Sorting through my father’s personal affects following his death, I came across a small bible and inside, a lock of black hair, tied with a ribbon.
The bible once belonged to my grandmother, but there were no clues to the origin of the lock. Was it hers? Had she sent it off with my grandfather, inside the bible, as he shipped out to for the war in France in 1917?
Or was the lock my grandfather’s, a keepsake he left for her not knowing how or if he would return?
In those days, soldiers often were lost in war. During the World War I Battle of the Somme, more than 72,000 British soldiers died without a trace. A lock of hair might be all that a war widow would ever see again of her lover.
Do people still save a lock of hair? Or send a perfumed letter? I once received such a letter, and I can attest that there’s no faster form of travel than the scent of paper spiced by the fragrance of a lover far away.
Another treasure dad had set aside was an autograph album, a small, bound book made for saving inscriptions written by friends and loved ones.
The album dad collected, probably from a thrift shop, once belonged to a Maime G. Adams. From its inscriptions, it appears that Maime was a young woman who traveled in the Midwest in the early 1890s, perhaps to attend school.
She collected inscriptions from people in Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa, but the autographs, hand-written in cursive, are more than signatures. Most are a small poem, quotation or thought.
Emma Lester of Garnett, Kansas wrote:
“Like as a plank of driftwood, tossed on the watery main,
Another plank encounters, meets – touches – parts – again.
So tossed and drifting ever, o’er life’s uneven sea,
We meet – and greet – and sever, parting eternally.”
Deb of Topeka wrote: Friend Maime: “May your life have just enough clouds to make a glorious sunset.” Frank Cochran of Topeka wrote:” Be thine the fairest dreams that angels bestow upon the pure.”
Poetic inscriptions, locks of hair, perfumed letters, all remembrances that predate photography. Held in one’s hand, with some imagination, these small tokens bring back the people to whom they were once attached.
They kindle thoughts, memories and idealizations. We’re likely to consider such talismans “romantic.” Why?
Is it that romance is also a function of the imagination, a way of burnishing away the sharp edges of the people and things that we love, leaving them in a gauzy glow? Does a lover’s selfie compare?
In his 1998 book “Life: The Movie,” culture critic Neal Gabler writes about the advent of photography.
“Everywhere in America there seemed to be a new emphasis on seeing, whether it was the sudden dressing of department store windows which were carefully arranged to provide maximum visual stimulation, or the vogue for box cameras. As if in testimony to the ascendance of the eye, Shakespeare had, by the end of the 19th century, fallen out of favor because, surmised the New York Times, he was an aural anachronism in a society that opted for the visual.”
Social observers of the day realized what was happening, that images, not words, were becoming the world’s new language. Historian Daniel Boorstin said people were being transformed from “ideal-thinkers” to “image-thinkers.”
You need only consider the diminished reading habits of Americans to understand that we have become a video culture. We are truly image-thinkers. The image reigns supreme.
But an image is everything that is captured in a photograph, and less. It is less imagination. It is less romance. It is less potential, and every bit the actual.
It is reality. It is what we are stuck with.
Is it any wonder that so many us living in the image-thinking generation feel stuck?
There is magic in a lock of hair, in a perfumed letter, in an autograph that’s absent in a selfie. But to experience it requires the holder of those objects to sit and to imagine for a while.