~Clown
in the Moon1~
Some days, I believe in ghosts.
In a metaphorical sense, that is. I’ve neither seen nor felt anything in this
life that would give me reason to believe in literal ghosts. So I don’t.
They’re the products of our fears and, strangely, hopes. We fear death, yet also hope that death is
not final, that we survive in some form.
Though few hope to be ghosts, for tragedy and loneliness are generally
the attendant themes of such a condition, many hope that ghosts provide proof
of the survival of the self, the persistence of the soul. It's an odd, if understandable, disconnect in the human psyche.
I’ve never been one of these people, though.
In the end, all ghosts are, whether one chooses to believe in them or
not, are the semiotic expressions of who we are. Symbols and metaphors for longing, symptoms
of our inchoate fears of the Great Beyond.
Like metaphors, ghosts are born in imagery, in the need to grapple with
a too-literal world. And in this
literal world, death itself is entirely literal. We create symbols to hold the truth at bay,
abstrusions to create the comforting illusion of distance. None of them are verifiable, nor should they
be. A symbol that can be rendered
concrete is useless.
So when I say I believe in ghosts, what I really mean is I believe in
the power of the imagination. In the
end, ghosts are real because we are real.
We haunt ourselves, and there’s precious little we can do about it.
When we lose
people, it seems we never quite manage to stop talking about what they would
have thought, what they would have believed, how they would have reacted. The more we miss them, the more we recreate
them in hypotheticals, like intellectual and emotional ectoplasm forever
haunting us at the most unexpected moments.
Or perhaps intellectual protoplasm, evolving inside us at the cellular
level, pervasive as the insistent chill of stark memory, and just as difficult
to dispel.
But, of course, we’re always talking to ourselves, not them. Never them.
Even when we believe in ghosts, a part of us always knows they have
nothing left to give us, neither advice nor love nor comfort in the wee hours
of lonely mornings. La mort n'a
peut-être pas plus de secrets à nous révéler que la vie? They might not
have moved on, but neither can they return.
As a species, I think, we stopped really
believing in the beneficence of those gone beyond the curtain long ago. Some still pay lip service to the idea, even
when their eschatology specifically contraindicates such a thing. For example, Christianity, which has no
shortage of people who believe in ghosts, spooks, spirits, and all manner of
unsavory non-terrestrial creatures: “And
the dead in Christ shall rise first” (1st Thessalonians 4:16), but
this means that they remain buried until this moment, at the end of the world. And ancestor worship has fallen very far in
this day and age.
After *E.A. passed, I stopped talking about her out
loud except in the exigencies of momentary need. In the aftermath of such loss, there’s a terrible
loneliness that fights to stay inside you.
You think you want catharsis but what you really want a reason. Something to make everything seem meaningful,
or at least natural. Just acknowledging
that loss and death come for us all accomplishes nothing. It’s a homily, a truism from some rarefied
sphere where we can afford to toss off such observations with the blitheness of
someone who has something better to do shortly and can afford to take a bare
moment of contemplative logic before being distracted. When the loneliness of an irretrievable loss
hits you, clings fervently to your thoughts, simple words won’t pry it loose. Catharsis
is destruction, it whispers, and pain
shared is pain misunderstood.
It’s no secret I’ve always been very
careful about sharing even without such whispers in the darkness following losses. Sometimes I wonder if I should ask *Terri,
who has never been in the slightest bit reticent about sharing, for lessons on
how to fix that.
Because I’ve always loved *Terri as a person and a friend even when the
romantic bond between us was long gone, I talked to *Terri about *E.A. some
after *Terri managed to track me down.
That has been about the extent of it.
Even my family, even my closest friends, they knew little, if anything,
and I’ve gone to considerable effort to keep it that way. They know about *M.W., my closest friend, if
only a little; they may or may not suspect there are others beside her. I compartmentalized my life fair tidily in
some ways, and think I’m probably happier for that. If someone asks a direct question that entails
bringing her up – e.g. “What the hell have you been up to for the last few years,
anyway?” – I’d allude to the people I’ve lost, though only in the barest terms
I can get away with while still answering the question. It’s akin to describing the inner workings of
a watch by saying, “Gears plus springs equal time.”
And I tried to stop thinking about *E.A. and *M.W. in any terms but
what once was true but isn’t anymore. I
want to move on. Find someone and
something new. I neither need nor want
to be haunted in this life.
I have enough ghosts as it is. None of them literal; all of them real.
But ghosts
don’t require you to believe in them in order to exist, any more than your past
requires you to believe in it on order to have occurred. We can’t escape either. Endeavoring to do so simply forces us to
wallow in the inevitable truth of the ineluctable self. Our past, and our ghosts, require us, and are
part of us, no matter what lengths we go to pretend otherwise.
So the ghosts of friends and
girlfriends and relatives lost still whisper at moments inopportune in places
inappropriate. Sometimes in appropriate
places at moments opportune, but far less frequently. One in a blue moon, at the exact right time
and place to keep you from doing something stupid, like eating questionable
haggis or telling the patrol cop who pulled you over for speeding exactly what
you think of him before blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke in his face.
Not that any of these apply to
me. I promise. Scout’s honor. I haven’t been pulled over speeding in ages
and ages, and genuine haggis is illegal in this country.
Also, I was never a Scout. That probably needs acknowledging, if for no
other reason than my merit badges tend to be for ridiculous things like ‘ennui,’
‘synecdoche,’ and ‘Cartesian coordinates.’
Though I am particularly proud of my merit badge in ‘Neoplatonic
Hylomorphism,’ given that I managed to absolutely disprove the concept by
careful application of self-analysis mixed with the objective observation of
halter tops.
Yes, halter tops. If this is a problem, then disprove my
disputation.
The impulse to be facetious,
flippant, or just plain ridiculous tends to patter in on the heels of such
morose moments; it keeps me centered, I think.
Because I’ve always been a fairly happy person, because I’m something of
an absurdist, I hold onto humor and try not to think about all the times I want
to make a funny observation to *E.A. or *M.W.
Being able to share such things with them provided me with happiness,
with the sense that not only did I know the world was a good place, there were
people who shared that belief, and did so in part because I was in the world
with them. There’s a certain irony in the
fact that being able to share such things with someone close, whether best
friend or girlfriend, would be the perfect antidote to the grief of losing
someone close.
Irony has been good to me in times
past, but I’ve come to realize that Irony can be a bit of a bitch as well.
To come to a full circle (because I’m
tired of writing tonight), when
you’re haunted, you learn nothing that you didn’t already know. More precisely (and more cuttingly) you learn
nothing that you didn’t already want to believe. That sense of isolation, of talking to
yourself no matter how hard you try to couch it in psychological terms, view it
as a form of healing – it wears at you. You start to sense the futility of it all
fairly quickly. Or at least I did. Intellectually, I never fooled myself into
thinking I was doing anything other than engaging in rote pattern resurrection;
I brought back the memory of things lost and measured my current thoughts
against them.
Intellect generally doesn’t have
much patience for the emotive. Though
both arise from basic cognition, they diverge fairly quickly. This truth keeps the shrink (and sometimes
quack) industry in business.
Being an eminently – and imminently, for that matter, my intellect
always lurking over every gut reaction – sensible sort of romantic, I knew
perfectly well that what I was doing didn’t just border on futility; it crashed
right over into the phlogiston of the existential void. The only meaning that existed was the meaning
my brain insisted on creating.
Still, as any grieving person can tell you, demarcating the lines of
absurdity is a far cry from adhering to them.
In the end, as much as I don’t want to be haunted, as much as I would
prefer to move on, find a new best friend, or a new person to love, ghosts that
don’t exist can’t actually be exorcised.
Because I don’t believe in ghosts, because I know I’m just inflicting my
own grief on myself, the only way to escape them is to let them leave at their own pace in their
own time. Though I can move on – a problematic
but achievable goal despite certain circumstances of late – it’s not quite as
simple as just forgetting about the ghosts.
If one could banish them so easily, grief and mourning would cease to
exist in this tired world of ours. So it’s
not that simple.
But it will happen. I know
this. My knowledge springs not just from
knowing how the world works, but from knowing myself. I don’t believe in ghosts, and I don’t
believe in clinging to the past. At some
point soon, I’ll find myself leaning over to ask *E.A. a question, or tell *M.W. a joke,
and they won’t be there anymore. All
that will be left is memory, and memory? Memory, I
can handle just fine. There are worse things than memory, and staying trapped in that awful moment of loss is one of them.
It's far too easy to believe in ghosts, after all, when you bring them with you.
~Fin~
1) The full text to the Dylan Thomas poem of the
same name:
“Clown
in the Moon”
My
tears are like the quiet drift
Of
petals from some magic rose;
And
all my grief flows from the rift
Of
unremembered skies and snows.
I
think, that if I touched the earth,
It
would crumble;
It
is so sad and beautiful,
So
tremulously like a dream.
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