Collage and the Secret Adventures of Order

Like a pure sound or melodic system of pure sounds in the midst of noises, so a crystal, a flower, a sea shell stand out from the common disorder of perceptible things. For us they are privileged objects . . . more mysterious upon reflection than all those which we see indiscriminately. They present us with a strange union of ideas: order and fantasy, invention and necessity, law and exception.

—Paul Valéry, “Man and the Sea Shell”

The series of events that occasioned this meditation on collage began with a discussion I had with a close friend—about Foucault and his archaeological way of looking at things, of recognizing and applying patterns of thought. Samuel and I were in the midst of a vegan breakfast at Peace Food, a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where we met once a week or so, usually on Sunday morning.

“Before Foucault,” Samuel pointed out, “historians of ideas only paid attention to the new thinkers who got things right. But Foucault took it upon himself to go back and read all the stuff that the new thinkers had made obsolete and search out the general pattern that all the ‘incorrect thinkers’ had been using. He wanted to show how the field of thought was changed and continued to develop, and how it even inflected new developments.”

The following day I came across an article in American Atheist that read, in part, “I believe that we can . . . examine patterns of knowledge, experience, and learning in order to arrive at a better understanding of the low likelihood that any god exists—particularly the god of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.”¹ The argument itself, one with which I was familiar, was beside the point; it was the reiteration of a theme from my breakfast talk that got my attention.

When next I reached for a magazine—later that day—it happened to be the American Scholar, where I was drawn to a brief account of “How the Seashell Got its Stripes”² and was struck by the following sentence: “Scientists have long suspected that the stripes, zigzags, and spirals on mollusk shells have a neurological origin, but the exact cause of the colorations has remained elusive.” I considered the color patterns on seashells—and the well-known “Golden Ratio,” which translates the shape of the chambered nautilus shell into an equation—as emblematic of the patterns of knowledge propounded by Foucault, explained by Samuel, and applied by the American Atheist author. While it wasn’t immediately apparent on the surface, some underlying principle (both in the case of the mollusk and in that of the history of human thought) had asserted itself.

The fact that I subscribe to the American Scholar and American Atheist and that other authors are frequently my correspondents or tablemates is probably exemplary on a very small scale of what Heraclitus meant when he equated character with fate. (A more modern version is “Sow a thought and it becomes an action; sow an action and it becomes a habit; sow a habit and it becomes a character; sow a character and it becomes a fate.” This is sometimes attributed to William James but just as often seems to be considered an anonymous contribution to thought.) In other words, our predilections create a sort of gravitational field that pulls into our orbits the very things with which we tend to be preoccupied, or, possibly, because of those preoccupations, we happen to notice them when they turn up more or less at random.

Part of the nebulous field of who I am, for example, and what I’ve surrounded myself with includes the fact that, at about the time Samuel and I had that conversation about Foucault, I had just begun rereading Borges’s Other Inquisitions, and on the train home from the bar where I work—a day or two after our conversation—I finished an essay called “Valéry as Symbol,” which concludes with Borges’s eloquent summing up of Paul Valéry as “A man who, in a century that adores the chaotic idols of blood...