Collecting (Part II)
HE SAID:
Recently I quoted John Bradford on collecting: "the excitement of the hunt, the find, the acquisition and the display is perhaps most akin to being in love." Since then, quite unexpectedly, I found this passage in Phyllis Rose's book, The Year of Reading Proust:
"I have reached the age when collecting is the stage on which I enact desire, for the feel of promiscuity — if that is what one needs to feel alive — is the same whether the object of desire is a man or a sprinkler jar."
Or a hatchel.
One thing I know for certain is that you don't have to reach a "certain age" for eroticism to enter into the desire to possess an object. I vividly remember seeing my first flax hatchel, a comb for separating flax fibers. It was very like the one pictured at the top with a wooden cover. It was more years ago than I care to think about, in the basement of an antiques mall in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. Just thinking about it now, I can recreate the thrill of seeing all those sharp points as I lifted the cover. It was electric.
I didn't buy it, mostly because I didn't have the hundred dollars they were asking. But I was also experiencing a guilty pleasure, an embarrassment to admit how much I wanted it and why. I thought about that thicket of long iron points for days after. It was very much like an infatuation, like meeting someone at a party and being too shy, too afraid to reveal the intensity one's desire, to call the next day.
Eventually Linda and I met and married and came upon another hatchel, although without a cover, and brought it home with us. Her anxiety over both the implied and real danger in response to those spikes was moderated only by her interest in the process they played in creating textiles.
The hatchel was used in the third step of linen production. After the plant stalks had been retted, or allowed to rot, they went through the skutching or crushing step to separate the fibers in the stems. They were then combed by drawing the fibers through the hatchel combs. The spikes would remove the shorter fibers, line up the long soft fibers, and remove the woody debris from the stems.
We have four or five hatchels now. Most of the time they are kept in the basement where they can cause no injury. Once in a while, though, we'll bring one up and hang it in a corner, behind some furniture where no one is likely to go. And for a month or two we'll admire it for its elegant functionality, its history as a tool, and the frisson produced by those many very sharp points.
Picture #1 was copied from an auction site and used without permission. The rest of the hatchels are from our collection. The largest, the double comb pictured in #2 and #6 is 40 inches long. The hatchel in pictures #3-5 is 34 inches long. Picture #5 shows the nails from the back. The hatchel in the last picture is 12 inches long and has pretty decorative metalwork.
