convinced that one day some newly-discovered rubbish heap would reward him, the disappointments he had suffered, let alone the fatigue and derision, would have made him give up the pursuit. Provided with a bag and a long stick fitted with an adaptable hook, he ransacked all deposits of earth; raked beneath matted tangles of scrub; searched all alleys and spaces between walls where he had learned to expect to find objects of this kind thrown away. As his standard became higher and his taste more severe the disappointments were innumerable, but always some gleam of hope, some piece of china or glass curiously marked or broken lured him on.
[5] Joanna Lumley, writing in Punch:
I am sometimes asked to officiate at charity jumble sales...I warn them with quiet insistence that I will not be making a speech...once when I did attempt a few words...I saw at the far end of the hall a stout, tweed-coated woman had jumped the gun and was negotiating in whispers over the price of a Coalport tureen. So now, barely pausing by the microphone to shout, “Good afternoon it’s open,” I hurl myself, elbows out, into the crowd of human locusts.
[6] Benford’s law describes a similar distribution of digits in “real-life” numerical data.
[7] Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” might have been written to contrast life’s self-actuating force and the entropic heat death of the universe—but probably not.
[8] Or the yet more self-conscious irony of pattern excessively fulfilled, as when Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opens with coin flips producing ninety-two consecutive heads.
[9] To quote Samuel Parkes (and share his hope):
The tribute which an elegant modern poet [Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles] has paid to the peculiar industry and genius of this very eminent man [porcelain manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood] is so just, and at the same time so beautiful, that, I do hope, no reader of taste will blame me for its insertion.
Gnomes ! as you now dissect with hammers fine
The granite rock, the noduled flint calcine ;
Grind with strong arm the circling chertz (sic) betwixt
Your pure Kaolins and Petuntzes mixt ;
O'er each red saggar's burning cave preside,
The keen-eyed fire nymphs blazing by your side.
And pleased on Wedgwood ray your partial smile,
A new Etruria decks Britannia's isle.
Wilde’s china was doubtless Chinese, however, not from Wedgwood’s Etruria factory.
