"The gruesomely conscious realm of ghostly fear and cold terror," or, The Haunted Commonplace Book!

{Resting, London. Photo by rocketlass.}

From a gravestone in Norfolk churchyard, collected in Everybody's Book of Epitaphs, W. H. Howe, editor

Underneath this sod lies John Round
Who was lost in the sea and never was found.

From Jean-Claude Schmitt's Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society (1994, 1998 translation by Teresa Lavender Fagan):

Historians and ethnologists commonly speak of a "belief in ghosts." But what does this really mean, and how can the historian ascertain past beliefs? One of the recent advances in the "anthropology of beliefs" is to question the ill-considered uses of the notion of "belief." We must be careful not to reify belief, to turn it into something established once and for all, something that individuals and societies need only express and pass on to each other. It is appropriate to substitute a more active notion for the term "belief": the verb "to believe." In this way a belief is a never-completed activity, one that is precarious, always questioned, and inseparable from recurrences of doubt.

That seems in keeping with Shirley Jackson's argument, in the lecture I quoted from yesterday, that even those of us who claim not to believe in ghosts are a quick glimpse in the wrong direction away from changing our minds. We don't believe, but . . .

From the entry for "ghost" in David Pickering's Cassell's Dictionary of Superstitions (1995):

Measures that may be taken against encountering ghosts include, according to Scottish tradition, wearing a cross of Rowan wood fastened with red thread and concealed in the lining of one's coat.

From "Mujina" by Lafcadio Hearn, collected in Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904):

Then that O-juchu turned round, and dropped her sleeve, and stroked her face with her hand, ;--and the man saw that she had no eyes or nose or mouth,--and he screamed and ran away.

From "The Banshee," in Jorge Luis Borges's The Book of Imaginary Beings (1967, 2005 translation by Andrew Hurley):

No one seems ever to have seen one. They are less a shape than a wailing that lends horror to the nights of Ireland and (according to Sir Walter Scott's Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft) the mountain regions of Scotland. Heard outside one's window, they herald the death of some member of the family.

{Weeping girl in Cemetiere Mont-Royal, Montreal. Photo by rocketlass.}

Most of us skeptics these days ground our rejection of the concept of ghosts not so much on our not having seen one but on basic rationality. The efforts of William James and his colleagues to find proof of spirit manifestations were, after all, a bust, and no verifiable evidence has emerged since. Rationality, therefore, demands that we at the very least put ghosts in the category of unlikely. And yet, the sun still goes down, and the autumn nights still carry their unsettling chill . . .

From Jean-Claude Schmitt's Ghosts in the Middle Ages (1994, 1998 translation by Teresa Lavender Fagan):

A persistent yet somewhat ambiguous and contradictory refusal to admit the possibility that the dead might return in dreams or perhaps in conscious visions characterized the ecclesiastical culture of the early Middle Ages. . . . In a religious way of thinking long fragmented by a fundamental dualism--the antagonism between the devil and the saints, between the phantasmagorias of the former and the controlled apparitions of the latter--there was very little room for ghosts or for the oneiric and ambivalent revelations of ordinary dead people.

From D. J. Enright's introduction to the "Loving Revenants" chapter of The Oxford Book of the Supernatural (1994):

That these visitors rarely convey a message of much overt significance has found its reasons. What motivates them rather than the delivery of urgent intelligence is the natural desire to glimpse their children, their loved ones, to revisit places where they lived or worked (a pantry, a library, an altar), returning, in the words of Hardy's poem, to where the living person "found life largest, best." Such appearances are more for the sake of the revenant, then.

{Gravestone of an aviator, San Michele Island, Venice. Photo by rocketlass.}

Of course, unlike most of human history--or for example, thinking back to yesterday's post, the years following World War I--now we are able to pass through our days with little thought of death. It's something that happens elsewhere, to other people. Such a denial makes every aspect of modern life easier, from conspicuous consumption to support for distant wars. Death no longer visibly stalks us, and though we know that means he'll ultimately sneak up and pounce us instead, we have become very good at denying that inevitability.

From Johan Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1921, 1996 translation by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzch):

No other age has so forcefully and continuously impressed the idea of death on the whole population as did the fifteenth century, in which the call of the memento mori echoes throughout the whole of life. Denis the Carthusian, in the book he wrote for the guidance of the nobleman, makes the exhortation that "when he goes to bed, he should imagine not that he is putting himself to bed, but that others are laying him in his grave." . . . . In the fourteenth century, the strange word "macabre" appeared, or, as it was originally spelled, "Macabré." "Je fis Macabré la dance," ("I made the Dance Macabre") says the poet Jean Le Fevr in 1376. It is a personal name and this might be the much disputed eytmology of the word. It is only much later that the adjective is abstraced from "le danse macabre" that has acquired for us such a crisp and particular nuance of meaning that with it we can label the entire late medieval vision of death. The motif of death in the form of the "macabre" is primarily found in our times in village cemeteries where one can still sense its echo in verses and figures. By the end of hte Middle Ages, this notion had become an important cultural conception. There entered into the realm surrounding the idea of death a new, grippingly fantastic element, a shiver that arose from the gruesomely conscious realm of ghostly fear and cold terror.

Ah, but us ghost story fans at least have October as our memento mori, our occasion for focusing our attentions on the fate we'll all share--and, while eschewing the comforts of religion, thinking on the possibility that it might not be the end after all.


{St. Boniface Cemetery, Chicago. Photo by rocketlass.}

From "The Girl I Left Behind Me" by Muriel Spark, collected in The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark (1994):

I opened the door and my sadness left me at once. With a great joy I recognized what it was I had left behind me, my body lying strangled on the floor. I ran toward my body and embraced it like a lover.

From Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842):

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

From Stephen King's Salem's Lot (1975):

It became unspeakable.

To begin the weekend, some beginnings

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In the wake of the long, involved Austerity Britain, I've felt the need for its opposite: books that are petite and circumscribed i their intent, but no less potent--bursts of intensity rather than drawn-out explorations. So I've pillaged my bookshelves for narrow-spined volumes, and for the past few days I've carried half a dozen books with me on the train every day, blazing through one and then choosing another. I think that's the form my whole weekend is likely to take.

Coincidentally, the first couple I've read have had fabulous openings, the sort that instantly establish an unforgettable tone and, were you to read them in a bookstore, would send you straight to the cash register to buy the book so you can enjoy the rest of it on your back steps with a martini.

The first paragraphs of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) don't feature Miss Brodie, the book's unforgettable central character, whom in the supplementary materials to the HarperPerennial edition Hal Hager describes as

fascinatingly complex, idealistic, self-deluded, vulnerable, vital, romantic, preposterous, lonely, gregarious, outspoken, [and] solipsistic

--to which I'd have to add "inadvertently malevolent," or even "slightly sinister." They do, however, establish a singular mood and prose rhythm--attentive and matter-of-fact, yet subtly ironic about the world of rules and conventions portrayed--that drew me right in:

The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.

The girls could not take off their panama hats because this was not far from the school gates and hatlessness was an offense. Certain departures from the proper set of the hat on the head were overlooked in the case of fourth-form girls and upwards so long as nobody wore their hat at an angle. But there were other subtle variants from the ordinary rule of wearing the brim turned up at the back and down at the front. The five girls, standing very close to each other because of the boys, wore their hats each with a definite difference.

Georges Simenon's The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (1938) opens in a totally different register. Crime novels, perhaps more than any others, need to declare their tone at the start. The lurid cover, after all, has already told us roughly what to expect inside: bad behavior--possibly stretching to murder--and most likely some sex and consequences. The question is how we'll get it, and what the author's relationship to the contents will be. Will he, like Chandler or Graham Greene, create for us a fallen world suffering the consequences of its rot? Will we get the matter-of-fact, crime-as-workplace approach of Donald Westlake? Perhaps the story will be filtered through the knowing perseverance of a Lawrence Block narrator?

Simenon, in the opening paragraphs of The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, announces, loudly, that we will be dealing with inexorable fate, and an ordinary man caught up in its brutal machinery:

As far as Kees Popinga was personally concerned, it shoudl be admitted that at eight in the evening there was still time: his fate, among others, had yet to be sealed. But time for what? And what else could he have done other than what he did do, convinced as he was that his actions were of no more consequence than during the thousands and thousands of days that had gone before?

He would have shrugged in disbelief had someone told him that his life was about to change radically, that the photograph on the side table showing him standing in the middle of his family, with one hand casually resting on the back of a chair, would soon be printed in every newspaper across Europe.

A nice touch, from the former newspaperman Simenon, the transfiguration of the utterly ordinary family photo into a frightening talisman of dark renown.

I was going to stop with two, but then I picked up Gregoire Bouillier's odd little memoir, The Mystery Guest: An Account (2004), which I read a couple of nights ago, and couldn't resist sharing its deliberately casual and opaque first page, too:

It was the day Michel Leiris died. This would have been late September 1990, or maybe the very beginning of October, the date escapes me (whatever it was I can always look it up later on); in any case it was a Sunday, because I was at home in the middle of the afternoon, and it was cold out, and I'd gone to sleep in all my clothes, wrapped up in a blanket the way I often would when I was alone. Cold and oblivion were all I was looking for back then, but this didn't worry me. Sooner or later, I knew, I'd rejoin the world of the living. Just not yet. I felt I had seen enough. Beings, things, landscapes . . . I had enough to last me for the next two hundred years and why go hunting for new material? I didn't want any trouble.

Deceptive in so many ways, that opening frankly invites us to conspire with Bouillier--to acquiesce to his pretense that there's still time for him to clarify the date--and offers, in exchange, it seems, so much. He's seen enough? Enough to last two hundred years before he has to rejoin the living? What could possibly be next?

The answer, though, turns out to be both more pedestrian than you would expect--a mysteriously ended love affair--and yet strangely interesting, even comforting, regardless. Like the others I've written about today, The Mystery Guest is a modest book, but its pleasures and rewards are genuine, and I hope to write more about it soon. For now, I'll close by saying that Bouillier lives up to the implicit credo in the following statement about dreams:

The significance of a dream, we're told, has less to do with its overt drama than with the details; a long time ago it struck me that the same was true of real life, of what passes among us for real life.

Paying attention to the details: the novelist's art in brief.

Enjoy the weekend, and remember to raise a glass to the labor movement. We'll never pay them back enough for what they've given us.

R. I. P. Muriel Spark (1918-2006)

From "The Portobello Road," collected in The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark

I must explain that I departed this life nearly five years ago. But I did not altogether depart this world. There were those odd things still to be done which one’s executors can never do properly. Papers to be looked over, even after the executors have torn them up. . . . Sometimes as occasion arises on a Saturday morning, my friend Kathleen, who is a Catholic, has a Mass said for my soul, and then I am in attendance, as it were, at the church. But most Saturdays I take my delight among the solemn crowds with their aimless purposes, their eternal life not far away, who push past the counters and stalls, who handle, buy, steal, touch, desire and ogle the merchandise. I hear the tinkling tills, I hear the jangle of loose change and tongues and children wanting to hold and have.

That is how I came to be in the Portobello Road that Saturday morning when I saw George and Kathleen. I would not have spoken had I not been inspired to it. Indeed it’s one of the things I can’t do now—to speak out, unless inspired. And most extraordinary, on that morning as I spoke, a degree of visibility set in. I suppose from poor George’s point of view it was like seeing a ghost when he saw me standing by the fruit barrow repeating in so friendly a manner, “Hallo, George!”