On collecting
A gallery of the pages of my zine, “Connection.” It reads what drives us to collect? to categorize? to consume? consciousness is loneliness.
Collecting is one of the most common human hobbies across time and space, such that the number of ‘collectables’ approaches infinity. What drives us to collect?
I believe that it’s not greed that drives us, it’s loneliness. Consciousness is isolating. I am the only entity in existence who will ever experience how it feels to be me. I will never experience how it feels to be anything else. The gulf between myself and every other thing in the universe cannot be bridged.*
But I can put myself in relation with other forms. Collecting is a process of forming connections between oneself, the collectables and other collectors. It is a way of engaging with the world that helps us feel less alone.
I love having loose, incomplete collections of things. I am simultaneously awed and grounded by the diversity of existence.
But I cannot end this ramble without touching on the dark side of collecting. Human zoos serve as an example of collecting at its worst, a disgusting combination of colonization and capitalism fused by a desire to collect and categorize. Humans continue to be categorized to our detriment in a multitude of ways, not limited to race, gender, sexuality, nationality and medicalization.
I want us to be better at rejecting categories, at embracing the beauty of nuance, even when it’s complicated and messy, even if it’s less efficient, less “useful.” Categorization inherently generalizes and reduces entities so that they can fit neatly alongside other things that are not the same. This lumping together enables abuse and control and disables connection. The most meaningful connections come from engaging as individual entities with other individual entities that we see and appreciate for what they are, not what category they have been ascribed.
*I love intimacy because it’s the closest I can get to experience-sharing, to a mutual understanding that bridges the gaps between consciousnesses.
