Posterior - Part Four (A) - "Highborn"

Posterior

Part Four (A)

"Highborn"

            If a flea market is a posterior

            Of both the antiquarian interest

            And the antiquarian commercial realms. (Part One)

            If it is a posterior

            Then “Why?”

            Should I.

            First I ‘habitat’ using a duck, duck, goose of three old chairs (Part one).  Classic ‘antique’ chairs they were... at a posterior marketplace.  Then I turned snide and vended an old looking glass while promoting philosophy and humanity at the

            Posterior marketplace. (Part Two)

            “Chippendale” I said of that... looking glass.

            Did you look in it (“Mirror, mirror on the wall”)

            Or through it,

            Alice?

            Yes... to that word; “Chippendale”

            It is a little ‘highborn’?

            Following that smooth spread, I angled crass and commercial (Part Three) by frontal declaration that the actual selling of a better thing (antiques) is well accomplished at the posterior marketplace using the skullduggery of ‘sleight of hand’ (sight and hand).  I used a true rare book and a never technically described old painting as passive commercial examples.  I did not mention then that these; rare books and old paintings, may be ‘of highborn’.  A smaller circle I am showing?

            Yes.

            This is the greater key to the posterior market; this smaller circle

            Of the highborn

            ‘Antiques’.

            It didn’t ‘used to be that way’; this crass and crude marketing of scrapings and leavings turning out to be ‘of flea’.

            Scrapings and leavings served to me at an antiquarian food court designated a ‘posterior’ of a ‘marketplace’ prefixed ‘flea’.  It is the highborn?

            “When they don’t know... they don’t know.”

            When you do not know then you do not know.

            In spite of that they all show up, all the time and

            Speak very well of a... that... they... well... “do know”.  Vendors, guests, walking couples, collectors from New Jersey, family vacations, professional decorators and... a good dozen or two of people who all though well intentioned, could not explain what they are doing ‘here’ and how they, too, ‘got here’.  There’s a certain charm to those of the last group.  Really; there is.  Just watch them for a few minutes.

            All need warning to:

            “Look out for the dog poop.” with that warning including the ‘that’ from their own dog.

            So... ‘highborn’ anything

            “Is not”?

            That levels a playing field doesn’t it.  Or does that give someone like me ‘advantage’?  And that advantage becomes a ‘biggest reason of all’?

            If an antique is highborn... there are less of them ‘around’.  There are so ‘less of them’; so few... that one may not ever sight one.  Or... more likely, one may actually ‘see one’ (a highborn specimen of a design medium) ‘once’ in a lifetime (twenty to thirty years but better considered ‘in a lifetime’ of fifty years).  Sight one.  Not find one.  Not buy one.  Not collect one.  Not seek, study, know of, learn about or... no.  Just ‘see one’.

            Looking at that from my trained and traveled antiquarian eye, I... with my eye... learned a long time ago that I may (and do) carry a smidgeon of ‘highborn I know’ ‘that’ with me for decades before suddenly ‘using it’ on a ‘that’ and.... that-that being too... ‘highborn’; a highborn antique.

            “Oh now that’s just” especially at a posterior marketplace called flea... a fish in a barrel... to someone like me.

            I always stop at them.  I promise.

            It is a dirty business; pursuing highborn antiques at a posterior.  A buttock of the market?  Dirty business whose setting is cleaned up for me by the partner:  Mr. Know-Not Know.  You’ve met him?  I doubt it.  He says to me “Well what about THAT over THERE”.  What he speaks of is so far away.  I do not hurry.  No need to scamper.  Everything is in slow motion.  It has taken me fifty years to ‘find one of those’... so it should be ‘in slow motion’.  I walk over.  The ‘in the mind’.. design... rat race has already taken place in my head as these steps are taken.  I don’t just grab ANYTHING:  ‘People’ are watching.  No... everything is in slow motion.  I have the entire posterior of the flea market field to myself.  No one is going to swoop in.  Not even you.

            I will try to levitate:  Clustered on a folding plastic card table and among the table top’s hoard of rubble are six specimens of an... English ceramic design form titled commonly ‘copper lustre’; a form of  ‘English’ ‘Lustre Ware’.  So... already the chess piece titled highborn may be moved:  Yes... isn’t that... so there we go with that ...quite early on.  But that is not critical highborn.  No; that is commoner... highborn.  And I am still walking over.

            When I do touch, I touch the common by conscious choice.  ‘People’ are watching’.  Touch and price this clump of ‘old copper lustre’ ‘ware’.  Copper lustre, in the current antiquarian... interest... and market... is, at the most, a “zero” if not actually a ‘negative’.  Everyone ‘knows’ what it is they will tell you; the ‘I know’ from above.  Then they just add for clarity that ‘it doesn’t sell’ and... move on past my dismembered body they, the ‘I know’ just

            “I know” to “death”.

            Well I know all that too but am, shall I say, born again... of the English design forms titled ‘lustre ware’.  Yes:  I ‘looked into it’ (studied it) a long time ago; its art, history, heritage and... all that applied TOO to its (lustre ware) antiquarian collector and that market.  Notice that is TWO fields of survey and study.  That is, then, ‘a lot’ of informed ‘I know’ that I “bring to this” (the six or seven old lustre ware vessels... sitting on a folding plastic card table in the sun at an out of doors antiquarian posterior called ‘flea market’).  That is a lot more than anyone else ‘around’ “brings”.  Valuable seconds of my life are ticking away (wasting).  Or are they?  You may not tell me.  I will tell you.  I am in the moment of ‘finding’ a ‘highborn’ antique.  Is that wasting time?  You, for example, are next to the table inspecting an old metal ‘potato racer’ that is “JUST LIKE MY MOTHER USED” you speak to your friend as you, idly, put it back.  You smell like sun screen.

            You do.

            And I don’t care.  I am busy.  I am at work.  I am at my job... working.

            So... the cluster

            Of Lustre

            All have little slips of paper inside each vessel pricing that vessel.  And:  One vessel has no price slip in it.  That vessel, I noticed... ten feet away... is notably different as lustre ware when an ‘I know’ eye races ‘over it’.  Copper lustre is a shiny copper glazed ground with decorative design hand painted upon this copper... lustre.  Form, too, is important.  Copper lustre is an ‘Empire Style’ form (1825-1845); the ‘style’ of a, for example, table pitcher (“jug”).  The Empire Style is ‘credited’ to Josephine, Napoleon’s wife.  I do not need to get into that.  In this moment the copper lustre (with price slips) are clear-to-my-eye “copper lustre” “Perfect condition”.  “Oh.”

            “But what about THAT?”  A forlorn hope in the midst of Empire Copper?  Yes.  In the midst is a white glazed clay body with vigorous PINK lustre hand painted decoration all over it and TOO this pink lustre being a ‘jug’ of ‘different form’ (earlier)

            How different?  The lines are stern; not flamboyant.  The lines ‘hold’ the form.  To a lay... USA... eye, the ‘stern’ looks a little toward... American Federal... style.  But it is not American Federal style.  It is, actually, the English ceramic form that American Federal form

            Comes from;

            An English

            ‘Highborn’.

            Form:

            “Hepplewhite”.

            So I see all of this ten feet away in seconds; the this one ‘jug’ is, as design, heads and tails above the Empire copper lustre; that it is classic ‘pink lustre’ decoration on classic English Hepplewhite ‘jug’ form.  I, too, see that the jug is age tone ‘browned’, has pleasing and concise usage wear on the bottom, three minor spout edge old usage flakes and... “Otherwise perfect” and “don’t have to worry:  “It’s real” (not a recent ‘reproduction’).  But.  No price.

            “How much?”

            “Five (dollars).  See the chips?”

            “I hand over five dollars and say, only, “Thank you”.

            “Really”:  It’s the best pink lustre I’ve found in years.  The form is perfect.  The painting full fledge.  Somebody cared... about “that”.  They certainly cared when they made it.  And it is, as an object, so fragile;

            So highborn.