Sacred Objects Are Temporary Objects
Animism and the spiritual path
Hi y’all,
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the animism of sacred objects and how this relates to spiritual practice.
Years ago—before it was cool, before it was uncool—I lived in Austin. I was twenty-two. A friend of mine, Evelyn, visited from Mexico. We drove to South Congress to look at the junk stores. They weren’t antique stores, exactly. As far as I can tell, antique stores smell like gardenia room spray and wood polish, and chinoiserie pottery is a dominant feature, and nothing costs less than two-hundred dollars, even something like a pen.
Junk stores, like the one Evelyn and I visited, exist somewhere between the estate sale of a hoarding bachelor uncle and a talented art student’s window display project. There is a celebration of excess, of maximalism—-a more is more attitude. The store was large and divided neatly into small sections by bookshelves, wardrobes, and pie-coolers, so that each section was roughly the size of a small eight by five cubby.
Each cubby had a certain kind of vibe that felt very specific, the way a person feels specific.
Each cubby told a story.
Like, there a cubby where you could imagine a five-year-old in 1948, drinking too much Coca-Cola, watching cowboys on a grainy TV set, and twirling the flowery apron strings of his grandmother, because dad didn’t talk as much since he’d come home from the war and mom was coping by making aspics in tin fruit molds.
The antiques—or the junk—were for the most part unremarkable but curated in such a way that they seemed to be in conversation with other objects. They stood out. The effect was vivid, so vivid that the objects in the space felt alive.
“It’s like a museum except you can touch everything,” Evelyn said, with admiration.
I could sense her forming a narrative about the U.S. from the impression she was getting in the junk store. It was a kind of narrative about the amount of stuff gringos have, our enjoyment of things. Her impression was generally a positive one, I think, but I also wanted to tell her, It’s not always like this. Sometimes, our stuff is too much.
I wandered past the clear glass cases of rhinestone jewelry, old wedding rings, and statement orange beads to a small trough bookcase featuring black-and-white vintage photographs of people. Below the bookcase were two bins of brimming with these personal photos. I shuffled through them, idly, not thinking, till I came across a photo of a bride in what looked like the nineteen twenties, the dress of her waist was dropped and she wore a beautiful, intricate lace veil.
The bride looked serious. Pissed, even.
I wondered what befell her, then quite suddenly, it occurred to me that everyone in these photographs was dead. And I felt very sorry for her.
I kept shuffling.
Not only were the people in the photographs dead, there was no one alive to claim them, no children or grandchildren to argue over who got Nonna’s wedding photo.
These were ancestors who had no descendants, or worse, they were ancestors’ whose descendants didn’t care about the preservation of their image. The chubby toddler, the two young men in high-waisted pants in front of a Chevy, the thirtyish woman’s portrait snuggled with her three children, the little girl in ringlets in a first communion dress, the smiling teenagers behind a birthday cake.
I wanted to buy all of these photographs of the abandoned dead, I wanted to do something with them. But I wasn’t sure what. Keeping them in a box in my closet felt like another form of hoarding. I thought I might dispose of the photographs in a way that felt respectful. Maybe burn them in the fire pit in a friend’s backyard, to send them off to their next life in a dignified manner. To let that arrested moment of the photograph be free.
I didn’t end up buying any of the photographs. At the time, it didn’t make sense to buy things I would only end up burning.