Forget Me Not

Public Sale’s – and every auction house’s – gallery is a Memory Palace, stocked with a carnivalesque riot of things both wholly imbued with past experiences, and anticipating new ones – in new places, new rooms, with newly appreciative and artful owners. Some of those things [Lots 8, 20, 21, 56, 62, 421] bear the patina of age more visibly than others, but every cupboard’s latch [3, 322, 325]; every chest’s brass [415, 458] or porcelain [342] drawer pulls; every leather chair’s [372, 278, 381] scent evokes some buried reminiscence in us. We cannot glance at a brass log holder [380] without hearing the sound of cordwood tumbled into it, nor look upon an old clock [408] without summoning our inner soundtrack of favorite clock chimes.

“Forget–Me–Not!” cries out every object fashioned by human hands and heart and mind, for in the moment of making it, each artisan places into the wood, iron, glass – even plastic – a small piece of his or her soul, to rest there forever within the object’s lifeless substance. While using or merely beholding an object, our own soul is stirred, mingling our joys and fears, our delights and even our destinies into the molecules of mere matter.

In antebellum America’s enchanted age of Mesmerism, Phrenology, and Spiritualism, not only houses were haunted; jewelry, clothing, furniture, seashells, and other everyday articles took on mysterious powers of communicating secrets about their hidden histories. In the 1840s, mesmeric physicians discovered “psychometry” – a new science wherein clairvoyants could, merely by touching objects, discern obscure details about their pasts. New York City cabinetmaker Charles Inman (brother of famed NYC painter Henry Inman), for example, found that he could give exact descriptions of the intimate thoughts of a letter’s author simply by laying his open palm upon the paper. Through the mysterious faculty of “sympathy,” Inman would become immersed in both the writer’s and recipient’s views and feelings.

“Haunted” comes from the Old French hanter – to frequent, or dwell. We haunt our things – and they haunt us – through our faculty of attention. Daily dwelling with these things, they share in our soul’s life, and we share in theirs. We need not be psychometric clairvoyants to feel our way into the memory palace of vintage vernacular objects. Cleaning them up, refinishing and restoring them, even placing them in new scenes and situations, we “forget–them–not,” turning them into treasured talismans.