REPRINTED IN MEMORY OF JOHN FISKE 1939-2021

When Turley Publications decided to discontinue New England Antiques Journal, I decided to concentrate my energies on publishing anthologies and writing novels. The Editor-in-Chief, John Fiske, decided to start a bi-monthly digital antiques newsletter, along with Mary Hahn, NEAJ’s former Production Manager, and Mark Ehrlich, former Advertising Exec. Even if you’re not an antiques enthusiast, it’s a great read for anyone who has an interest in history or the past. I’ve invited John Fiske to the blog today because he can explain it much better than I can. Take it away, John:

I’m old and decrepit, and writing is one of the very few things I can do as well as when I was hale and hearty. So I do it. A lot of it, and very satisfying it is.

Mary Hahn and I publish Digital Antiques Journal, a twice monthly electronic magazine with 8,000 subscribers. It’s free. Mary is a super graphic designer and a web guru, I’m a content maven, and we’ve worked together in print or digitally for more than 20 years. I love her.

There are thousands of people who love antiques, but very few who are interested in any specific category. Someone who collects early Coca-Cola memorabilia may seem to have little in common with a collector of medieval stoneware mugs. Yet we have both among our readers, and my job is to tap into what they have in common, so the medieval mug collector will enjoy reading about Coca-Cola glasses and vice versa.

Obviously, one thing that both have in common is that they live in the present but love the past. Another is that they are both human beings – and every single human society that has ever existed has told stories: Humans are makers and consumers of narratives. A third commonality is that humans want to make sense of things, they want to understand what’s going on. All are blindingly obvious platitudes but, like most of the blindingly obvious they are all too easy to overlook.

Now let me throw in two of my favorite bits of advice to writers: “Only connect,” (E. M. Forster) and “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” (William Faulkner.)

A conservator working on the effigy of John de Belton

Let me give you a recent example of how these platitudes and this advice inform my writing. I read a news report telling how the stone effigy of John de Belton, a priest who died in about 1350, had been vandalized and hidden behind the organ in an English church. Interesting? Maybe so, maybe not.

John de Belton’s effigy had been vandalized (as we call it today) by Henry VIII’s soldiers in about 1530. He was a Catholic priest, a member of that pesky Roman Church that kept denying Henry VIII the right to divorce his wives whenever he felt like it (which was quite often.) An emblem of the Pope and the Catholic Church had no place in the England and the new Church of England that Henry had created. So, King Henry VIII’s soldiers smashed his face, cut off his hands, and decapitated the angels who cradled his head. But they spared the little dog upon which his feet rested. Dogs don’t care about stuff like that.

Only connecting the vandalizing and removal of John’s effigy with the recent removal and often destruction of statues of Confederate war generals in the US. John de Belton and Robert E. Lee both spoke publicly of a history that we would prefer to mute.

Now for another connection with John de Belton: He had probably died of the Black Death. There are two Black Death burial pits outside his church which was a church of the Knights Hospitallers who pledged to look after the plague victims and bury them. John de Belton was a medieval frontline worker and paid the same price as many of our frontline workers today.

There’s another connection – fainter perhaps but still real. Today, members of racial minorities die disproportionately from Covid-19. The coronavirus and the removal of Confederate statues connect to each other within the Black Lives Matter movement. John de Belton is a great connector.

As a writer, I prefer to overestimate rather than underestimate the insightfulness of my readers. This means that I wobble precariously on a tightrope. I feel the need to make some of these connections explicitly, but I suspect that the most effective ones are those that my readers make for themselves. I try to clarify the story that every antique tells, and to draw out the connections within it and see what light it might shed on what’s going on today.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” “Only connect.” That works for me.

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John was a friend, a mentor, a scholar and a gentleman. Here is his obituary. RIP John, you will be missed.