TIME OUT: A trip to the attic shines a light on the past
“There’s a light on in the attic.
I can see it from the outside.
And I know you’re on the inside . . . lookin’ out.”
Sheldon Silverstein
YOU NEVER know what you will find in the attic. What you find is psychologically significant. Because attics are personal. What we put there or do not put there says something about our relationship with objects. It shows whether we store or discard belongings, whether or not we hold on to the past, organise the present or plan for the future.
The attic, like the mind, is one collection and cache of our personal lives, containing far more than we remember storing there until memory is triggered by a forgotten object, a discarded toy, a photograph album, a dismantled cot, a deb’s dress.
New year brings many of us into our attics. Once January 6th, Nollaig na mBan, Epiphany and Wise Men have departed, we go to the attic to return the Christmas decorations, now strangely tired, gaudy, limp and kitsch. Decorations are remnants of festivities ended. Packing them away is a ritual annual closure to the year that is over before re-entering the routine of life and the new year just begun.
There is always a moment of reflection about what lies ahead, as we deposit boxes that will not be required for another year: a flicker of fear that we or those we love may not be there for the next retrieval.
When the 12 days of Christmas end, 12 months lie ahead. We do not know what they may bring. We wonder momentarily with what emotions we might re-enter this space next year or if we will be there to do so. We wonder whether we would be glad to know, or distraught to learn what this new stretch of future holds.
The attic is a place that invites such musings. Like the mind’s long-term memory system of retention and retrieval, the attic is designed for relatively permanent storage of that which has meaning and importance.
It encodes and retains more than we require for daily living, but oh such precious evidence of the treasures of the past. Guardian of what we have decided to keep, the attic’s memories are silent, still, timeless, old and ever present.
Mind and attic await our wish to visit, recall, reminisce and recollect. We open trunks and find old trophies of forgotten triumphs, copybooks and essays written in a hand no longer ours, well-thumbed schoolbooks and college notes with the scattiness or meticulousness of our former selves.
We find annuals, Beano, Bunty, Dennis the Menace, Judy, Tara, Boy's Own.We find books by Enid Blyton with memorised editions of the "classics", and so many tapes and records, "singles", EPs and faded album covers such as Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
In the attic we find birthday cards, inscribed by parents to us as children, inscribed by us as children to them, thank you cards never sent for gifts we don’t recall. We find diaries documenting the crises of childhood, the agonies of adolescence, and the cataclysmic yearnings that evoke a smile as we re-read the drama of pubescent rejection.
We find ribbons that trigger something so old we can barely remember, but it was ours, such as a baby shoe, a Winnie the Pooh dish and Piglet spoon, a favourite frock, patent shoes, Dinky cars, jigsaw pieces, all scattered in time’s top storey and narrative of our lives.
And we bury our faces in faded garments that belonged to those we loved or lost or whose lives were foreshortened, as so poignantly described by Andrew Motion's I n the Atticpoem.
And if we wonder why we do not clear the attic, it is because to do so is not a physical activity but a psychological undertaking and selection of what we want to retain of our ourselves.
Attics are about time; time past, time present and time future, and the unique smell, texture and presence of objects that symbolise our lives. Which is why we do not stay “marooned at the attic skylight” but close the hatch, descend into the present, into this year 2011 whose numbers once seemed unimaginably futuristic.