On collections

Enclosed worlds and jewel-box songs

Hello hello! We are back in the UK now, having recently returned from a grand old adventure, and we’re just starting to think about real life again. I’ve sorely missed having a routine, and I’m excited for a fresh start and to get stuck into new projects after the festive break. To that end, if you’re in search of a freelance writer to help you with something you’re working on, I’d love to chat. Or if you just want to catch up (or introduce yourself!), I’ll be a short train-ride from London after the new year. Anyway, that’s real life out of the way. Now for a flight of fancy that takes the idea of collections as its point of departure. Bon voyage!

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Sometimes, when I am feeling posh, I say I have a wine collection. In it, there are cases of Kumeu River’s Chardonnay, Eden Rift’s Pinot Noir, López de Heredia’s Gravonia Blanco. There’s even a case of Taittinger’s Comtes de Champagne! I can scarcely believe it. But this is a wilful distortion of the truth. Nathaniel has a collection; I’m only in it for the blow-out 50th birthday bash. If we break up, I get nothing, so I figure it’s worth sticking around. Frankly, I am not nearly strategic enough to collect wine. I like drinking nicely aged wines when they present themselves, but I don’t enjoy thinking about how to get them to that stage – there’s too much left-brain activity involved.

The thing about building collections is that they require a level of methodical thinking. Like the butterfly collector or the antiquated book collector, there’s an element of categorisation involved – a certain detachment, a cool scientific gaze. The archetypal collection, according to the American scholar Susan Stewart, is Noah’s Ark. We all know the story: the animals come in two by two – one male, one female. Each animal is the perfect example of its type. There is an economical efficiency to it; there are no more animals than is necessary. But this slimmed-down collection of the animals of the world has, in theory, the ability to reproduce itself to “an infinite reverie”. Each individual animal is inconsequential; what is important is the collection as a whole. This collection is transcendent. In a nutshell, it’s the fantasy of the enclosed world.

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Enclosed worlds are seductive. In the same way that a child delights in a forest den or a secluded hut, the fantasy of finite space has an almost primordial appeal. Doll’s houses tap into this same instinct. It is a space defined by a boundary: inside and outside, public and private. “Worlds of contamination and crudeness are controlled within the dollhouse by an absolute manipulation of the boundaries of space and time,” writes Stewart. This is true of all collections, including wine collections. (This is especially true of wine collections within doll’s houses.) You have claimed a piece of the world for yourself. You have condensed it, categorised it, brought it under control. You have altered the flow of time, and by doing so, created a space to call your own.

Enclosed worlds of various kinds

Perhaps I’m thinking about this because I’ve been adrift for a while without a space to call my own. Nine months on the road, drifting across borders and between hotels and guesthouses. There is a boundlessness to this that is freeing, but it can also be alienating. You are always in someone else’s space, both geographically and domestically, and very quickly you can feel unmoored. The favourite chapters of our journey, we both agreed, were in New Zealand and Japan, where we rented a campervan. It was the grown-up equivalent of hiding out in a forest den (not that I consider myself much of a grown-up).

I love the thrill of the outdoors as much as I am drawn to cosy and interior spaces. Ironically, this desire for bounded space only seems to fuel the traveller’s imagination. French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote about Jules Verne’s obsession with enclosure in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The Nautilus is full of plenitude, furnished with the attention-to-detail of an “eighteenth-century encyclopedist or a Dutch painter”. It has everything the traveller could possibly need to live in comfort as they descend to the deep ocean. In Luggage, Susan Harlan (citing Barthes) writes, “Verne is obsessed with the idea of closure – a ship, for example, is one ‘emblem of closure’, a thing that stands not just for departure, but for a desire to create a habitat that is finite. This is the fantasy: that you can take everything with you when you depart. You don’t have to leave your home behind. You can recreate it, in its fullness and completeness, elsewhere.”

Surely I am not the only person here to relish the task of packing for an adventure, whittling down my world to a collection of necessities. I have always found the notion of living out of a backpack appealing. In the absence of a physical home, my backpack becomes a surrogate home of sorts. In the same way that a house is a structure filled with possessions, over time coming to reflect the psyche of its owner, a suitcase or backpack is a miniature version of this. We are our property. I don’t want to believe that, but in the sort of globalised consumerist society we live in, it feels true. We strategically acquire objects to reflect and communicate the sort of people we want to be, and that is the basic principle that underlies all collections.

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Roughly a decade ago, I was living out of a suitcase in Granada during my year abroad. I lived in a spectacular 17th century house with 17 other people from around the world, and one of the games we liked to play was En mi maleta, tengo… It’s a variation of a simple memory game, in which you take it in turns to add an imaginary item to an imaginary suitcase. Invariably, this suitcase would end up as some beast of a thing, containing random and physically impossible items within it. Some objects were magical, others were mundane.

There is a precedent for such bags: Mary Poppins’ carpet bag. Even to this day, I find it an enchanting object. (Etsy has one available in red velvet, and I’m tempted. As one reviewer says: Every girl wants a Mary Poppins bag! I’ve wanted one since I saw the movie! 60 years ago.) It’s a powerful object because, as Susan Harlan writes, it contains all of Mary Poppins’ desires. “Like her animated umbrella, it is a powerfully enabling object. Mary Poppins does not have a home she has left behind. She belongs to the elements, witch-like and free… The world is infinite. The world is full of numerable and contiguous objects. Her carpet bag is all the objects of the world, contained within a finite space.”

In the 1964 film, Jane and Michael watch astonished as Mary Poppins pulls out each item – a mirror, a lamp, a hat-stand – and gradually, the arrangement of these objects take on the resemblance of a home. This scene perhaps reflects a child’s fascination with their mother’s handbag. The mystery of it, the promise of self-sufficiency. As Harlan puts it, luggage contains secrets. We want to know what those secrets are.

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I’ll let you in on a few secrets then. En mi maleta, tengo… A small camping lamp to make an unfamiliar place feel homely. A silk scarf that doubles up as a shawl. A bottle of lavender oil. A Kindle, a Japanese mug, a talisman. A silver Balinese ring. A diary with a polaroid photo tucked inside it. Some mangosteen and lemongrass tea. That’s the nice stuff, the homely stuff – the stuff that makes me feel like me. After that, there’s the stuff that’s neither here nor there: leech socks, diving manuals, water bladders. Fine, tolerable. Then comes the random crap: half-empty packets of paracetamol, chargers that only want to work half the time, hotel toothbrushes, nearly-empty bottles of mosquito spray and sun cream. That stuff isn’t me. I do not look at those things and feel any inkling of identification; if anything, I feel irritated because they are tainting my collection. They are meaningless interlopers, but they’re also too useful to throw away.

Enclosed worlds on the road

Like many collectors, I want my little travel collection to be perfect. It is my contained world, my interior life. There is a performance of self and character going on, and subconsciously I am trying to tell a story – if only to myself. It circles back to Susan Stewart’s point on transcendence: a collection of objects, arranged with intention, becomes its own universe, existing outside the parameters of normal space and time. The stories within the collection are taken out of their context, their histories overwritten or erased, and what emerges is the story of the collector themself. We identify with our objects, and in time, our objects identify us. You can almost see the outline of a person contained within their arrangement.

This is equally true of wine collections. Like visiting someone’s house, there is an interiority to a person’s cellar that tells a story about who they are. It’s quite fitting, in a way, that we speak of a collection as a cellar, even if most of the time this is a figurative place that is in fact in a warehouse. Psychoanalysts believe that when you encounter a house in your dream, it represents an aspect of the self. So following this line of reasoning, the cellar becomes an apt metaphor. We can imagine going down the stairs, twisting the key and pushing open a door into the collector’s mind. We get a sense of the way this person thinks, the way they taste. Are they a traditionalist? Are they an adventurer? Are they a romantic, or a cold-hearted investor? Which corners of the world do they like to venture to? Are they rich enough to take us with them? Like a suitcase, a cellar contains secrets. It is a self-contained world – a mystery, a fantasy.

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Jewel-box songs

I wasn’t expecting great things in my Spotify Wrapped this year – with the constant travel, my listening became more sporadic – but I was OK with it. According to the stats, I listened to 332 genres this year. Folk rock, neoclassical, soul jazz, singer-songwriter and “oldies” were the top five, not that I have any idea what oldies refers to. I have a listening age of 68. Fabulous.

If Instagram Stories are a veritable anthropological source, it seems I’m not even the most mismatched with my so-called listening age. It’s interesting to see how many of us are listening to “old music”, although I find people never really say the same about books – no one was alive when David Copperfield came out, so no one gets to “claim” it. Gravitating to the past is not a deliberate choice on my part. I listen purely for pleasure, and I don’t discriminate by era or genre. I am more drawn to specific sounds and textures, sensory details that spark my brain in a specific way. I might find the same sounds in a piece of classical music or in experimental pop.

There’s a specific sound I really love – I don’t know how to describe it other than to say it has a shimmering, jewel-like quality. It’s delicate but it’s also surprising, like moonlight on the window. But its delicacy belies its power. In the same moonlit room, there’s a wild cat skulking in the shadows. Instrumentally, this sound might be delivered by a pared-back percussive element, or harp strings, or piano notes that crest like a wave. This sound catches the light while you are listening, and its shades deepen and change. It is fluid and organic: you can hear the bodies of the musicians moving in flow with the music.

So, in the spirit of “collecting”, I have brought together just a few of these songs in a figurative jewel box. I could add so many more, but I limited it to the songs that were in my Spotify Wrapped this year. Collections work well with limitations. These jewel-songs accompanied me around the world – on long bus journeys through the night, in unfamiliar hotel rooms, winding around mountain roads and drifting between borders.