Today I was going to talk about a figure of the shadows: The thief, the prostitute, the nightwatch man. All noirs take place at night -unless it is the film chinatown. Who are the people that are creatures of the night? What are the archetypes? someone said a collector. I really do not necessarily think a collector is a creature of the night. Unless it is a spider collecting pray like the Shelob the demon spider in LOTR. Or perhaps rats, rats collect things in the dark, probably at night. Kids collect baseball cards on the school bus, back when kids went to school and took school buses, and probably baseball cards are not NFTs on the blockchain. It sounds like a COVID vector to me.

But as some of you may or may not know, I was in the middle of making a documentary on Collectors during my first midlife crisis with Paul. That midlife crisis was much less fun than my current midlife crisis. And the take away from that is, don’t rush your midlife crisis – it wont taste so good and you may need to put it back in the barrel to age it.

But the documentary on collectors… we have like 100 hours of footage, we (me and Paul V) were collecting collectors. Were we creatures of the night? Perhaps. We did stay in many grungy motels which I do associate with night.

What about collecting is night related? Perhaps there is no logic? Collecting is not Apollonic, nor is it Dionysian (I mean the way I collect s dionysian, but I am special like that). No Collecting is Plutonic -related to pluto or hades – the god of the dead. The god collecting the dead he also collected other things like gems perhaps. Plutos means wealth. Here is a great resource on pluto and other mythology.

Collecting is illogical, but also the collector becomes less rational or becomes beholden to the reason of the collection. To complete the collection for example is an organizing principle of collecting. The collector is musty wearing strange devices to help him better understand his collection. The collector becomes his instruments phenomenologically. What is a collector without his instruments??? A collector’s body is the collection. It is distributed like a bee hive or ant colony. The body of the collection of the body of the collector. It is amorphous like the night and to an outsider the uninitiated undifferentiated from the night.