XLVIII. bump in the night

on the disappearance of ghosts and language

Some news! Sorry to be a business woman at the top but I have had my first essay published (!) in Lit Hub this week, “Constructing Blackness: Reading My Identity in Maryse Condé’s Segu.” This essay started as a newsletter that many of you kindly responded to which made me consider expanding it. Beyond this little feather in my cap, this platform has allowed me to experiment with a form (personal essay) that I have no formal background in; I really feel a profound shift in my relationship to reading and writing. I know I have never figured out an actual way to incentivize paying subscribers, but I do want to take the time to thank you all. This is a space where I can play without pressure and your contributions help me keep it going without falling into the hell-trap of monetizing another creative outlet. I am just very grateful to all of you who take the time to read and send me your reflections, especially when I go on incomprehensible tangents (brace yourself for what’s below). I will keep tossing things at the page to see what sticks. Thank you guys a million.

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In January, to pull myself out of a reading slump I turned to my favorite 20th century snark, Edith Wharton. Having made my way through her most popular novels (if anyone wants to get me The Buccaneers, you are allowed), I picked up her collection of ghost stories, recently reissued by NYRB. Apparently it was a thing for writers to have some spooky stories in their back pocket to publish here and there between novels. I have never been a huge purveyor of scary stories. Just as I cannot watch horror movies, I apparently can’t read horror stories without laying awake all night listening for footsteps. But Wharton’s stories are more uncanny than frightening. For the most part they are concerned with the classic Wharton themes: class, gender, family tapestries, women trapped by their husbands’ mistakes. It is a fun read, but for me, the highlight of the collection is the preface where Wharton predicts the death of the ghost: “Ghosts, to make themselves manifest, require two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind: silence and continuity.”

The Mount. Perfect place to scare yourself with your own writing.

We could never have ghosts in the city. It occurred to me a few weeks ago, as I was listening to The Daily in the shower that Michael Barbaro must be actually incomprehensible to anyone outside of New York or D.C. Not even coastal elite—he speaks to a very northeast, private university, earnest/ironic, cynical/optimist hybrid monster that could only be legible to those who are anxious about what other people think of them based on the book they’re reading on the subway. I count myself as part of this group. I live in a city where everyone around me is in complete agreement about the horrors, but we carry on in a half defiant, half c’est la vie posture that can only be maintained with a million flashpoints of external stimuli to distract us. Wharton called out our inevitable downfall in 1937:

For where a ghost has once appeared it seems to hanker to appear again; and it obviously prefers the silent hours, when at least the wireless has ceased to jazz. The hours, prophetically called “small,” are in fact continually growing smaller; and even if a few diviners keep their wands, the ghost may after all succumb first to the impossibility of finding standing-room in a roaring and discontinuous universe.

Of all the things we are losing right now—civil rights, cultural institutions, our international standing as an allied power—I am weirdly moved by this idea of the loss of ghosts. We have things that inspire fear and disgust but not mystery, and not awe. We have monsters, but they don’t even bother to hide under the bed. Ghosts, shades you might catch only out of the corner of your eye or who visit only in deep sleep may be relics of a bygone era. Somehow the death of ghosts feels like the next step after the death of god. Nothing but ourselves left on this plane, everyone and everything else pushed out by our insatiable self interests.

And what has all of this noise brought us to? It seems we’ve clogged up all the good cosmic frequencies not with any language to accurately reflect the times, but with either a wail or a snort. In one of Brandon Taylor’s most recent newsletters he writes about symbol collapse, the critical breakdown of language.

What I tell my students about figurative language and about the lyric is that it constitutes a phase change. That is when language is put under the pressure or extremity of experience or emotion it shifts register from reality as it appears to reality as it is experienced. The language itself attains a shimmer of that which it seeks to contain and the contents of the language are briefly made manifest.

…

I think so many of us got burned out in the Trump is a Fascist wars of the last decade—so many metaphors and allusions to fascism—that now the fascism, the actual, factual, here, boots on the ground, one step from declaring that he is the State (he might have actually said that he is the State), seems a little…I don’t know. Not anticlimactic, because in truth, it is very scary. I think to me it feels as if we’ve already expended the charge contained within that word, within the idea of the fascist president, that now we need another word, another phrase, something else to capture the extremity of what is actually happening.

…

I suppose cliché is what happens as a language has expended its charge or mystery or surprise. Cliché seems to me to always refer to relations. It’s always a cliché to call a thing another thing in a way that’s been said or done before. A little too familiar. We’ve been down that road before. That’s a cliché, for example. But what I feel now is that a whole reservoir of language is dying out under the extremity of this new regime. Whole kinds of expression are just being totally deaded in our mouths and minds and at our fingertips simply because nothing can keep pace with the strange world we find ourselves in.

Sometimes, when there is a crisis and people say, “this is why art is so important,” I’m like what do you mean? Laws feel important, the Constitution, vaccine distribution…but then in a recent closed-door panel/strategy session/freakout with several arts and culture workers someone asked, after an hour of incredible conversation, “can you [the panel members] each name what is happening?” The panelists all had the very natural tendency to lean on abstraction: this moment, these times, unprecedented situation, etc. but the audience member wanted them to name names. He wanted concrete language. What is actually happening? Some of them attempted an answer, some of them abstained. As we all squirmed, looking around to see if anyone might loose us from silence, I think we felt what Taylor described, whole kinds of expression being deaded in our mouths. In that moment, and so many others, I flashed to a performance I saw in January.

Super Nothing by Miguel Gutierrez is “choreography for the apocalypse.” In a seventy minute piece, four dancers answered the question. I left that experience knowing exactly what is happening, exactly what this moment is—its sexual escapism and puritanical handwringing, the isolation, the communal grieving, bursts of frenetic joy verging on hysteria, drone-induced, bone-numbing exhaustion—and all on loop and all on your phone and all because we don’t touch each other anymore and all because there is still hope. And even to write that, none of those words strung together are capacious enough to hold the times, but the body was. Four bodies stopped the gap left by language.

it is so like that

After I saw Super Nothing, as I was reading Ghosts, I was in a workshop at BAM for a new work that did not yet have text. At the time, I wrote about how stifled I felt my expressions had been. From the beginning of the year until then (February) it felt like I had a lot to say but it was out of reach. Dancing with that ensemble I felt I could make myself perfectly understood and everything they returned was clear as if it had originated in my own head. And I can’t recall that we talked about much of anything. I don’t know where most of them are from or their “take” on our absurd government, but I do know that my body, that vulnerable animal self, was pretty intimately cared for for six days.

But back to ghosts. A few weeks ago I went to the ENT and he told me I have small ear canals and, in an effort to mitigate my prolific earwax production, I should avoid using airpods. This has led to a lot of quiet time. Not even quiet, the city is so loud, but I haven’t been actively blasting other people’s voices straight into my brain. In the beginning it was terrible. My thoughts, as if loosed from a dam, crashed in an unceasing tide. To-do lists and deeply held fears and recipes I’d like to try were all vying for attention like they thought this was their only chance to be heard. When my forced headphonelessness continued, things calmed. Ideas could float in and out, unhurried; I could drift off on the current of random impressions one has on the subway. In that soft focus is where I imagine ghosts reside. I don’t want to see any, for any ghosts reading this, but I would like to know my life has enough space for those kinds of mysteries, that there is enough silence and stillness for inspiration. I want to be able to pay attention.

I leave you with a final Edith Wharton drag:

To a generation for whom everything which used to nourish the imagination because it had to be won by an effort, and then slowly assimilated, is now served up cooked, seasoned and chopped into little bits, the creative faculty (for reading as well as writing) is rapidly withering, together with the power of sustained attention; and the world which used to be so grand à la clarté des lampes is diminishing in inverse ratio to the new means of spinning it; so that the more we add to its surface the smaller it becomes.

xx

Mia