Antiques: The Presence of the Past

No Label Necessary Here

Camden Passage. Every Saturday in a little street just outside the Angel tube station is a place where some antique dealers have shops -- and others have card tables set up or even cloths spread on the ground -- to display the residue of human pasts.  You can find anything there: a used light bulb, Victorian door key, 18th-century nautical paintings, Louis XVIII chairs, an early 16th-century whale's tooth with a sex scene carved upon it -- and there's everything between.

I have all the light bulbs I need, no door for the key, no place for the chairs to fit in, appreciate the painting, but the whale's tooth says something: things (and maybe sailors) don't change much over centuries, do they?

While it is true that the antique market on Saturdays has diminished in quality and size over the last decade, there was a section of Camden Passage years back where you could find military paraphernalia.  I mean, for £11,000 (this is a little expensive: today that is $18,040), you could purchase a First World War DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross) awarded to a man who did some unheard-of stunts in a kite made of cloth and wood that had a heavy, metal dynamo with a fan on the front and which hurled him past bullets (or not) at the amazing top speed of 115 miles per hour.

A 1918 DFC

Bits, pieces, flotsam and jetsam: antiques.  The things that flow in and out of people's lives.  Sometimes, obviously, people internally move away from the things they owned, selling them as they grow beyond the import of the objects.  At other times survivors of the deceased are left to figure out what to do with the objects left behind.  But the objects indicate one thing that the Modernists knew very well: the past is always present with us.

T. S. Eliot put it this way (in Burnt Norton):

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

In buying an antique, there is the hope that collecting an item of someone's past may give our own present a missing element -- and make our future moments more blissful.  True, no?  Well, that's bleak.  But is it solely our own discontents that force us to purchase?

I'm not so certain.  Some years back I bought a brass, black-powder cannon in Camden Passage and built a heavy carriage for it so I wouldn't harm the more delicate, original carriage when I fired it.

On New Year's Eve, I load the little noise-maker with black powder and a paper wad, take it out onto the deck over the snow, and light the fuse.  The fire and the bang bring in the new year with a lively POP replete with a flash of light; the cannon rolls back, and the neighborhood echoes the report.  On the 4th of July (which the English here would rather not mention), it's the same -- but without the snow.

Cannon from Camden Passage, with Heavy Carriage (above)

In firing the cannon, I don't think so much about the person who made this exquisite little object, nor about who sold it to the antique dealer in Camden Passage; I'm thinking of the miniature marvel of how it works.  But there's this: the previous owners' past has made a number of my present moments a delightful (and brightly noisy) place.

Other objects bring more somber thought.  For instance, in Camden Passage years back, there was a section of the market where Nazi paraphernalia was sold -- swastika flags, busts of Hitler, WWII iron crosses with swastikas on them (which WWI iron crosses did not have).  These things I do not want to see, touch, nor -- obviously -- own.  They are illegal to sell or purchase on the continent.  Some people, then, come to the UK to purchase them.  Still, in Germany two years ago, I found some of these items being sold at an outdoor antique market despite the laws.

I like my celebratory cannon.  It makes a humbly grand sound on a holiday.  In thinking of it going off this New Years' Eve with friends present, I anticipate its happy influence in future, even while it sits this present moment at my home gathering a little dust.  And in its past....who knows where it was?

Eliot was right about external time even though he was speaking about the internal significance of the past on our present moments.  Perhaps head to an antique market.  Find something of the past for your present and, in consequence, enjoy a unique moment in your future.

Tattershall Castle

 From Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows:

   The [Water] Rat sculled smartly across and made fast. Then he held up his forepaw as the Mole stepped gingerly down. `Lean on that!' he said. `Now then, step lively!' and the Mole to his surprise and rapture found himself actually seated in the stern of a real boat.

     This has been a wonderful day!' said he, as the Rat shoved off and took to the sculls again. `Do you know, I've never been in a boat before in all my life.'

      `What?' cried the Rat, open-mouthed: `Never been in a--you never--well I--what have you been doing, then?'

     `Is it so nice as all that?' asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leant back in his seat and surveyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks, and all the fascinating fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him.

     `Nice? It's the ONLY thing,' said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. `Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING--absolute nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,' he went on dreamily: `messing--about--in--boats; messing----'

One place that over the years represents London life for me is the Tattershall Castle [link], a ship moored in the Thames.  No, you can't row her.  She's too big.  And she's permanently moored at the embankment.  She bobs in the waves, rises and falls with the tide, pitches in her moorings, and...doesn't go anywhere.  But she's fun to board on a social journey for all that.  After all, messing about in boats is the ONLY thing!

She has a nice restaurant below decks and two pubs above, fore and aft.  On nice days, you sit above decks on thick, varnished mahogany benches (as should be on a ship), and there are brass fittings (polished) studding the rails and gunwales.  You sit in the sun and watch boats working up and down the river.  On a rainy day, you can sit below in the restaurant and watch the river traffic out the windows.

Tattershall Castle

What is especially nice about having dinner and a pint on this ship -- and this feature is experienced most immediately by men, I suppose  -- is the helpful sensation one gets while peeing.  Yes.  It's true.

You see, you have a pint, sit talking and boat-watching for any amount of time, and then -- as the need becomes more evident -- head for the head (as they say on a ship).  So you stand there at the urinal, and the Tattershall bobs and rolls on the waves of a passing boat or sways in the strong tidal current moving up or down the river.  And as you sway you think (it's all very logical) -- "No!  No way!  I've only had one pint -- and food with it!"  One bloke along the urinal line pipes up: "Blimey!  Ah'm swayin' like six pints and Ah've only 'ad woone!"  He commented further on his savings -- it's not the cheapest pint in London.

Tattershall Castle in Her Glory Days

Which brings up a question: when exactly were her "glory days"?  She's certainly bringing in more money for her owners now without ever leaving a mooring than she did when underweigh as a lake ferry. And it's pretty soft work these days.

Ironies.

Not to dwell on beer (which is a marked and standard feature of life in England), but..."IPA" bitter stands for "India Pale Ale."  And if I drink one or two of these, you know what happens?  Yes.  I - P - A bitter....  After all, it's good for what Ales you.  Oh my Guinness.

My.  That was stout.

So boats and ships: England being an island has at the center of its collective identity the presence of the sea.  For most of the history of this country, if you wanted to get somewhere else from here, you had to go by ship, and then -- later in English history -- by plane.  Now, of course, there's the amazing Chunnel: the tunnel under the English Channel (or as the French call it, the Pas de Calais).

It's easy to forget England is an island, especially with planes and the Chunnel, but it remains, as Shakespeare called it,

 This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle...

Just think of England as a castle with a great mote round it -- or, it's sort of like a boat you can't row 'cause it's too big...and it's permanently moored.

Houses Far Afield or Near

Dude Bill

It's an odd thing -- visiting the house where one of the greats among humans was born.  For instance, a house five centuries old shows a little wear: wood floors rubbed down to a shine by millions of shoes, wood railings worn smooth by half a millennium of hands, hearths buffed a millimeter lower into the stone that once faced the famous owner's foot.

In short, little to nothing original remains, even if it all has been well preserved.  Inevitably, old boards and decaying stone have been replaced.  So the stray hair of the poet, the trace of DNA, and the dropped crumb will have disappeared beneath the stray hairs, exfoliated cells, and crumbs from centuries of visitors.  Whether our expectation is articulated or not, we expect (strangely and beyond all probability) to see some trace of the person, some finger print, some remnant of body, soul, intellect, or work overlooked in a corner of some room -- we expect that there will be something untouched, a connection for us that another visitor has not seen.

And everyone wants to own something of the person.

Will's birthplace, John Shakespeare's house

Tuesday involved a nicely meandering train ride to Stratford-upon-Avon, to the house where Shakespeare was born, his father, John's, house.  The birth room remains largely intact, as does, a couple miles away, the cottage of Anne Hathaway, despite an addition.  That cottage is where, it may be assumed, Will first met Anne, willed her to do, which she wantonly wished, and, winging his willie, Anne, 8-years-his-senior, was for some moments wistfully willful and then with his child.  The question was "will 'e marry her?" -- yes, 'e will.

What transpired during their years of marriage has long been debated, not least in relation to stuff in the plays.  But in Will's last will, he left her "the second-best bed."  Was she unfaithful during the years he spent in London, away from Stratford, or (another of perpetual possibilities) did he leave her that bed -- an extravagantly expensive item -- out of great affection, out of an intimate message of deepest love?  Perhaps that was the very bed they first shared and continued to use over the years.

 

Carving and inlay (right side of the headboard)
of what is believed to be the 2nd-best bed.

Touching the talent seems to be the issue for those who visit the houses of the famous.  Is it to touch the hem of the great, the fringe of the robe worn by...and thereby derive some essence of that greatness?  Perhaps.  But I gather they are few who can visit a place like the birth room and regard it with clinical detachment.

So what is it we want, after all?

On the train to Stratford, the man next to me, who appeared to be from Sri Lanka or India, was reading Bill Bryson's book Notes from a Small Island, which is about England.  Bryson is from Des Moines, Iowa, where I also grew up, and some of the places he mentions humorously in his books are places I know well (as do how many others throughout his and my generations?).  Will Bryson's old family home become a place of pilgrimage?  Well, it's not that Bryson would ever be seen on a level with Shakespeare, and Des Moines is no literary capital: anyone with any talent has left this place long before they were known to have had any.  Nevertheless, I wondered if the fellow passenger in the train would like to have heard something of Bryson's home -- both the town and the house he lived in.  I wondered if he wanted something of Bryson as well as of Shakespeare.

I didn't ask.  He was busy with his family, then on his cell making business deals in both Hindi and English. Between looking back to his book, then to his wife, and his attempts to settle their fidgety child, I figured some days are just too busy for any thinking about Bryson, who, by the way, wrote a bio of Shakespeare and who also walked through the house, the birth room, and Anne's cottage at some point.  Perhaps it was he who spied a grey hair on the hearth that the bard had dropped....

Yet Bryson, who has lived in England since his early adulthood, views his hometown without the undue affection that people show to the houses of the famous.  He has instead clearly marked Des Moines as needing remedial work if it would become culturally fit for human existence.  The difference between yogurt and Des Moines?  Yogurt has an active culture....  Iowa or England?  If you want to live in mind and spirit, the choice is obvious.  Yes.  But who can afford it?

Shakespeare probably went through the same questions as these in leaving Stratford for London -- questions Bryson also no doubt contended with in leaving Des Moines for London.  If you want to advance, you have to go where advancement is possible.  It may be expensive, but so is the waste of a truly gifted soul and intellect in a place that fosters only the mediocrity of a big fish in a small pond (a consideration relative to the size of the pond and the fish).

Bryson's recent work includes a book, A Short History of Home, in which, I shouldn't wonder, he probably speaks of his childhood digs.  But it's doubtful that -- except among a very few Des Moinesiacs -- Bryson's childhood home will entertain pilgrimages.

On Wednesday, I took the students to visit Dickens' house on Doughty Street, which has been maintained much as it was in Dickens' day, complete with some of the author's furniture, including the desk at which he wrote his last words.  Suffering a stroke, he left the novel he was working on unfinished.  And even with such an item remaining there, other pieces of furniture were temporarily in France for an anniversary celebration (i.e. his A Tale of Two Cities, which has to do with the French Revolution).  So it is not merely that people want to visit, but want to borrow from, the houses of the great.

Dickens' house, Doughty Street

C. S. Lewis's home outside Oxford, The Kilns, was one I don't recall Lewis cared much for but tolerated, yet was a house that his brother, Warnie -- who lived with his brother -- absolutely loathed.  I believe the events transpiring in the house dictated his feelings towards it.  As a grad student in 1984, I visited the small house; I went back in the early 2000s.  He wasn't there either time....  Of course.  Yet isn't that what we really want?

 The Kilns in Headington, North of Oxford

What I remark is this: the adulation in people's minds regarding great people and their homes.  This adulation, the attempt by a pilgrimage to evoke some part of the great person's spirit, ability, talent or fame, is a seance in reverse: it is the living who visit the place of the departed instead of, by seance, the dead who (supposedly...) visit a place of the living.

Archaeologists can point to plenty of reasons why the houses of the great (or not-so-great) are important to us in what we learn.  In any case, it's a curiosity what we do.  Chaucer gave this reason for people like himself to travel from the Tabard Inn near London to Canterbury:

to Caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke

That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

That is, in my translation, 

to Canterbury they wend

To seek the holy blissful martyr

That helped them when they were sick

Sheldon Vanauken told me that some of his Catholic compatriots believed that a personal possession retains something of the spiritual residue of the person who used it over time: the favorite pen, the bed, the chair....  And that spiritual residue is present in objects of the pious as well as of the evil, the object itself being an item indifferent to whatever forces act upon it.  So the belief goes.

We want something from the great, from the very houses they lived and died in, whether you believe in spiritual residue or not.   But I think what we seek has already been given us: their works, their thoughts, their entertainments, their recorded experiences.

One Text of the "To be" speech from Hamlet

A Swan Dive, If You Reaaally Wanna Know

As a graduate student in London 1984: that was the first time I went to the Swan in Cosmo place.  At that pub you could meet locals, lawyers from nearby Lincoln's Inn, people who had children in the nearby children's hospital, and who not?  Of an evening, tables and people would spill onto the pavement on both sides of Cosmo Place, just leaving a path wide enough for families on their evening walk, parents slowly drifting by with their kids in strollers and jammies.

One warm evening in summer, two men invited me to bring my pint and sit at a table on the pavement with them.  They both treated me kindly and to pints -- sternly refusing to let me take my turn at buying a round ("yoo're a stoodent and need yur mooney" said one),   So I learned pubs: it's about people, a "public house" in the real sense.  It's not an American bar.  Even dogs are welcome (every type), but they all -- canine or human -- must behave.

The Swan, flowered on a Sunday
first to the left on Cosmo Place.
The Queen's Larder, further on, by the phoneboxes

One man was from Glasgow, the other from Exeter, in the south.  A true Scot, the man from Glasgow was, and Glaswegian [link] is a language far from Edinburgh's smoother notes even if these towns are but a wee hop apart by train. In short, Exeter had to translate almost everything Glasgow said to me, and what things those two lads taught me.

Exeter's job: he sold camping gear for Lowe and asked if I'd seen Lowe bags in the states.  Saying that, "yeah--in the states they sell anything from large frame packs to fanny-packs," I saw them both suddenly wince, look round at the crowd and shush me.  Glasgow said, as I recall, "ghrthpuntichlock, ween abrightlightkitinyourattic," which Exeter gave me to understand was Scots for "we dinna say that in polite company here, laddie: 'fanny-pack' is impolite slang for the most intimate part of the female anatomy."  And so the two traveling salesmen, one from north, one from south, and a green student from America met up and spent a long evening talking about America and Britain, comparing expressions of each country, philosophizing about wives and jobs (neither of which I had as a student), and trying to imbibe yet another pint.

At a late point, a woman hovered by us who, to all indications of decimation and fogginess, was working on a habit more heroin than ale.  A seat was open at the table and, wishing to sit, in her perpetual movement of slow and relative motion, she asked, "D'yamoind if Oy siddown 'eeuh?"

The guys had already noted her lolling and swaying to the cosmic forces.  It was not a warm "Yeah--awroight."  She sat -- immediately bummed a cigarette from Glasgow, and announced "I'm nawt from round 'eeuh, if ya reaaaly wanna know."  No one took notice.  She repeated this a number of times before Exeter shot back in the middle of a story he was telling: "well, we didn't ask, did we, so we really don't want to know -- if you really wanna know." The slight seemed to bounce off her.  She only waited silently a bit, smoking, until Glasgow rose to get another round for us all.  She was on again: "well a girl could really fancy a pint 'ereself, if ya reaaaaly wanna know."  Exeter said "get yer own pint, eh?"  Glasgow came back with three pints and a half-pint for her.  She said "Well I would've loiked a full poynt, if you reaally wanna know," which set not only Exeter into a remark, but made Glasgow smolder a bit as well.

By the end of the evening (perhaps it was the ale), the two men took occasional and then more frequent glances at her.  They delayed their departures -- the game of "whocanstaylongestandgetthegirl?" had begun.  I was the first to rise to take my leave.  There were hand shakes all round and many thanks from me and wishes of good luck from them.  Glasgow looked to be leaving as well.  I don't know when, or if alone, Exeter left.  But I've often wondered what happened to the other human there, the woman whose life had wound down to a thin thread of "if you reaaaaly wanna know." In the decades since, her phrase has remained a regular linguistic feature at my home -- used to offer information that a listener didn't ask for, as in "Yes, it was I, indeed, who cleaned the fireplace this morning, if you reaaaally wanna know...."

~     ~     ~     ~     ~

Saturday, one of the group -- having a severely injured back -- could stand no more walking about London and needed to rest her back (and had endured a trip to the hospital on Sunday).  So she and I made our way (slowly) back to the flats from the group outing to Notting Hill market.  While she rested, I went to Greenwich to catch up to the group, missed them by minutes, and then trudged back to Bedford Place to check on the patient, who, as it was now around 6:00 p.m., would need food.  To the grocery store, then back to the flat.  "Do you want curry chicken salad I can make here and you can continue to rest, or do you want to go to the pub round the corner for fish and chips?"

So...at the Swan over fish and chips we sat and talked of England, Bloomsbury, books, and everything.  She is a bright soul, an astute being, and she listened kindly to a few tales of my student days while sipping her cider.

And another evening, a few of us went to The Queen's Larder, another pub at the end of Cosmo Place, and enjoyed a pint -- but more: talk with an elderly couple from Newcastle on Tyne, down to London for a short holiday.  With them there was much delightful talk about England in the 60s, and Newcastle, and Sting (who is from Newcastle).  Sting was highly admired by the couple because he goes back to his "Local" (pub) occasionally to see his working-class mates in the northern town. The couple cared not at all about the Beatles who, unlike Sting, stayed in the posh south -- London -- and do not go back to visit their old mates in Liverpool.  A lovely couple in their autumn, they are, and the old guy gave me a thumbs-up when they left, saying "it war very nice ta meet ya."  And so to meet them also!

It's a public house, not a bar.  And everyone petted the little dog who courteously nosed round and greeted newcomers.  If you reaaaaaaly wanna know.

The Red Thread

 A brief passage from Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway:

"And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread, which would stretch and stretch ... as they walked across London; as if one's friends were attached to one's body ... by a thin thread...."

And so it is with friends, is it not?  No matter where you wander, or where I go, we remain connected as we go through our days.

But more.  There's this, from a Wiki:

"According to [a Chinese] myth, the gods tie an invisible red string around the ankles of men and women who are destined to be soul mates and will one day marry each other....  The two people connected by the red thread are destined lovers, regardless of time, place or circumstances. This magical cord may stretch or tangle, but never break.

"One story featuring the red string of fate involves a young boy. Walking home one night, a young boy sees an old man standing beneath the moonlight (Yue Xia Lao). The man explains to the boy that he is attached to his destined wife by a red thread. Yue Xia Lao shows the boy the young girl who is destined to be his wife. Being young and having no interest in having a wife, the young boy picks up a rock and throws it at the girl, running away. Many years later, when the boy has grown into a young man, his parents arrange a wedding for him. On the night of his wedding, his wife waits for him in their bedroom, with the traditional veil covering her face. Raising it, the man is delighted to find that his wife is one of the great beauties of his village. However, she wears an adornment on her eyebrow. He asks her why she wears it and she responds that when she was a young girl, a boy threw a rock at her that struck her, leaving a scar on her eyebrow. She self-consciously wears the adornment to cover it up. The woman is, in fact, the same young girl connected to the man by the red thread shown to him by Yue Xia Lao back in his childhood."

Some have also seen the thread tied between mothers and daughters; Lucy Kaplansky's CD Red Thread and title song have to do with this myth.

And in Nguyen Du's tale of Kieu, there's this, about two people betrothed, but fates intervene and they are separated:

By the red leaf, the crimson thread,
we're bound for life—our oath proves mutual faith. (ll. 459-460)

It's painful to leave for other places, leaving people behind.  It pulls.  Yeah: we're still connected, but the thread pulls.  And I suppose it's the weight on the pull, the degree of pain, that lets us know who is most precious to us.  Old Mr. Emerson in E. M. Forster's Room with a View perhaps said it best:

The only impossible thing is to love and to part.

In my case, it's not the "for forever" that Emerson meant.

I feel the pull already.  Friends, family...Michael..., but mostly, of course, my love.

18pdr's Blog

18pdr's Travel Blog

This 'ere blog'll tell ya bowt me travels fah n' woid, if ya reaally wanna know.

This blog talks about travels external and internal: the places we go in this world as well as our inner journeys.  The past is always present; we travel back daily in our memories, and sometimes that past drives straight into our present and influences our futures.

Time isn't the only thing that goes on internally.  We travel to other people's paradigms -- visiting them, learning by them, and sometimes taking souvenirs from them.  We also watch others travel into and out of our lives.  And I suppose we also travel into others' lives -- often leaving lasting impressions: love, hurt, aspiration, reparation....  And there are travels of faith -- so you'll also find journeys of faith here.

The visual below is a progressive image of the vehicle I've been traveling around in during my years.  (Ironic thanks to Keith for making the flash file, below, and its little "ending.")