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.