A Ghost Is Just The Love That Stays Behind

in my dreams lately I see a greener and simpler world

Since I posted about ghosts a few weeks ago I have been encountering references to them everywhere. More likely than not this is just frequency illusion—the same phenomenon that makes me notice anyone else driving a beat up 2007 Saturn Ion in maroon (then give them a little nod and a “hell yeah”)—but I am paying attention to it regardless.

I wrote back then that “there are so many cruel and pointless ways to die.” What I really meant was “there are so many cruel and pointless ways to be killed.” My friend Marianela let me know she interpreted it differently: that whether or not one is legally dead, there are many cruel and pointless forms of death that one can experience. The ghost of a dead person is a value-neutral phenomenon. But a living person described as a ghost is proof of a great and inexpressible tragedy.

Every day it feels like we are hurtling toward cataclysm and that kind of world produces the living ghosts that are our sin and shame. Ghosts hollowed out by poverty and addiction and broken hearts. Ghosts tethered to their living places by storms and violence and immiseration. There is no accounting for how a society could do this to itself and if I am being honest most days I wake up without the rosy optimism that things can and will get better that I have been accustomed to leaning on all the other days of my life.

But in my dreams lately I see a greener and simpler world. I see bridges made of living trees covered in a matting of moss. I see revenant runs of salmon choking the rivers. I see mushroom tables and chairs in damp and sun-soaked woods. I have been reading about fungus and the constructive intelligence it possesses. The chemical signals it pours into the soil to tell the snaking roots of trees that it is ready to enmesh itself among them with cellular anchors. The way that certain species hunt worms to gain essential nutrients. The conduit that mychorrhizae form between biomes and kingdoms: salmon that die and wash ashore pour their nitrogen into the roots of enormous red cedars, who pass it along to needy birches on superhighways made of mushroom.

I see stark human figures against black backgrounds, mushrooms erupting from and forming them, like a fungal version of the sea creatures that Davy Jones’ men became in that Pirates movie. People of chanterelles and oysters and turkey tails and blewits. New living, walking proof that we do not just live on earth: we are inextricable from it. That we are formed of earth stuff and recycled into earth stuff no matter what kind of life we lead. There is no border between past present and future, which churn into one another with every passing second.

And so I also think about the ghosts we might keep alive through our rituals, great and small acts of love and joy that in their doing become religious rites. The Uffington White Horse comes to mind. Some 3,000 years ago, on a hill near Oxfordshire, prehistoric people dug trenches to form the shape of a giant horse, and filled them with white chalk. Without regular scouring the figure quickly becomes obscured; for three millennia, then, people have been cleaning and filling in this great figure, and for most of that time no one has known quite why. But they do it anyway and in doing so keep alive the first people to make and cherish the horse, on that hillside in an incomprehensible lost age. That commitment to a simple act of communion and preservation is something I lean on and cherish, in these times of great despair.

It doesn’t have to be a horse made of chalk. It can be an olive eaten from the tree of Vouves, which started giving people olives to eat more than 1,000 years before the birth of Christ. It can be the rubbed-gold places on every statue of a dog. It can be the act of remembering a certain person in a certain room, long after both are gone.

In that piece on ghosts I wrote that maybe a ghost is just unfinished business. But maybe it can be something else, too. Maybe love is bound to the laws of thermodynamics and cannot be destroyed, only transformed. Maybe a ghost is just the love that stays behind once everything else is gone.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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