Strange feelings.

The shadow

The shadow knows!
I recently bought a small piece of coal from the Titanic. It's real and authentic.
I have it sitting in a box near my model of Titanic. Every time I look at it I get a feeling of sadness and loss. I never touched it. Outside the box. Is the physic memory of Titanic on it?
Or am I just having feelings because I know it's history?
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
what sort of provenance does it have ?

I collect old military rifles. When I'm 'cheek welded' to something made a century or more ago it's hard not to wonder who else has done exactly that, when, where and why. You literally have your face and hands firmly planted in the exact spots where some unknown number of other people have doing the same thing.

Yes, there is some weird connection to inanimate objects. I guess I'm sort of a lazy animist.
 

Rick Hunter

Celestial
I totally get it. Since I was a child I have been attracted to old things and have collected them. My largest collection is old glass and ceramic insulators used on electric, telegraph, and telephone wires. I have more than 200 of them and (in my mind) can feel the energies they still contain from power transmission and thousands of messages carried over the decades. I also feel a strong connection to old places and buildings, and it really saddens me when they are demolished. I want to yell at them, "Do you know what the hell you are doing? What you are destroying?" There is a railbed that was abandoned in 1980 near my home that I really need to explore and document someday before it gets devoured. I have even had dreams about places and buildings from the past that don't exist anymore, they feel very real to me.
 

The shadow

The shadow knows!
what sort of provenance does it have ?

I collect old military rifles. When I'm 'cheek welded' to something made a century or more ago it's hard not to wonder who else has done exactly that, when, where and why. You literally have your face and hands firmly planted in the exact spots where some unknown number of other people have doing the same thing.

Yes, there is some weird connection to inanimate objects. I guess I'm sort of a lazy animist.
It has a CoA from RMS titanic inc.
It has an artifact number and a date of recovery. It's really from Titanic.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Pieces of World Trade Center steel were made available for memorials because a few fire companies around here lost people on 9/11. Problem is, some of them went waaaaaaaay over the top. We have an absolutely enormous new firehouse down the road for which I am very grateful, but their sense of decor is off. They have a girder there and a bronze sculpture of what is supposed to be boots and gear topped by a helmet.

My brother from out of state looked at it one day as we passed by and say ' hmmm... looks like Yoda....' . Odd, he's not even a fan. but you know, it does ! Now that I've seen it I can't fail to. I don't know what strange feeling it might engender in the men at the station but I bet we're not the only ones to notice.
 
Interesting thread! I've had many such feelings about things and places over the years. Not so much in recent times, but it still happens. Years ago, I was killing time in a big second hand store near our home at the time. I came across a vinyl covered case that looked interesting, and the price was $6 or something. I use things like that for tool storage, the odd project enclosure, and such. Turned out it had housed a child's phonograph, but all the metal parts were long gone, and someone had carefully lined the inside with some kind of plastic tape. They had gone around all the wood blocks glued in there to fasten the turntable to. There was a drawing of a clown's face on the inside cover. I did an image search on the web and found the model, along with other versions. Clowns don't bother me; I get why some people have strong negative reactions to them, but I've never had any kind of emotional investment either way.

As soon as I got the thing home, I noticed a strong energy about it, as though someone did not want me messing with it. Like maybe it didn't belong in the thrift store, and I was meddling somehow with my ideas for remodeling it into something useful. I stuck it on a shelf in the basement, sort of a very low budget version of that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Every now and then, I'd be looking for a case for one thing or another, and see it and think maybe I could use that for whatever I was making. The "aura" would assert itself, and I would decide I didn't want to deal with it.

Eventually we moved to another town, and I took loads of stuff to various thrift stores, much of it in a catch-and-release way by taking it back where I got it. The phonograph case went back to the store where I'd found it a couple of years earlier. This seemed to make it happy.

I have a chunk of concrete from the Berlin Wall, with a fancy certificate full of proclamations in German, ribbons glued on, official looking stamps, and a photograph of a section of the wall. It was given to me by a family member who was stationed in Germany at the time the wall was demolished. It doesn't seem to hold any sort of charge for me. It could, of course, be a lump of debris from a sidewalk in front of a café in Munich that was being remodeled, but my relative said she looked around for a legitimate piece of the abomination. I remember for what seemed like two weeks I'd come home from work and turn on the TV to watch Germans around my age partying on top of the wall. Very, very distant cousins, I'm sure, celebrating the end of that particular bit of stupidity. That's the association for me with that chunk of concrete, a victory over fear and loathing.
 
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