Collectibles

A couple of days ago my writer friend, Vivienne Tuffnell, posted a link to a blog called Cazadora.  Vivienne is a stunningly good writer, and her books are lovely and poignant and atmospheric, and you should all add her to your TBR list immediately.  (Seriously.  She's that good.)

Viv and I share a great many interests, and what she posts is unfailingly interesting, so I checked out the link.  The blog is owned by the writer Elsie Morales, and this particular entry is entitled "Why Do We Collect Things?"  It's a fascinating question, because collecting stuff -- everything from action figures to coins to mantelpiece tchotchkes -- is, on the face of it, the most pointless occupation imaginable.

When I was a teenager, I collected postage stamps.  I was pretty serious about it.  The ones that fascinated me the most were the old stamps, some of them from countries that no longer exist.

A 1900 overprint stamp from the Orange Free State, now part of the Republic of South Africa [Image is in the Public Domain]

I learned a great deal of history and geography from stamp collecting.  More, it must be said, than I did in most of my history classes.  There was something so tangible about it.  I could see the progression in the 1920s of stamps in Germany going from one Mark to ten to hundreds to millions to billions, as hyperinflation made the Weimar Republic's currency essentially worthless -- one of the factors that contributed to the rise of Hitler and the eventual horror of World War II.  Stamps from the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s were a mute testimony to the nationalism and militarism of the Stalin and Khrushchev years, with their colorful designs celebrating Soviet advances in space science, engineering, and agriculture (and, of course, conveniently overlooking the awful authoritarianism that was propelling it all).  During the same period, colonies in Africa became free nations, many of them changing their names (in the case of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, several times), and all of that was recorded in the stamps those countries issued.

Of course, for me, the point wasn't learning history and geography; that just came as an added benefit.  My fascination was the curious designs, and (sometimes) different languages and scripts -- even the strange words the stamp books used to describe the colors they were printed in, such as carmine and bistre and vermilion and lake and ultramarine.  The biggest draw, though, was the thought that these had been handled by people back then actually to send a letter.  I have a piece of paper that someone had affixed to an envelope in Bulgaria in 1911 to mail -- what?  A payment to a bill collector?  A newsy letter to a family member?  An official piece of correspondence to a business?  A secret romantic note to a lover?

Could have been any of the above.  The possibilities are endless.

In fact, that's connected to why I finally gave up collecting.  In the 1980s, a lot of countries realized that philately was a booming and potentially lucrative hobby, and started issuing thousands of "stamps for collectors" -- glorified stickers, honestly -- that were never intended to be used as postage.  Many, in fact, were "pre-cancelled" to prevent anyone from using them to mail stuff.  The market was flooded with pretty designs of flowers and famous people and cute animals, and the whole reality of what postage stamps are kind of evaporated.

So did my interest.

Man, capitalism sucks, sometimes.

I still have my collection, though -- the dozens of binders I have with stamps going back to the mid-1800s.  And I still find it all fascinating, even if I don't actively collect anymore.

In any case, Morales has a very cool take on where this impulse comes from.  (I really encourage you all to read her blog post -- linked above -- and also subscribe to her Substack, because it's awesome.)  She writes:

[T]he things we keep and arrange become part of our environment, identity, and how we communicate with the world, both as individuals and as societies.  Collecting is a deeply meaning-making activity: it weaves memories and longing into the everyday spaces we inhabit...  In a nutshell: Even the most mundane object (an old concert ticket, a pencil eraser) matters if it tells a story or sparks a memory.

I think this is spot-on, and it also gets at the heart of why we shouldn't be embarrassed about our fascination with strange stuff.  How often have you heard people follow up a comment like, "I collect Matchbox Cars" with something like "... I know it's pretty silly."  Well, of course it's silly.  But who cares?  That's the whole point.  The only relevant question is "Does it make you happy?"

If so, then you should happily indulge in it.  This world is already filled with enough narrow, hyper-serious ultra-practicality.  Why shouldn't we engage in pointless activities that bring us joy?  And why should we worry if someone else enjoys a different set of pointless activities?

Here's to pointlessness, my friends.  I swear, the world would be a far, far better place if more people spent their time doing stuff like trainspotting or geocaching or painting miniatures or building model train setups or making their home paneling out of old yardsticks.

Embrace your hobbies, and most importantly, don't apologize for them.  They're part of what makes us unique.  Hobbies give us a respite from the stresses of the world, and help us to find like-minded individuals.  Basically: do what makes you happy, and don't worry if others don't understand.

So maybe I should break out my stamp collection and take a look at it.  It's been at least five years since I've done so much as taking the binders off the shelf.  Maybe I should even get back into filling in some of the gaps.  It'd be a better use of my time than obsessing over the damn news, anyhow.

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Ringing the changes

I find human behavior absolutely baffling a lot of the time.

I've spent a significant fraction of my life thinking, "Why did (s)he do/say that?"  One positive result of this is that it's turned me into a dedicated observer of the other members of my species.  Even so, I have to say that my efforts have, on the whole, been a failure.  After 64 years on this planet I'm no closer to figuring out why people act the way they do than I was on day one.

Mind you, I'm not saying all the behavior is bad.  It's just that a lot of it is weird.  Take, for example, the English practice of change ringing, one subset of a larger topic called campanology -- the study of bells.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Keichwa at German Wikipedia., Poppenreuth-glocke-1695, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"Ringing the changes" involves taking a sequence of tuned bells and using them to ring a series of patterned mathematical permutations.  So with six bells -- numbered from 1 (the highest-pitched) to 6 (the lowest) -- it might start with a straight cadence down the scale, 1-2-3-4-5-6.  But from there?

One possibility is called a "Plain Bob Minor" (being England, all of the patterns have extremely creative and quirky names), in which each bell takes a turn working its way down the sequence and then back up, and the rules are (1) no sequence can happen twice, and (2) each bell can only switch on each subsequent sequence by a single position.  Here's a part of the Plain Bob Minor pattern, following the positions of the #1 and #2 bells with blue and red lines, respectively:

As you can see, the pattern is mathematical; in fact, whole books have been written analyzing the math of change ringing.  And let me tell you, it's complex.

I first ran into change ringing in the wonderful mystery novel The Nine Tailors by the brilliant British author Dorothy Sayers.  The whole story revolves around it; even the chapters are named after change-ringing patterns, often involving clever puns (Sayers is at her sparkling, intellectual best in this book).  Despite being fairly good at math, how the patterns work (on the larger scale) escapes me; but -- amazingly -- practicing change-ringers have entire sequences memorized.

This is even more astonishing when you consider that a "Full Peal of Seven" -- seven tuned bells -- has 7! (seven factorial, or 5,040) different permutations, each of which has to be rung in its proper place. 

Ringing a Full Peal of Seven takes over three hours.

Here's a group of people doing a sequence called "Jump Changes," which requires twelve bells.  Fear not, this is only a small part of the sequence.  A Full Peal of Twelve would (literally) take years to ring.

What strikes me about change ringing is that although it's mathematically and historically interesting, it's not very interesting to listen to.  At least not for me.  Because a Full Peal goes through all possible permutations, it includes some that sound pretty random.  And long sequences just kind of go on and on.  And on.

In the case of Full Peals of Twelve, AND ON AND ON AND ON.

So it seems like kind of an odd hobby.  Don't get me wrong; I'm glad people are keeping it up.  For one thing, if you watched that video, you probably noticed that change ringing would be really good for building upper-body strength.  For another, it's a piece of English culture that goes back centuries, and it would be sad if it died out.  But more than that, I love that people are so devoted to something so purely weird.

I might not get why this pastime appeals to you, but more power to you if it does.  Hell, if I can spend my time making ceramic Doctor Who figurines, you can be deeply invested in memorizing mathematical patterns of bell ringing.

Maybe I don't understand all the strange side alleys of human behavior, but I definitely encourage them.  The world would be a far happier place if more people devoted their energy into odd and pointless, but entirely harmless, hobbies, rather than using it to figure out how to make groups of people they don't like as miserable as possible.

So hooray for weirdness.  Be proud of what you love, even if other people don't approve.  I was told over and over when I was a child, "No one wants to hear about that," whenever I talked about stuff I was interested in.  The experience left me with a lifelong reluctance to talk to people about what I love most.

And how sad is that?

So let your freak flag fly.  You collect bottle caps?  Cool!  You're a geocacher?  Awesome!  You carve little statues out of bars of soap?  Amazing!  We need more of that kind of thing, and less of... *gestures around vaguely at everything*

Time to ring the changes on your own individuality.  Proudly.

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Bird is the word

Dave Barry once quipped, "There is a fine line between a hobby and a mental illness."

In my case, that line is a little blurry sometimes.  My dad used to say about me that I was the type of person who would test the depth of a river with both feet.  I'm fascinated with genealogy (at latest count, my family tree database contains almost 115,000 names).  Since getting back into running last year, I have done ten 5K races and try to run or cycle every single day.  I've been passionate about music since, no lie, I was three years old.  And then there's birds...

This last-mentioned obsession is what is taking me away from New York (and from Skeptophilia) for ten days.  I'm leaving tomorrow morning for my very favorite place in the world, the highlands of Ecuador, for a hiking and birding expedition into the cloud forests.  Our home base will be Mindo, a little town northwest of the capital city of Quito, which I visited last time I was there (fifteen years ago), and which to this day is the most beautiful place I've ever seen.  I've been a lot of places, but Mindo is one of the only ones that I truly, honestly could happily move to permanently and never look back.

Among the birds I hope to see are the Golden Tanager...

... the Flame-faced Tanager...

... the Violet-tailed Sylph...

... the Masked Trogon...

... and the Purple Honeycreeper.

[all images courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Along the way, I hope to hike through some beautiful places and make some new friends.

So anyhow, I'll see y'all when I return on July 20.  I'll post some of my own photographs -- none, I'm sure, as nice as the ones above -- but at least enough to give you an idea of what this spectacular corner of the world looks like.

Until then, Dear Readers -- keep hoisting the banner of skepticism, and keep sending me ideas and topics for future posts!