The Natural Order of Things

I smoke. Not from excessive brain activity or a general tendency towards spontaneous combustion, but because I happen to be addicted to nicotine. And, before I even start this post, let me say that I am aware that smoking is a disgusting habit and is very bad for my health. My advice to everyone is to give it up if you've started or don't start if you haven't. It really isn't worth the hassle.

That's the disclaimer out of the way; now perhaps we can get busy on the post.

A few months back, the particular brand of cigarettes that I smoke began to include picture cards with each pack. Each card is one of a series of twenty-five and has a painting of a famous American beauty spot, with some information about the place on the back of the card. The paintings are 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 are so few in the series, I find that I now have several sets of them. They serve no useful purpose, unless one considers the information they provide educational, but they're nice. Too nice to throw away. My little pile of cards has grown from a thin stack to become a fat wad that sits beside my computer, constantly asking the question: What are you going to do with me?

It's a question I can't answer. Try as I might, I just cannot think of a use for these cards; yet they remain too nice to just dump in the garbage. I am trapped in indecision. I toy with the idea of separating them into sets but this doesn'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 fits the latter category, I think. There is no reason for it apart from, umm, it's nice.

Thinking about my motivation has led me to the conclusion that it's a 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 expected. 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 re-arrange 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 now my need to have a tiny piece of order in the messy universe is fulfilled in this stack of cards. As long as this little pile stays obediently on one corner of my desk, the rest of the world is safe from my attempts to whip it into line. I'm happy and so is all creation.

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


Tags: Collections; Order; Chaos.

Emigration Blog

ISAY's comment to this post has reminded me that we were going to establish some form of reciprocity between her blog and mine. She is writing about her experiences and thoughts as a recent emigrant from the States to England and, since I'm doing the same thing except the other way around, we figured it made sense to reference each other.

Click on the heading to this addition to today's post and it will take you to ISAY's blog, Emigration Blog. Have a read; it's fascinating stuff, full of memories for me and a good insight into what it means to be an American living in Britain. She writes well, too.