If you devote a portion of your life to visiting distant parts of the globe, you'll often end up bringing back some exotic mementos. That certainly happened to me, although those pictured above are not mine, but a friend's.
These antiques come from Tibet, China, Nepal -- mostly from the Himalayan regions. There are antique daggers, religious artifacts, gems, carved ivory, hand-painted containers, and ancient coins.
A friend brought them by recently to show the kids and me. Of course, the large dagger from China caught their imagination, as they all crowded in to slide it out of its sheathe and admire its possibilities.
We lost most of our Afghan and Indian antiques when our van was burglarized in the alley next to our SunDance office at 1913 Fillmore Street in late 1971.
I filed a police report but nothing ever was recovered. The cops said I should cruise the many pawn shops then in San Francisco, and I did so for months, but to no avail. What we lost was priceless, not so much in monetary terms (we'd never had them evaluated), but as memories of two years in a distant land that all too soon was going to be essentially obliterated by unending decades of war.
I still have a few tiny things from Afghanistan and Kashmir hidden away so thoroughly than not even I can find them easily. But my friend's collection inspired me to look for them. Someday soon. Each and every item has its stories, of course, packed away inside itself. How and when and where I obtained these things is the only part of their stories I can tell --the rest have to be imagined.
I like it that way.
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1 comment:
Beautiful artifacts. I am sorry to hear about the loss of your own collection from your travels.
I have always been entranced by the way that the artifacts a civilisation produces, resonate with its character:
Style like a wavelength of experience, like a pattern you can almost taste. I had an experience once that suggested to me almost as though the elements of language, style and shaping of the land express some kind of hidden coefficient. How it would I have no idea, but there is something so compelling about the way that so many aspects of a time and place fit together.
The artifacts can be quite different, they can have many different functions, but they belong together. In a sense they are also dots you can joined together with your imagination to apprehend something of people either a long way away, or far back in time.
I don't know if you know the Borges story Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius - about a secret society who invent a civilisation, and create the impression of its former existence through creating an encyclopedia to describe its cultural facets and history, and also fashioning false artifacts.
I guess if you found a group of artifacts that express a particular era and sense of design you might well conclude that a community once used them, that they lived their lives using them.
It is that sense of things that were handled and were a focus for human energy that makes a former culture so much more real than just stories about them, to my mind at least. Certainly how different would the myth of Atlantis be, if we had objects that were, or could have been Atlantean?
I can identify with the knife fascination. I was given an Indian ceremonial knife with a wooden sheath at a young age by a relative. I poured over it, frustrated by the fact I could only do so when closely watched by adults.
Something sharp that hides in darkness, and gleams when drawn. Well, that was going to appeal to a young boy I guess.
However, I don't think it was the destructive potential of it, it was that the knife was somehow so complete in itself, so impossible to hedge your bets around, so real. A bit like the edge of a cliff, you know it is supposed to be dangerous, but it marks a boundary between things you just get used to and things you can never afford to let out of your attention.
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