On Ghosts

A mock-academic footnote to Ghost of A Flea

Some clueless cunts there are, wearing the grizzled mask of Wisdom, Wisdom that is little more than the instant gravy of Common Sense put through a gold plated sieve, who maintain that ghosts, or what are called ghosts, are little more than the foggy and luminous shadow of a once mortal body, neither matter nor spirit but a kind of “albuminous compromise” as the eminent Bataille might have said. These people, so-called “mediums” and tatty occult dunces with stained sleeves, maintain that The Living, when snuffed out by Death’s bony fingers, leave a kind of lingering steam, albeit scary and somehow able to pass through walls, evacuated of stomach and bone, in no way slippery or jammed with gunk, but capable of moaning.

But I, having chatted and bantered with actual ghosts, in that congenial lounge, that open salon called Sleep, with its many untouched rooms and portals, can testify that they – ghosts -are in fact more powerfully corporeal than anybody and any Body you might have met with in the pallid light of day, or even the drunken glittering lights of night. Their nearness cannot be measured in inches, or indeed in measures at all, for the face of a ghost is always too clammily close, no matter the metrics. It always presses and threatens infection or frottage, and, without touching (at least in the conventional sense) leaves its imperceptible slimes (for there are several) in your helpless pores. How is it so, this effect, this collapse of metrical distance, metrical distance made drunk and unsteady by the sheer presence of the so-called ghost? Explanation below:

Things and people, as we encounter them in the world, the so-called real world beloved by “blokes down the pub,” by the grubby potbellied propagandists of everyday life who are only too eager to trumpet the immoveable virtues of the Self-Evident, have an external border conferred by custom, by the collective imagination you might call it, but imagination at its most servile, gimpish and domesticated. Put differently, each thing we meet with arrives already in a labelled jar, such as Woman, Man, Child and so forth, so that we see not a living being with its knocking impersonal heart, the recycled air it pukes from its nose, its parasite-hosting epidermis, its plasticky nails and black springy hairs, but first of all the label on the jar, and the thing itself only as refracted through the glass and made palatable, as it were, by the reassurance of the label.

That, forgive the digression, is what the “Bloke down the pub” means by the real world – things that are no bigger than their labels and their jars.

But ghosts have always crawled from their jars, their eyes - literally and figuratively - too big for the sockets, their chittering insides too near the smooth outside, their faces somehow face-less and raw; everything about them, to the merely human eye, looks varicose and abnormal, and this only because we cannot pin a name on them or pop them back in a jar. And so what happens is that the shock to the nervous system is so intense and immediate, that memory cannot hold the ghost. Memory is left instead with the after burn, the cloudy signature left behind. And this cloud, this after-smoke is what they then call ghost, being all that they can remember. But the living meat and electrical energy of the ghost itself: gone forever.