hauntology

Serendipity can't just be the happy accident in which all the players and actions turn out well; it can't just be the chance occurrence that is the most pleasing, distinct from all the other possible outcomes which were thankfully avoided. If you threw the box in the air to see where the contents land, it would be foolish to be disappointed that their chaotic scattering is not as aesthetically pleasing as you'd like, or that the random assemblages, unlucky breakages and strange dispersals are less satisfying than you'd hoped. The unfamiliar new configurations in which you find yourself newly involved are as they are: they bustle a life into the world; they invite you to enter in amongst them; but they will not necessarily wait for you to overcome your hesitance to find the meanings that haunt the things in the world as it is.

As I write these words, I hold the squat pen in my hand. It is disposable, plastic, blue. The paper is in a notebook, bound inside a hard-cover, a remaindered, mass-market line-end. I picked them up this morning when a need to write this came on at the end of a car-boot sale exploration. As I suddenly started hunting for paper and pen, I might well have had in my mind's eye some yellowed pad, a miraculously preserved antique moleskin, or some other imaginary canvas awaiting my discovery; maybe an antique pen, complete with wooden barrel and ink-pot, or a hard-leaded pencil, ready-sharpened and decorated with minuscule scenes of distant lands reflecting the long voyage it had taken to reach my hands. Holding out for such romantic finds might seem admirable; uncompromising; indicative of a self-esteem worthy of such fastidiousness: yet it might also have been fruitless, and these words would have fizzled out as their emanations through my mind ran down and vanished along the grooves of my brain.

I saw a little jewellery carton, small and square, felt-lined; likely it had long ago been home to a once-new necklace. Now it lay open on a paste table and held some cheap worn brooches, a chain interspersed with ancient fake pearls, some little plastic beads no longer connected to their cord, so old they were cracking, and an earring, its oval lobe dulled with age. I paused as I glanced at it and then looked up at the man on the stall. He was old, hair combed madly back, the quiff a flat shelf like a crested penguin, his brylcreem dried up in the hot morning sun; painstakingly giving the prices of the bric-a-brac as two elderly women went through his stock.

I walked on, wondering what I could be looking for. Eventually I came to a collection of old boxes, laid out neatly on a table, the proprietor cross-legged in a camping chair, reading a paper over his carefully trimmed beard, looking for all the world as though he and his stall had been transplanted, copy-perfect, from a dusty antique shop to a sunny field. "Yes, that's nice, isn't it?" he said as I examined a wooden box, the lid decorated with symmetrical patterns in the metal trim. "It has some character. You can have that for six-fifty." I'm not good at haggling. "Ah-" I continued to inspect the box, turning to its underside, then opening it, trying to coax the lock mechanism to move with my thumbnail. "I'll take six for it," he pursued. "I'll give you six-fifty," I replied.

As I continued the slow stroll among the aisles of the market, I kept thinking about the little jewellery box and its nondescript contents. I wondered what sequence of events had led to their being thrown together, those old bits of cheap feminine fetishes and their cardboard container with its soft padded lining. Perhaps, I thought, the old man with his rock-dry, dragged-back hair was clearing out the excess of paraphernalia that eventually clutters up a home, the rag-bag, willy-nilly accumulation of odds and ends, accreting in corners and drawers as their ageing human operators fail to dispose of anything that might have some sort of value or place in memory.

The box looked though it had been lifted straight from its home, exactly as it had long lain. How many years had it taken for those items to find their way to that resting place, rather than the next drawer along, or the second one down? Whose fingers had squeezed the beads from their snapped cord, as it must seem, with the hope that they'd some day be sewn together on a new band, to be worn again once more? This old man alone on his stall, laying out for perusal and sale the no longer needed knickknacks, ornaments and decorative leftovers: how had he come to the conclusion that it was now time to vacate this junk and see if it might bring him a few quid? Was he on his own now, I wondered, briefly reminded of the elderly 80-year-old who'd sold me his car a while ago, saying he didn't need it because he couldn't turn his head to look over his shoulder any more, and anyway, he was a widower now? Were these objects on his stall the flotsam he had finally managed to allow himself to part with, now he'd had time to mourn his wife? The more precious things, of course, he'd kept, so he'd have her most evocative belongings around him; but now - perhaps he was moving? or attempting a new start with a clear-out and a clean-up - he was ready to let go of the bits and bobs that she herself had allowed to sleep in forgotten corners before she herself finally slept for the last time.

But how ludicrous to race away with such fantastic ideas. She might well be at home now, the stall-holder's putative wife; not dead, but cleaning the spare room that for the first time in decades had in recent days been emptied of the gradual accumulations and built-up layers of junk that she and her old man had only now managed to gather up, sort through and dispose of. Perhaps they had grasped the nettle together; dusted off some of the shelves; occasionally sat on the bed or the chair, slowly filing through box and drawer. Perhaps they ask each other from time to time about the items they find, deciding what to keep, what to sell and what to throw away; and as they filter all the old strata of life, they might remember together as they stumble through the evidence and detritus - scenes from the past that are familiar, or scenes dusty with disuse, memories across the spectrum - warm, joyful, awkward, painful. Maybe regrets might leak into consciousness, or equally, satisfaction. Who could know, just from glancing at all these worlds on the paste tables and blankets, what memories they were caught up with, what stories they played in?

And all of these stalls, the rows of picnic tables, doubling as counters for the wares that their vendors had dug out from the recesses and crowded old rooms, attics and garages, the homes of people and of things - weren't they all being freed from their buried past, like disinterred grave goods, or unmoored from their hidden creeks and allowed to wash away into an ocean - flotillas of plastic, paper, wood and metal either bobbing away or sinking to the depths, detached from all that had given them meaning? Even now as they lay on their tablecloths and formica tops, they still bore the traces, the fingerprints, even the dust overloaded with sense and the last living remnants of the dead hands that had held them, lives that had carried them along, hearts that had felt and imbued these charmed objects with significance. This field was a mortuary for the paraphernalia that gave people's live structure, the gifts people exchanged, the tools they built with, utensils they prepared food with, the signs and images with which they decorated their homes, the idols before which they knelt - here was the whole sum of their material world, their heirlooms, their heritage: bequests from lives that were no more, a bazaar of surfaces hiding their own importance, a web of relations disappearing forever.

I realised I needed to buy that little box of irreparable and ageing jewellery and started to make my way back to the brylcreemed man and his stall. What would I say, I wondered, as I anticipated his - what? sadness at the box's departure? confusion at my unexpected and inscrutable interest in an old pile of trinkets? I imagined myself asking for the box, and everything in it, just as it is, and how I'd answer his puzzlement by explaining that it just seemed so pleasing, this box that had somehow come to be where it was, with the earrings and chains and brooches it held - it couldn't have been expected, it couldn't be created, or recreated, or staged, or anything other than what it was - some excess of life that had been washed up on this table, in this sunshine, another chain in the sequence, another step on its journey, another sentence, image, meaning, in its story.

"Hi... this box - how much for the box and all the things in it?"
"Sorry?"
"This box? I'd like to take this box and everything in it." He fingered his way through the broken beads and sad anomalies, checking for anything valuable.
"Fifty pee."
"Here... thanks..."
"Thank you."