The Magic of Things

I’m a rational person, until I’m not. I don’t believe in ghosts except at three in the morning, and I don’t believe in lucky charms except on a match day. I’ve been an atheist since I was eight. So why is there a medallion of The Virgin Mary in my purse?
Recently I’ve been looking a lot into the Lancashire Cotton Famine for a music project I’m working on with a band mate. As a brief introduction, the Lancashire Cotton Famine arose during the American Civil War, when the North blockaded ports to prevent the South exporting slave-grown cotton. The economy of many Lancastrian towns was completely reliant on cotton manufacture, so this blockade caused huge economic and social hardship. One of the things we’ve been looking into is how in spite of the abject poverty it caused them, many of the mill workers of the time supported the North wholeheartedly, for the simple reason that they supported the emancipation of the slaves. Falling down a research rabbit hole, I came across this knitted pincushion, which depicts a female slave on one side and reads “Am I not your sister” on the other. I have fallen in love with this pincushion. I’ve become determined to make a copy, and started to knit a test version. There is something meditative in knitting (except when it all goes wrong) at any time. But that I’m following the same movements as a woman who lived more than 150 years ago gives me a strange connection to her, whoever she was. I can imagine her quite clearly, although I’m almost certainly wrong about her so I shall keep my thoughts to myself. What I think must be true is that she would not be able to imagine her little pincushion would one day affect so strongly a woman in the future with a very different life. What I also think is true is that she cared deeply about people who lived far across an ocean she would never traverse, because she knew they were people just like her. I feel an intellectual connection to whoever she was.
When I explained this to my friend/songwriting partner, he told me of a similar, if more spiritual, experience,at the Victoria and Albert museum. He was looking at a 3,000 year old perfume bottle and felt entranced by its beauty. He realised that millennia ago someone else would have looked at the coloured glass and felt the same way.
One can also feel a more physical connection. An exhibit at the Mary Rose that I took my then-young son to had a piece of tarred rope on a handling table. One could still smell the tar on it. The realisation that someone long dead also inhaled that scent brought a tear to my eye.
The world of history is full of these little connections, these threads that run between us all and weave together to make the cloth of our reality, but so is the present.
I have a lot of little objects that hold meaning for me far beyond any financial or utility value. My nan’s cigarette case lives in my work bag and holds my paracetamol. It connects me to my nan as she was before I was born, when she was close enough to the age I am now. It still smells of tobacco. I have a guitar pick thrown at me (or at least in my general direction) by (I think) Justin Lockey of the band Editors, at Royal Albert Hall in 2016. One day I’ll use it on stage myself, and feel a small connection to a far better musician than me. I’ll know when the right time is, as I’ll pick it up off my bedside table where it lives, and put it in my pocket. And I have my Virgin Mary. I found her in a charity shop and knew I had to buy her. Even as I handed over £3 I asked myself why. Before I lost my faith I was raised Church of England. I’m not even a lapsed Catholic, and my brief attempt to find God again (a thinly fictionalised account of which is here) failed after about four minutes.
The medallion has a lacquer over a bas relief of Mary, getting thinner over her face where the medallion has been rubbed over time. Someone kept her close and took comfort from her in times of trouble. And whoever that person was, I feel a connection to them. When I look at the medallion I don’t think of Mary, or the Catholic church. I think of someone who needed a moment’s comfort, and I feel a thread between us.
That, I think, is the magic in objects. What they can make us feel about our fellow humans. That all over the world, the millennia, and through different cultures and backgrounds we all feel the same way sometimes. People are always people.
