What to do with collections when you are moving? Photograph them like Sophia did with some of her collections (and another) before giving them away. This bread clip collection, is one of my favorites, partly because it reminds me of one of the most specialized articles I have encountered: “Proposal For Phylogenic Classification, Advances Bread Clip Science” (mentioned previously). I’m a sucker for taxonomy (more).
This is an expanded version of a series that started with a spontaneous burst of five tweets:
To be updated here (perhaps) and elsewhere (certainly).
One of three diagrams from a “Proposal For Phylogenic Classification, Advances Bread Clip Science”
“We are, all of us, abandoning taxonomy, the ordering and naming of life. We are willfully becoming poor J.B.R., losing the ability to order and name and therefore losing a connection to and a place in the living world.
“No wonder so few of us can really see what is out there. Even when scads of insistent wildlife appear with a flourish right in front of us, and there is such life always — hawks migrating over the parking lot, great colorful moths banging up against the window at night — we barely seem to notice. We are so disconnected from the living world that we can live in the midst of a mass extinction, of the rapid invasion everywhere of new and noxious species, entirely unaware that anything is happening. Happily, changing all this turns out to be easy. Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound. Give a nod to Professor Franclemont and meditate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. Learn science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own. To do so is to change everything, including yourself. Because once you start noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you.”
