On Walking Backwards
By Anne Carson
My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.
I just love Carson—each sentence is polished and a little unpredictable. This prose poem is from Carson’s “Short Talks” which is collected with other odds and ends in Plainwater. I wanted to start this episode of Notions & Notes with “On Walking Backwards” because I’m interested in the idea of ghosts. The ghosts in her poem are both real and conceptual. Ghosts represent what haunts us, what’s lost and lingers, our fear of finality, our little hope that our lives might not end completely.
So yes, I’m rambling on about ghosts in August, because metaphors aren’t seasonal in the same way pumpkins are.
“Ghost” by Neutral Milk Hotel
This song is from one of my favorite albums of all time (I don’t say this lightly—I even have a tattoo on my arm referencing another song from the album).
Jeff Mangum spoke about writing this song in a 1997 interview:
When I started writing “Ghost,” it's like the 10th track, the song that goes [sings] “Ghost, ghost I know you live within me,” because we thought we had a ghost living in the house, living in the bathroom. So I locked the door and started trying to sing to the ghost in the bathroom. But then that was sort of like singing about the ghost that we thought was constantly whistling in the other room that kept waking me up, and then a ghost that may or may not live within myself. And it also ended up being more of a reference to Anne Frank. And a lot of the songs on this record are about Anne Frank.
I think Mangum and I feel the same way about ghosts—they’re a possibility we won’t discount entirely; they’re a stand-in for all the things we can’t explain; and, from a creative perspective, they’re a metaphor. When Mangum speaks about Ann Frank, you realize her ghost is the song is his small way of preserving her humanity.
While I was reading the book, she was alive to me. I pretty much knew what was going to happen. But that’s the thing: You love people because you know their story. You have sympathy for people even when they do stupid things because you know where they’re coming from, you understand where they’re at in their head. And so here I am as deep as you can go in someone’s head, in some ways deeper than you can go with even someone you know in the flesh. And then at the end, she gets disposed of like a piece of trash. And that was something that completely blew my mind. The references to her on the record—like “Ghost” refers to her being born. And I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I’d have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank.
I’ve listened to this song so, so many times, but the interview is new to me and has gotten me to thinking about how his lyrics reincarnate Ann Frank, give her another life, which is what ghosts are in the end, and how writing more broadly is a record of our existence, something that lasts after our body doesn’t.
Ghost Orchids
Watch this video while enjoying a good sandwich—trust me, it’s a perfect little break. The search for the ghost orchid pollinators is as gripping as any ghost story. (It is also a reminder that patience and observation are as essential to science as they are to writing).
The same scientists in this video published a paper finding ghost orchids are threatened by loss of water and longer dry spells related to impacts of development.
These causes include diversion by canals (which keep water off of roads and out of neighborhoods), increased extraction by suburbs and agriculture, and less green space for water storage. A lack of natural fires has also driven a change in plant cover from grasses to large plants like shrubs that use more water.
It’s a lesson that we can’t merely create a wildlife preserve and sit back, says Clem. The plants, animals, and entire ecosystem still must be defended from threats outside the sanctuary’s boundaries.
The reality is that our short-sighted decisions today will make these scientific documents—studies and films—into ghosts and all that remains the orchids and their incredible moths if we don’t stop centering ourselves so destructively.
I think photographs can play a similar metaphoric role in retaining or memorializing what’s physically gone. They are also a shadow of what once existed. Is Leibotiz’s photo of Emily Dickinson’s ghost? Does knowing she took this photograph and published it as her first project after her longtime partner Susan Sontag’s death make it a double ghost, of Dickinson and Sontag, two queer women whose writing still resonates like a voice coming from down the hall?
In her seminal essay, “In Plato’s Cave,” from On Photography Susan Sontag writes:
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Hilma af Klint
I recently got Notes and Methods, a collection of Hilma af Klint’s notebooks from the time she collaborated with four other women to contact spirits through seances and meditation in a group called “The Five.” It’s a neat window into the practice and discipline that goes into making art. These five women felt the physical world too static and that the spiritual world was just as real as that perceived with the five senses. While I love her abstractionism, she saw her paintings as a transcription as precise and concrete as possible of her contacts with the spirit world, and her work is full of symbols representing abstract ideas like a secret code.
Hey look, the symbolic flowers in this painting look like ghost orchids:
My favorite paintings by Hilma af Klint are from the series of Paintings for the Temple, 193 works done over the course of nearly a decade, which she felt were communicated to her through spiritual guides. Here are a few I find particularly beautiful:
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old--as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny band prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once--the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.
Baby Suggs didn't even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn't the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realize that every house wasn't like the one on Bluestone Road. Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present--intolerable--and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.
"Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don't."
And Sethe would oblige her with anything from fabric to her own tongue. Winter in Ohio was especially rough if you had an appetite for color. Sky provided the only drama, and counting on a Cincinnati horizon for life's principal joy was reckless indeed. So Sethe and the girl Denver did what they could, and what the house permitted, for her. Together they waged a perfunctory battle against the outrageous behavior of that place; against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air. For they understood the source of the outrage as well as they knew the source of light.
It’s an incredible opening passage to a brilliant book. I always find myself tongue-tied if I try to talk about Morrison’s writing—her words should be felt like a shock wave and anything I could say is just a distracting buzz. For the purposes of exploring the idea of ghosts in this episode of Notions & Notes, I will only add that the literal ghost in this novel is a manifestation of history—the individual and collective trauma caused by slavery. Look at the savage inequities in our education system, our health system, our “justice” system, and you know slavery haunts us still. Here’s some advice from Morrison’s The Source of Self Regard:
Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of “I” and choose the open spaces of “we”.
For a while I lived next door to a haunted house. I’ve written about this house and its former occupant more than once, and I even have an essay I’m shopping around where the house plays a prominent role. While I can’t say I really believe in ghosts, I also can’t say I don’t. Regardless of their existence, I hope his ghost haunts the shitty luxury townhouses they built in its place.
I’ve always been fascinated by abandoned and decaying buildings—I’ve broken into a few, mostly when I was a kid, and recently had the crowning achievement of just strolling right into the old Steinert Piano building to see the abandoned underground theater. I love the the peeling wallpaper and flecking paint, the remnants of lives that passed there, the history and architecture, the earthy smell of a room that is starting to erode to nature and time. I picture rooms like this when I think of “love’s austere and lonely offices.” What can I say? Abandonement and decay are my aesthetic. So it seems obvious that I would love the details in Bryan Sansivero's photographs:
If abandoned buildings are also your aesthetic, I highly recommend following this account for some dreamy French abandoned buildings:
Yūrei-zu
I stumbled on yūrei, Japanese ghosts or “faint souls,” when I was trying to learn more about the witch scene in Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957).
There are different kinds of yūrei, including ghosts of mothers who’ve left behind children and ghosts of those who’ve died at sea, and they are usually bound to a particular place. Because each yūrei is different, there are many different shinto stories and myths, which are fascinating. I particularly enjoyed following this rabbit hole to find ukiyo-e paintings and prints of yūrei.
Ghosts by Vauhini Vera
The author writes about her sister’s death in a series of nine stories with the help of an AI text generator. The result is surprisingly intimate and mesmerizing in its repetitions and variations, as if the form itself is haunted by grief. It’s too long for me to paste here in its entirety, you really shouldn’t miss the experience of reading it all at once. Though they are out of context and you really should read the whole thing, here are a few moments that really stood out to me:
In grad school I was skinny and pale and quiet. I rarely spoke in class. I was getting my master’s degree in literature, but I was still a ghost. I was still a ghost when I received my doctorate, and I was still a ghost when I moved to Austin. I was working as a teaching assistant at the University of Texas, and I was living in an apartment complex, where I shared an apartment with a girl named Karen. She was thin and pale and quiet, too. We were both ghosts. One day, Karen met a man, a local, who was not a ghost. He had a beautiful face, hands, and body, and he had a beautiful soul, too. They fell in love. I watched them fall in love, and I envied them. I envied her. I wanted to fall in love, too.
I’m not a religious person, but I do believe in ghosts. Not the ghosts of the dead, but the ghosts of the living. The ghosts of people who, because of a trauma, have lost their sense of themselves. Who feel, in some fundamental and inescapable way, that they are not real. This is why I could not conjure my sister for you. This is why you could not conjure her for me. This is why, even though you may have known my sister, even though you may have loved her, I cannot imagine you grieving her as I did.
Once upon a time, my sister taught me to read. She taught me to wait for a mosquito to swell on my arm and then slap it and see the blood spurt out. She taught me to insult racists back. To swim. To pronounce English so I sounded less Indian. To shave my legs without cutting myself. To lie to our parents believably. To do math. To tell stories. Once upon a time, she taught me to exist.
No More Cake Here
BY NATALIE DIAZ
Ghost Story dir. David Lowry
One of my students at Emerson told me about this movie. It is beautiful, meditative, intimate and one of my favorite new films I’ve seen in the last several years. It’s filmed to make the viewer feel like a voyeur, like the ghost left in the home.
Lastly, I’ll share a poem that appeared in print in The Fairy Tale Review this winter. There’s a whole series of Ghost Girl adventures that I have yet to figure out what to do with. If you get a friend to sign up for this newsletter, I’ll send you my contributor’s copy. (Look at that contributor’s list! It’s totally worth it.)