Ghosts I've Never Known

"WE have all met the man who says that some odd things have happened to him, but that he does not really believe that they were supernatural. My own position is the opposite of this. I believe in the supernatural as a matter of intellect and reason, not as a matter of personal experience. I do not see ghosts; I only see their inherent probability."
~G.K. Chesterton: Tremendous Trifles.

It is a peculiar fact that just about every member of my family has had a ghostly experience or a tale of weird encounters, while I have never experienced anything that I haven't found totally explicable. The peculiar thing is that there's nothing in my beliefs or philosophy that denies the possibility of ghosts; I've just never seen one.

And really, I live in one of the most haunted areas in our little town. Just across the street is a haunted hotel that's been featured on TV, news articles, and websites around the world. The house I live in (through no virtue of my own) is over one hundred and thirty years old. My nieces and nephews think there are ghosts here.

Lord knows, I've got plenty of dead relatives who could come visiting. It didn't use to be that way. For a long time, nobody I was close to ever passed away. But, of course, that couldn't last forever. I even knew lots of evil assholes, now passed, who could come a-haunting.

I have plenty of hypotheses about my situation. One is that everyone is bullshitting me about their paranormal experiences. The "professional" hauntings at the hotel seem like pretty obvious money-making endeavors. My favorite theory is that God knows I'll drop down dead with fright if I see a spook, so He protects me from that.

Orthodox Christianity seems divided on the existence of ghosts. One school of thought says when you're dead, you're either in Heaven or Hell, no vacations. Another tradition says the dead pop in and out for special reasons. A lot of opinion hinges on how they interpret the whole Samuel and the Witch of Endor episode.

Of course, the materialist philosophy says we're all just meat-machines. We see a ghost, that's just something interfering with the machine, a glitch in the brain or a hoax or a misinterpretation of the facts.

What do I think? I think all my ghost-seeing relatives seem sincere. They're not fools, though I'm sure they could be fooled. I'm not even sure when they describe their "ghosts" if it's dead people, and not, say demons up to some kind of mischief. That's certainly been one popular interpretation of hauntings. In which case thinking it was really ghosts would be almost comforting.

And, if they are dead people, why hang around? I remember reading a ghost story by Charles Dickens (or was it Mark Twain?) where the narrator, after getting on to comfy terms with an apparition, asks the ghost why spirits, no longer hindered by fleshly concerns, and having the entire planet, if not the universe, to roam, limit themselves to dreary places like cemeteries and abandoned houses that can only be unwholesome reminders of their death? The ghost realizes the justice of this argument and leaves for greener pastures.

So, ghosts: real or nay? I can only say, with Samuel Johnson, "[F]ive thousand years have now elapsed ...and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it."

Cor' Blimey!

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and now a Joyous Epiphany (or Twelfth Night, or Three Kings' Day) coming up. I haven't posted for a while now: but real life all too often trumps blogging when it comes to time and resources, and with Christmas, post-Christmas, New Year's, the search for a lost dog, a family move, and illness I've had little energy to spare. But I want to put up a little post to break the ice and get the ball rolling again.



First, a little list of the stuff I've gotten recently. In books, I got The Magic Spectacles by James P. Blaylock, a rather rare little volume that came early in Blaylock's career and apparently only published in Great Britain. It is his one avowedly "juvenile" work, and is very reminiscent of his "Balumnia" books like The Elfin Ship and The Disappearing Dwarf. I also got Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman, involving a young boy and the Norse Gods; The Bards of Bone Plain, Patricia McKillip's latest bejewelled work; and Against All Things Ending by Stephen R. Donaldson, although reading these Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant books always gives me a headache. I also now have the Frank C. Pape illustrated editions of the James Branch Cabell books Figures of Earth and The Cream of the Jest: I love Pape's work and would like to get all of Cabell's works that he illustrated.



In DVDs, I have Beyond Tomorrow, a 1940 Bangsian fantasy; Jack Frost, a vintage Finno-Russian family fairy tale movie; Stories From My Childhood Vol. IV, featuring Soyuzmultfilm's editions of Beauty and the Beast, The Nutcracker, The Golden Rooster, and The Prince, The Swan and The Czar Saltan; Bedknobs and Broomsticks; Nanny McPhee Returns; How To Train Your Dragon; Family Guy: It's A Trap!; and Blackadder: The Specials Remastered, which includes Blackadder's Christmas Carol, Blackadder the Cavalier Years, Blackadder Back and Forth, and Baldrick's Video Diary, thus completing my Blackadder viewing experience.



I'm feeling a little discombobulated because I don't have a new Tolkien calendar up on the wall yet; the only one available locally is the movie tie-in one, and the official Tolkien calendar this year features the art of Cor Blok. Cor Blok's style is...individual. Tolkien himself liked it, and had several LOTR-inspired paintings of his in his home. But I have always thought when W. H. Auden commented that Tolkien had "hideous" pictures hanging on his walls, he might have meant Blok's. But I might be willing to give them another try in calendar form, and I do like to have the Tolkien-related dates handy. So perhaps a fishing expedition to a bigger city nearby is called for.



And now the hour grows late, and it is time to put a few wisps of straw in my wooden shoe for the Three King's horses, and await the arrival of the friendly broomstick-riding La Befana and her gifts. Regular service should soon be restored. Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

The Drunkard's Lone Child

When my dad's mother was put into a nursing home, her remaining possession's were split among her children. As part of my father's portion he received several old German books that had come down through his mother's family, the Jandt's. He was never really a great caretaker, and when he passed away and I got them they had been stored in damp, dusty conditions for a while, and when I opened the tin box they were contained in, I was confronted by what appeared to be a mass of black mold. Not willing to simply toss them away I put the box in drier, more secure storage, and only recently have had the will to face them again.

To my surprise the mold seems to have dried away, and the books themselves no longer present the appearance of papier mache bricks; in fact they are so thoroughly dried one can once again thumb through them page by page. They are, as I said, all in German, and seem to be mostly works of Lutheran theology. There are inscriptions by various members of the Jandt family, and the publication date of at least one of them is 1863; it is possible these books came across from Germany with the family when they immigrated. The books (of which there are 12) are still in no great shape, being brittle and crumbly, but they are fascinating familial artifacts.

Inside one volume I found the clipping above. It had yellowed so deeply it was almost brown; there is no way to date it that I can see. A little research reveals it is a version of a traditional Ozark folk song, lamenting the evils of drink. As you can see, whoever clipped and saved it pencilled in the word "hell" on it. Why did they do that, precisely? Was it something they feared, or something they knew about personally, or did the words "no mother, no friends, and no home" just sum up for them what constitutes a hell on earth?

My brother and I had just had a long conversation about the "unknown" qualities of our ancestors. While we can know their names and dates, so little of their personality is transmitted to later generations; we speculated on what traits we might have ourselves that were passed down the line from persons unknown. Suddenly opening this enigmatic little window to the past, so haphazardly preserved, put a very big accent mark on that thought. Whoever clipped this--were they struggling with alcoholism, or did they have pious objections to drink? Or was it for poetic, sentimental reasons? We'll never know now in this world.