Ephemera.
When you read definitions of ephemera — is there a more beautiful word? — it is described as transitory creations which are not meant to be retained or preserved; things designed to be short-lived, of no lasting significance.
Of no lasting significance! How arrogant and short-sighted of any one generation to assume it knows what will stand the test of time, what will be lauded or ignored, forgotten, or rejected by generations to come. And frightfully snobbish, too, and blind.
For behold! The beauty of the humble bus ticket, the luggage tag, the bill of goods, the postcard home, crumpled magazines and lonely pages torn from books, longing for a new binding. Photographs and labels and dropped shopping lists. A most welcome welcome message from a beloved nephew, twenty years ago now.
If you are a collage artist, such things take on even more beauty and significance. Ephemera is both canvas and paint, a scattering and smattering and slippery heap of things which both provide inspiration and form further inspiring illuminations.
A French brocantes, a flea market, becomes Aladdin’s Cave, the search for a shoebox of paper scraps at the price of a few Euros a weekly pilgrimage of hope. A café crème and a chocolatine for solace on disappointed mizzly Saturdays.
And if they are torn, stained, old, made by hands long gone, in languages not understood? All the better. The beauty of decay, a friendly comfort to all who age. Giving new purpose and visibility to humble, lost, doddering, fragmented, and unremembered things is icing on the cake, great colourful buttercreamy dollops of it.
See over there, a created splendour made by one individual from things residual,
With all the various qualities hilarious of what hitherto was not.
Patrick Kavanaugh
I really enjoyed that! Thanks. A couple of years ago we had our kitchen redone and the larder cupboard is built in under the stairs. It was stripped out as part of the refurbishment and our dog used to like pottering in and out of it. One day she wandered out with fuse wire. The packaging is cardboard and it is very fragile. I can’t age it but I think it may be pre-war. The telephone number is only 3 numbers. I googled the shop it came from but no records survive. I’ve framed it as it really is a special find and has been in the house for untold years.