LURE of the LOST

     When I was a very young child, on rare occasions, I would somehow be permitted to ascend, by means of a seldom-used and twisted staircase, to the high, remote, silent and dusty attic of our rental house. A single small window afforded a unique and unfamiliar view of our backyard, where my puerile excavations were distantly visible below.  Ancient wooden planks had been laid out as a floor, but in many places these were absent, revealing an abyss of darkness that to my childish mind was potentially unfathomable. Way back in the remotest corner of the attic, under the slanting eves, was a collection of items that particularly attracted my attention, and aroused in me a dim and inexplicable mystic glamour that has not left me to this day. Here was a heap of utterly archaic electronic conveniences that must have dated from the 1940’s, abandoned by some remote tenant, who had himself doubtless long ago ascended to the dusty attic of our world. I delighted to inspect these bulbous old televisions and radios. In particular, the frayed and faded cloth-covered electrical cords attracted me. Most fascinating, however, were the beautiful glass vacuum tubes that these devices contained. These reminded me of terrariums, but unlike those mossy, slug-ridden ones in my room, these contained an inscrutable ecology of minute technics, whose rectilinear morphology seemed a frail echo of the lichens and desiccated sealife I collected at that time.
    While I have no doubt that my lifelong attraction to vacuum tubes resulted from these formative attic forays, it is more difficult to guess whether my love of lost and archaic technological devices is a result of these early encounters, or if, by contrast, some even deeper and more remote karmic trace impelled me to the attic corner in the first place, and that I was seeking out something I already knew I loved, but had at that time yet to see.
    Things lost, things dimmed and shimmered away into the obscurity of the past, mighty things that once heralded futurity, but now radiate utter obsolescence and futility, such things are dearest to my heart. Ruination, decay, and the slow, dark lapse into oblivion of once-bright novelties are all processes that endow objects with a deep attraction for me. The protracted gloamings of aesthetic senility, deep-layered coatings of dust, forlorn, forgotten, forbidden, covered up in dead leaves, coruscated encrustations, slyly hinting dim visions of futures that never were, the last legions of the lost are my real loves, the truest and darkest lusts of my being.

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