The Ark of Studies

{Bibliochaise, from nobody&co..}

From "Prologues to a Personal Library," by Jorge Luis Borges:

A book is a thing among things, a volume lost among the volumes that populate the indifferent universe, until it meets its reader, the person destined for its symbols. What then occurs is that singular emotion called beauty, that lovely mystery which neither psychology nor criticism can describe.

Anyone with an interest in the various schema by which books may be organized is liable at some point to find himself thinking about the furniture that carries out those organizational plans. Bookshelves are a remarkably simple, effective design for most of our storage and retrieval purposes. Yet they're not very good at handling one of the most basic problems that has faced scholars and dilettantes alike since the first bound volumes: how to deal with the fact that one is often reading half a dozen or more books more or less simultaneously? How is one to keep all those books in easy reach and usefully organized--especially when so many readers, like me, have already given over control of the most natural resting place for extra volumes--the lap--to a cat or two?

Via the Athanasius Kircher Society, I've learned about an admirable solution from sixteenth-century Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli: the Book Wheel.



Here's how Ramelli described it in 1588:

A beautiful and ingenious machine, which is very useful and convenient to every person who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are suffering from indisposition or are subject to gout: for with this sort of machine a man can see and read a great quantity of books, without moving his place: besides, it has this fine convenience, which is, of occupying a little space in the place where it is set, as any person of understanding can appreciate from the drawing.

Meanwhile, in this week's New Yorker Anthony Grafton highlights more inventions designed to help sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars deal with the unprecedented flood of books:

Jacques Cujas, a sixteenth-century legal scholar, astonished visitors to his study when he showed them the rotating barber's chair and movable bookstand that enabled him to keep many open books in view at the same time. Thomas Harrison, a seventeenth-century English inventor, devised a cabinet that he called the Ark of Studies: readers could synopsize and excerpt books and then arrange their notes by subject on a series of labeled metal hooks, somewhat in the manner of a card index. The German philosopher Leibniz obtained one of Harrison's cabinets and used it in his research.

The Ark of Studies reminds me of Dr. Johnson's relatively simple system for organizing the source materials for his Dictionary. Henry Hitchings describes Johnson's method in Definining the World (2005):

When he identified a passage suitable for quotation, he underlined with a black pencil the word he meant it to illustrate, marked the beginning and end of the passage with vertical strokes, and wrote the initial letter of the chosen word in the margin. Working in pairs, the amanuenses would then go over the books Johnson had marked. Each time one of them came to a marked passage, he would transcribe it on to a quarto sheet and strike out the marginal letter. . . . The quotations were set out in columns, and, once full, the quarto sheets were cut up into slips, each bearing a single quotation. These copy slips were kept in bins, and arranged in alphabetical order by the amaneuenses. As work proceeded, the juggling of copy slips unfortunately allowed some of the illustrations to be lost. We can see evidence of this occasionally in the finished Dictionary. Explaining one sense of the verb "to cream," Johnson says is "used somewhere by Swift," while another word, "dripple," is "used somewhere by Fairfax."

Of course, even the best scheme and the most ingenious book furniture won’t avail in those situations where the information one desires is simply not there, as Guy Davenport laments in "Dictionary":

Some years ago, on a particularly distraught evening, the drift of things into chaos was precipitated by my consulting Webster's Third International for the word Mauser. All I wanted to know was whether it sported an umlaut or not. It wasn't there. I paid $47.50 for my Webster's; it weighs as much as a six-year-old girl; and I had to build a table for it, as it is too bulky to go into a bookshelf, and will anyway come all to pieces unless it sits open day and night.

Perhaps we should just give up and move into Borges's Library of Babel, where we accept a life of isolation for the certainty that the knowledge we seek is in there, somewhere:

There is no combination of characters one can make--dhcmrlchtdj, for example--that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god. To speak is to commit tautologies. This pointless, verbose epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five bookshelves in one of the countless hexagons--as does its refutation.

To be honest, that probably is where we belong, immured in the endless library. Even the fact that we're worrying about these organizational problems at all suggests that we fit the pejorative connotation that Dr. Johnson ascribes to the term "booklearned":

Versed in books, or literature: a term implying some slight contempt.

To back up his assertion, Johnson turns--this time with attribution in hand--to a sharp little line from Jonathan Swift:

He will quote passages out of Plato and Pindar, at his own table, to some booklearned companion, without blushing.

We book people can tell ourselves that an ingenious piece of furniture may be all we need to establish order, but we know better. Entropy and its constant companion infinitude will never leave off plaguing us.

From Certain of the Chronicles, by Levi Stahl:

After a long night, I have at times slipped into dreams wherein I wander a vast ship full of books, shelves as numerous as the waves of the ocean, floors as many as the footsteps on a mountain, all unread, pages uncut, unknown. I know in my heart that I can find my way out, but I fear in my soul that I cannot find my way in.

The hazards of milk and the glories of puddingtime

"My illness is due to my doctor's insistence that I drink milk, a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies"--W. C. Fields

Perhaps Fields's doctor had been reading Lord Chesterfield? Chesterfield wrote to his son on March 12, 1768:

In my opinion, you have no gout, but a very scorbutic and rheumatic habit of body, which should be treated in a very different matter from the gout; and, as I pretend to be a very good quack, at least, I would prescribe to you a strict milk diet, with the seeds, such as rice, sago, barley, millet, etc., for the three summer months at least, and without ever tasting wine.

Fields would not have been surprised to learn that Chesterfield's son died soon after.

Though Chesterfield's son may not have suffered from gout, one who did was Tobias Smollett's cranky country gent (and alter ego) Matt Bramble in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), whose lively rant about the horrors of London milk Emily Cockayne draws on in Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England (2007):

[T]he produce of faded cabbage leaves and sour draff, lowered within hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings, discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco-quids from foot passengers, overflowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach-wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke's-sake, the spewings of infants . . . and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid.

Cockayne goes on to explain that London milk was thought to be particularly bad not just because of the contaminants that fire Smollett's powers of invective, but also because of the horrid conditions in which London cows were forced to live:

With a small and diminishing number of grazing opportunities and little space to store fodder, beasts were left to wallow in their own excrement, tied in dark hovels, where they fed on brewers' waste and rank hay. Their milk was known as "blue milk," and was only good for cooking.

The conditions described sound frighteningly similar to those found on contemporary factory farms; though I suppose pasteurization has cut down on the potential for contamination, the lives of the cows themselves don't seem to have improved much. And I'm sure I'll never be able to look at the blue tinge of a bowl of skim without thinking of horrid London blue milk.

In the right locations, however, Londoners could get the freshest of fresh milk:

[F]resh drinking milk was available in small quantities from cows that were walked along the streets, as mobile bovine vending machines. The Lactarian in London's St James's Park provided some fashionable milk, drunk warm, fresh from the udders of cows able to exercise.

{"The merry Milk Maid," from Marcellus Laroon's The Cryes of the City of London, Drawne after the Life (1688)}

Ah, but who would want milk, however fresh, from a cow rather than from a lovely milk maid--or, as Matt Bramble deems her, a "nasty drab"? In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the maids walked the streets of London, carrying pails and announcing their presence with, as Peter Ackroyd explains in London: The Biography (2000), a familiar--if incomprehensible--call:

It was certainly true that, as Addison wrote in 1711, "People know the Wares [tradesmen] deal in rather by their Tunes than by their Words." The words were often indistinct or indistinguishable: the mender of old chairs was recognised by his low and melancholy note, while the retailer of broken glass specialised in a sort of plaintive shriek quite appropriate to his goods. . . . There was also in the passage of years, or centuries, the steady clipping or abbreviation of jargon. "Will you buy any milk today, mistress" became "Milk maids below," then "Milk below," then "Milk-o" and, finally, "Mieu" or "Mee-o." . . . Pierce Egan, author of Life in London," recalled "one man from whom I could never make out more than happy happy happy now."

Before I milk this lazy little Saturday meander dry, I have to check in with Dr. Johnson. Though the definitions for milk in his Dictionary are relatively dull, he does define one of my favorite eighteenth-century terms, derived from a milk-based dish:

puddingtime
1. The time of dinner; the time at which pudding, anciently the first dish, is set upon the table.
2. Nick of time, critical minute.

Mars that still protects the stout,
In puddingtime came to his aid.
HUDIBRAS.

It clearly being puddingtime, I'll close.

A genial warrior calm

When people ask me why I love baseball, I usually boil it down to three elements:

1 It's played outdoors in the hopeful cool air of spring, the sweat of summer, and the glorious chill of autumn. (Let us not talk about baseball played under roofs.)
2 The lengthy careers of the best players provide for wonderful long-running soap operas. For example, #$#&*@# Roger Clemens has been a pleasantly reliable object of ire since I was in the fourth grade.
3 It's a sport of individuality, where there are multiple ways to excel--and, most importantly, where the fat man can have his day. And there are few things I love more than seeing a fat baseball player succeed.

It's that third point that brings on today's post and provides the reason that it's on this blog of things I've been reading, rather than the more casual baseball blog that my friend Jim and I run: Sports Illustrated has just put online a piece by Bill James, guru to baseball nerds (If you catch me in the right mood someday, I'll tell you about how I learned critical thinking from his books about the game.), in which he waxes exuberant about Cleveland's hefty lefty C. C. Sabathia. Following a week in which I raved to everyone in earshot about the glories of Luc Sante when he lets his enthusiasm fire his prose--about which more later this weekend--James's piece seemed appropriate for this venue.

James is a writer who would benefit from a good editor, yet he rarely seems to work under one: he's as perceptive as anyone who's ever written about the game and has a knack for a memorable phrases, but his writing frequently threatens to become too casual for the ideas it's trying to convey. Here, though, his breathless tone is perfectly suited to his subject, and it hits exactly the note I find myself striving for when describing favorite players:

I have to tell you, as a baseball fan, I absolutely adore C. C. Sabathia. I always have. I've compared all these players [on this list of top young players] to somebody else. It is sacrilege to compare C. C. Sabathia to any other pitcher. He is totally unique. For one thing, although listed weights of baseball players are so bogus that it's hard to see the point of listing them, C. C. has to be the heaviest player in major league history. He's huge--6'7"and has an aircraft carrier frame supporting large piles of necessary and unnecessary flesh, all of this adorned with comic little ears that stick out from his face as if the Lord couldn't find a flat place to put them. He has a unique delivery, hanging his massive leg in the air in seeming defiance of both gravity and nature, yet he is balanced and graceful. He projects a sort of genial warrior calm on the mound. He was an outstanding pitcher when he reached the majors in 2001 and has gotten steadily better, cutting his walks from 95 in 180 innings to 37 in 241 innings. He's 26 now, like Peavy, and his age is pushing him downward on this list; he is less of a young talent, and more of a mature product. But I don't think I've ever missed a C. C. Sabathia start in Kansas City when I was near KC or in Boston since I've been in Boston, and I hope he pitches forever.

That last line--I hope he pitches forever--is the heart of what being a baseball fan means to me, and it's the most important link between the game on the field and our daily lives. A lot of nonsense is written about how baseball is some sort of mirror of life, but James has hit upon the one tie that is indelible: in both, we always hope--against our knowledge of life's inevitable losses--that those people and things we love will be with us always.

Despite that hope, baseball forces us to confront change, and aging, in ways that the continuities of daily life allow us, most of the time, to glide over. Whereas in daily life, we can spend years pretending that we are the same--as sharp, strong, and good--as we were when younger, baseball is less forgiving. Jimmy Edmonds, great as he was, has lost a step, and my desire to deny that fact is frustrated daily. But the knowledge that our favorites constantly fight a losing battle against decay forces us to appreciate each moment just a bit more: every time Edmonds knocks a ball out of the park with one of his beautifully awkward uppercut swings I will stop and marvel, knowing my life's ration of those moments is limited. Literature at its best does the same, focusing our often wandering minds, reminding us that these moments are worth our thought, that freely given attention and care are nearly always repaid.



So even though Sabathia doesn't pitch for my team, and even though I only see him a few times each year, I'm with James: I hope he pitches forever.

"Methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies into the same water," or, Looking after the Codpiece Oeconomy

{Flea, by Robert Hooke, from Micrographia (1664)}

Is it a mark of shallowness that I never feel the difference between modern life and the past more clearly than when I am reminded that for most of human history people weren't able to take showers? Sure, baths have their virtues--though they, too, were so rare as to be almost nonexistent for most of history--but there are few things quite so satisfying as a hot shower. I think of my post-marathon showers, when I can feel the salt encrusted on my skin give way beneath the water; or the shower in high school that followed a day's work cutting horseweeds out of young beans, with not a hint of shade in sight; or the shower that cleansed the stench of cream cheese and cheap ham that lingered after a shift at Bruegger's Bagel Bakery during college. Oh, how lucky we are!

Those in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries weren't nearly so fortunate, as Emily Cockayne reminds us in her spectacularly rich Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England (2007)

Washing routines were so unexceptional that they are usually ignored in contemporary diaries, autobiographies, and letters. Consequently it is difficult to be sure how people washed in the period. . . . Samuel Pepys rarely mentions washing himself, and for him cleansing did not need to involve water--on 5 September 1662 he records "rubbed myself clean." It is unlikely that soap featured much in the cleansing routine. Made from rancid fats and alkaline matter such as ashes, most cakes of soap would have been quite greasy and would have irritated the skin. . . . Some authors did extol the virtues of a wet wash. . . . At the age of thirty-three John Evelyn began "a Course of yearly washing my head with Warme Water, mingl'd with a decoction of sweete herbs, & immediately with cold spring water." This "much refreshed" him.

In line with other physicians Joseph Browne thought that many conditions were improved with cold bathing, which could cure scrofula, rickets, venereal diseases and "weakness of Erection, and a general disorder of the whole Codpiece Oeconomy." . . . Chimney sweeps were besooted from head to toe and known as part of the 'black Fraternity." "I would not recommend my Friend to breed his son to this Trade," remarked Mr. Campbell in 1747, adding, "I think this Branch is chiefly occupied by unhappy Parish Children. Sweeps effectively acted as the chimney brush--their clothes were tattered on the way up the chimney and their skin endured grazes, burns, and scratches. Soot, a carcinogenic substance, would not have washed readily from skin. Millers were prone to lice, which fed off pockets of flour held in folds of skin. Grocer's itch was a condition caused by handling flour or sugar. . . . Jonas Hanaway reported that some sweep masters washed their apprentices annually.

Cockayne continues by citing Lord Chesterfield, which sent me back to his letters to his son for a more full statement of his position on cleanliness. As usual with Chesterfield, I wasn't disappointed:

In your person you must be accurately clean; and your teeth,hands, and nails, should be superlatively so; a dirty mouth has real ill consequences to the owner, for it infallibly causes the decay, as well as the intolerable pain of the teeth, and it is very offensive to his acquaintance, for it will most inevitably stink. I insist, therefore, that you wash your teeth the first thing you do every morning, with a soft sponge and swarm water, for four or five minutes; and then wash your mouth five or six times. Mouton, whom I desire you will send for upon your arrival at Paris, will give you an opiate, and a liquor to be used sometimes. Nothing looks more ordinary, vulgar, and illiberal, than dirty hands, and ugly, uneven, and ragged nails: I do not suspect you of that shocking, awkward trick, of biting yours; but that is not enough: you must keep the ends of them smooth and clean, not tipped with black, as the ordinary people's always are. The ends of your nails should be small segments of circles, which, by a very little care in the cutting, they are very easily brought to; every time that you wipe your hands, rub the skin round your nails backward, that it may not grow up, and shorten your nails too much. The cleanliness of the rest of your person, which, by the way, will conduce greatly to your health, I refer from time to time to the bagnio. My mentioning these particulars arises (I freely own) from some suspicion that the hints are not unnecessary; for, when you were a schoolboy, you were slovenly and dirty above your fellows. I must add another caution, which is that upon no account whatever, you put your fingers, as too many people are apt to do, in your nose or ears. It is the most shocking, nasty, vulgar rudeness, that can be offered to company; it disgusts one, it turns one's stomach; and, for my own part, I would much rather know that a man's fingers were actually in his breech, than see them in his nose.

Since she started me on this topic, it seems only fair to let Cockayne have the last word, which is not completely foreign to those of us who spend our summers swimming in Lake Michigan--though, again, our sufferings pale in comparison to those of the early moderns:

Despite the pollution Londoners used the Thames for bathing. John Evelyn noted that even when they bathed in water "some Miles distance from the City," they still became coated in a "thin Web, or pellicule of dust" gathered from the clouds of city smoke by falling rain.

It's a goner!

{Manny-kin by rocketlass.}

October, that is. All Hallow's Eve is here, and the haunting of this blog is coming to an end. I hope you've enjoyed it.

But there's still time to sneak in one of my favorite unexplained scary stories, that of Spring Heeled Jack, "the terror of London" in the 1830s. Though there have been whole books written about Jack--from penny dreadfuls to relatively serious scholarship--Peter Ackroyd's brief account in London: The Biography (2000) is a good place to start. He draws primarily on the testimony of a young woman who was assaulted by Spring Heeled Jack in 1837, the year he was first spotted:

One statement, given by Jane Alsop at Lambeth Street Police Office, describes how the unfortunate girl encountered him on her doorstep. "She returned into the house and brought a candle and handed it to the person, who appeared enveloped in a large cloak, and whom she at first believed to be a policeman. The instant she had done so, however, he threw off his outer garment, and, applying the lighted candle to his breast, presented a most hideous and frightful appearance, and vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flame form his mouth and his eyes resembled red balls of fire." . . . Jane Alsop's testimony had other, equally disturbing elements. From "the hasty glance which her fright enabled her to get at the person, she observed that he wore a large helmet; and his dress, which appeared to fit him very tight, seemed to her to resemble white oilskin. Without uttering a sentence he darted at her, and catching her part by the dress and the back part of her neck, placed her head under one of his arms and commenced tearing her gown with his claws, which she was certain were of some metallic substance."

Fortunately, two of Jane's sisters, hearing her cries, were able to drag her away and slam the door, locking her assailant outside. But even then, as she explained in her testimony,

Notwithstanding the outrage he had committed, he knocked loudly two or three times at the door.

Ackroyd rightly points out just how creepy the knocking is:

This knocking at the door, so strange that it could scarcely have been invented, is perhaps the most alarming moment in an entire alarming episode. It is as if to say--Let me in, I have not finished with you yet.

Others who spotted Spring Heeled Jack over the course of the next few years emphasized other attributes: several noted that he could leap remarkably high; others heard him cackling like an insane man; many emphasized his devilish appearance. Though the public furor over Spring Heeled Jack died down later that decade, sightings continued to be reported sporadically for the rest of the century. The Wikipedia, in fact, in a very good entry for those interested in learning more about Jack, catalogs sightings as recent as the late 1980s; it also runs through a variety of explanations, of varying degrees of likelihood, that have been offered over the years.

And now, because you can never be too careful when dealing with malign spirits, I'll close October with a brief parable by Robert Louis Stevenson that I found in The Suicide Club and Other Dark Adventures. It will surely keep the demons away for a while.


{Satan, by Gustave Dore, illustration for Paradise Lost}

The Devil and the Innkeeper

Once upon a time the devil stayed at an inn, where no one knew him, for they were people whose education had been neglected. He was bent on mischief, and for a time kept everybody by the ears. But at last the innkeeper set a watch upon the devil and took him in the fact.

The innkeeper got a rope's end.

"Now I am going to thrash you," said the innkeeper.

"You have no right to be angry with me," said the devil. "I am only the devil, and it is my nature to do wrong."

"Is that so?" asked the innkeeper.

"Fact, I assure you," said the devil.

"You really cannot help doing ill?" asked the innkeeper.

"Not in the smallest," said the devil; "it would be useless cruelty to thrash a thing like me."

"It would indeed," said the innkeeper.

And he made a noose and hanged the devil.

"There!" said the innkeeper.

"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.

Now, you cannot ask a man to meet a ghost, because ghosts are not to be counted on.

{Robert Boursnel, "Self-Portrait with Spirits" (1902)}

From a 1958 lecture, "Experience and Fiction," by Shirley Jackson

I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out that there was one common factor--most people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit that sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren't careful--if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first.

Shakespeare's ghosts have distracted me for a few days from my efforts to convince every single one of you to go to your nearest used bookseller and buy a copy of D. J. Enright's The Oxford Book of the Supernatural, from which I've taken Shirley Jackson's dead-on assessment of shaky skeptics. I've also drawn today's headline from the book; it appears in Oliver St John Gogarty's As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1936) in a description of a haunted evening with the Yeatses, during which Yeats, unflappable, makes the following 2 a.m. demands of a ghost:

1. You must desist from frightening the children in their early sleep.
2. You must cease to moan about the chimneys.
3. You must walk the house no more.
4. You must not move furniture or horrify those who sleep near by.
5. You must name yourself to me.

That doesn't leave a ghost much scope for activity. I suppose he could blow on Yeats's tea and make it cool extra-quickly.

Though Yeats may be the poet best-known for trafficking with spirits, he's not alone by any means. John Donne appears in Enright's collection via a story of a dark vision featured in Izaak Walton's early biography. Having made a trip to Europe despite his (yet again) pregnant wife's "divining soul bod[ing] her some ill in his absence," Donne is found by his patron Sir Robert,

in such ecstasy, and so altered as to his looks, as amazed Sir Robert to behold him; insomuch that he earnestly desired Mr Donne to declare what had befallen him in the short time of his absence. To which Mr Donne was not able to make a present answer: but, after a long and perplexed pause, did at last say, "I have seen a dreadful vision since I last saw you: I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms this I have seen since I saw you." To which Sir Robert replied, "Sure, sir, you have slept since last I saw you." To which Mr. Donne's reply was, " I cannot be surer that I now live, than that I have not slept since I saw you: and I am as sure, that at her second appearing she stopped, and looked me in the face, and vanished."

The vision proves at least partially true: Donne soon learns that the child was stillborn and his wife, though alive, is very ill.

Then there is the poet who is a ghost, as Enright presents Harold Owen recounting in the third volume of his memoir, Journey from Obscurity (1965). On a naval ship during World War I, he enters his cabin to find his brother Wilfred--who should have been at the Western Front--sitting in Harold's chair:

I felt shock run through me with appalling force and with it I could feel the blood draining away from limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not rush towards him but walked jerkily into the cabin--all limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not sit down but looking at him I spoke quietly: "Wilfred, how did you get here?" He did not rise and I saw that he was involuntarily immobile, but his eyes which had never left mine were alive with the familiar look of trying to make me understand; when I spoke his whole face broke into his sweetest and most endearing dark smile. I felt no fear--I had not when I first drew my door curtain and saw him there; only exquisite mental pleasure at thus beholding him. All I was conscious of was a sensation of enormous shock and profound astonishment that he should be here in my cabin. . . . . I loved having him there: I could not, and did not want to try to understand how he had got there. I was content to accept him, that he was here with me was sufficient. . . . I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty. . . .

I felt the blood run slowly back to my face and looseness into my limbs and with these and overpowering sense of emptiness and loss. . . . Suddenly I felt terribly tired and moving to my bunk I lay down; instantly I went into a deep oblivious sleep. When I woke up I knew with absolute certainty that Wilfred was dead.

From now on, any time I read about World War I and the swathe it cut through a whole generation I'll remember the sense of deep, ultimately frustrated longing in that passage; whatever hopes or fears in Harold Owen generated that vision, they are of a piece with those that drove the postwar efforts by Conan Doyle and others to search out a spirit world that might reveal some trace of their lost loved ones. So many millions of young men were gone, and the desire on this side of the veil for any contact at all was so powerful that the bereaved of World War I would surely have agreed with this passage that Enright quotes from Margaret Oliphant's A Belaguered City (1879):

Why should it be a matter of wonder that the dead should come back? The wonder is that they do not. Ah! that is the wonder. How one can go away who loves you, and never return, nor speak, nor send any message--that is the miracle: not that the heavens should bend down and the gates of Paradise roll back, and those who have left us return. All my life it has been a marvel to me how they could be kept away.

For as often as we hear stories of ghosts who need something from us, in fact it is we who need them--need them not to forget, not to stop caring for us. It's no wonder that such a strong desire sometimes generates a response, whatever questions we might harbor about its reality.

Bloody and guilty, guiltily awake

{William Hogarth, "David Garrick as Richard III" (1745)}

Like a good dissertation advisor, Jenny Davidson from Light Reading noted that I left out some Shakespearean ghosts in yesterday's roundup--eleven of them, in fact, who levy curses on their murderer, Richard III, on the eve of his death at the Battle of Bosworth Field. It seems appropriate that this most self-dramatizing of villains should suffer a haunting, but like everything else in the play, the ghosts remain overshadowed by the force of Richard's character: next to his evil ingenuity and ruthlessness, no one else seems quite alive--including the dead.

It should come as no surprise that Richard refuses to believe in the ghosts. After all, everyone in his eye is a tool or an obstacle; once they lose the potential to be either, why would they tarry in his sight, alive or dead? No, it must be a dream:

I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.

Dream or not, Richard nonetheless rehearses a sort of crisis of conscience:

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.

Yet there's little sense that the ghosts' imprecations ("Let us be lead within thy bosom") cause him anywhere near the horrors that Banquo's silence provokes in Macbeth. Macbeth, though deeply ruing the irrevocable first step that set him on his murderous path, tells himself that he has no choice but to kill Banquo because,

For mine own good
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as to go o'er.

--which renders Banquo's silent reappearance all the more horrifying, a grotesque proof that though Macbeth may plunge ever deeper into the rivers of blood, the absolving shore will remain forever distant.

Richard, on the other hand, has no false image of a distant day beyond murder--and no lost better self to regret. His crisis of conscience is in actuality little more than a batting about of the concept of his villainy. The ghosts may curse him, but he is proof against curses because there is nothing in him to damage; they lead him to worry not about what he has done but about what others might do--

O Ratcliff, I have dream'd a fearful dream!
What think'st thou--will our friends prove all true?

. Though he claims that the ghosts

Have stuck more terror to the soul of Richard
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers
Armed in proof and led by shallow Richmond,

his only real worry is the failure of his designs.

This gets to the heart of why Banquo's ghost is chilling where Richard's chorus of victims is forgettable--and thus of one of the reasons that Macbeth is the far better play. As Mark Van Doren writes,

Richard is never quite human enough. . . . He is only stunning in his craft, a serpent whose movements we follow for their own sake, because in themselves they have strength and beauty.

A ghost, like a reader, needs some flaw in a character to latch on to; a perfect good or a perfect evil leave little for the reader to ponder or the ghost to prey on. If a man be a perfect villain, what levers does a ghost have? What threats are at his disposal? Is it even possible to haunt him at all?

"It harrows me with fear and wonder."

{The ghost of Hamlet's father, as played at the Booth Theatre, London, 1870. Sketch by Thomas Glessing.}

In a comment to yesterday's post, Jenny Davidson from Light Reading corrected my half-assertion that Jacob Marley is literature's most famous ghost. That crown, she rightly notes, rests with the ghost of Hamlet's father, who should also, I think, get extra credit for appearing to so many more people than your usual ghost charged with a mission. He first manifests in front of two or three of the men of the guard:

MARCELLUS
Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us:
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night;
That if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.

Horatio, however, is having none of it:

Tush, tush, 'twill not appear.

But once the ghost does appear, there's no denying its presence, nor that it is

In the same figure, like the king that's dead.

Horatio, harrowed, hails Hamlet.

Watching the ghost of Hamlet's father, it's easy to see where Hamlet gets his flair for the dramatic. After all, need he appear in the chill of the ramparts at midnight? Wouldn't the quiet coziness of Hamlet's bedchamber have served as well? Ah, but then he'd eschew the hair-raising buildup he knows the guards will give him before he appears to his son, let alone Horatio's ascription to him of the powers of a Will-o-the-Wisp:

HORATIO
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.

And then there's the ghost's whole, "Oh, the stories I could tell of the horrors of the afterlife!" bit:

But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine,

Only, well, it turns out he's not allowed to:

But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.

While Hamlet's father's technique is quite effective--as he surely knew it would be, if he possessed any understanding of the character of his son--I prefer the more straightforward approach of, as Perry White would say, great Caesar's ghost, when he appears to Brutus in his tent:

BRUTUS
Ha! who comes here?
I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous apparition.
It comes upon me. Art thou any thing?
Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,
That makest my blood cold and my hair to stare?
Speak to me what thou art.

GHOST
Thy evil spirit, Brutus.

BRUTUS
Why comest thou?

GHOST
To tell thee thou shalt see me at Philippi.

BRUTUS
Well; then I shall see thee again?

GHOST
Ay, at Philippi.

BRUTUS
Why, I will see thee at Philippi, then.

[Exit Ghost]

I suppose you could ask why Caesar bothered to appear to Brutus at all--couldn't he have just shown up at Philippi? But I appreciate his straightforwardness; it seems appropriate to a great general. And after all, shouldn't a ghost be confident that his very presence will supply sufficient drama to make whatever point he's charged with putting across?



In that regard, no one tops Banquo, who doesn't even speak--or appear to anyone but Macbeth. A model of ghostly restraint, he merely sits quietly on Macbeth's stool and shakes his gory locks a bit:

MACBETH
Prithee, see there! behold! look! lo!
how say you?
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites.

GHOST OF BANQUO vanishes

LADY MACBETH
What, quite unmann'd in folly?

MACBETH
If I stand here, I saw him.

LADY MACBETH
Fie, for shame!

MACBETH
Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ere human statute purged the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools: this is more strange
Than such a murder is.

And his encore is even better:

MACBETH
Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!

Now that's supernatural efficiency.

"If that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death."

{Aubrey Beardsley, illustration to Poe's "The Black Cat" (1894-95)}

In recent days I've been mostly writing about ghosts and spirits who frighten, whether by their actions or simply through the way their presence disturbs settled views of the workings of the world. But it seems wrong to focus solely on the scary ghosts, when the corpus of ghost stories is rife with more benign--and more calmly received--spirits as well.

Hawthorne, for example, though a master of the gothic tale, lightened up considerably when describing the spirits who haunted his home in "The Old Manse" (1846):

Houses of any antiquity, in New England, are so invariably possessed with spirits, that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to. Our ghost used to heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlor; and sometimes rustled paper, as if he were turning over a sermon, in the long upper entry;--where, nevertheless, he was invisible, in spite of the bright moonshine that fell through the eastern window. Not improbably, he wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of manuscript discourses, that stood in the garret. Once, while Hillard and other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, there came a rustling noise, as of a minister's silk gown, sweeping through the very midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush against the chairs. Still, there was nothing visible. A yet stranger business was that of a ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the kitchen, at deepest midnight, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing--performing, in short, all kinds of domestic labor--although no traces of anything accomplished could be detected, the next morning. Some neglected duty of her servitude--some ill-starched ministerial band--disturbed the poor damsel in her grave, and kept her at work without any wages.

Similarly, though Jan Potocki's strange, captivating Russian doll of a novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (c. 1815) contains many a legitimately chilling moment, his protagonist frequently presents events with a detached irony. Even the scariest revenants, two hanged brothers who plague the narrator throughout the novel, are first presented as a focus of stories, even a point of argument:

Very strange tales were told about the two brothers who had been hanged; they were not said to be ghosts, but it was claimed that at night nameless demons would possess their bodies, which would break free from the gallows and set out to torment the living. This was taken to be so well attested that a theologian from Salamanca had written a thesis proving that the two hanged brothers were species of vampire, and that the supposition that one of them should be a vampire was no less implausible than that the other should be so: an argument that even the most skeptical were forced to agree was sound.

Even Jacob Marley--possibly literature's most famous ghost?--though he frightens Scrooge, is far from scary for the reader. Though Dickens could go in any direction after his unforgettable opening line--

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. . . . Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail

--the digression that follows establishes an, affable, conversational tone:

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Marley, in fact, for all Scrooge doesn't want to believe it, is actually a member of that seemingly common breed: the duty-bound ghost. Charged with a penitential mission, he will do his utmost to execute it--and Marley, at least, has the benefit of speech, an aid that, if lore is to be believed, is sadly denied to many a restless spirit, reduced to mutely pointing or dragging chains.

Far more rare is the ghost who, though not constrained by any long-ago wrong, helps the living of his own accord. After all, ghosts without missions have little to bind them to this earth, whereas those who do have duties are left, one assumes, with little extra time or attention. But in the right circumstances, a bargain can be struck--which is what happens in one of my long-standing favorite ghost stories, Walter R. Brooks's "Jimmy Takes Vanishing Lessons" (1957). When young Jimmy accidentally scares a ghost haunting an old house belonging to his aunt, the embarrassed ghost, worried about exposure, offers to teach Jimmy how to vanish. A few lessons, and:

That night at supper Jimmy's aunt said, "Well, what have you been doing today?"

"I've been learning to vanish."

His aunt smiled and said, "That must be fun."

"Honestly," said Jimmy. "The ghost up at grandfather's taught me."

"I don't think that's very funny," said his aunt. "And will you please not--why, where are you?"

I first encountered "Jimmy Takes Vanishing Lessons" in an old paperback from my father's boyhood that I read dozens of times. It mixed stories of harmless ghosts--Jimmy's friend being one, a weeping ghost who flooded a house with its tears being another--with more worrisome creatures, including some dangerously bewitching goblin children. My favorite story, an old English tale that comes to mind every autumn when the leaves first start to swirl down the street, is a good one to return us to the creepier sort of Hallowe'en manifestation. The book disappeared long ago, so I'll have to tell the story myself:

One October evening, an old woodman was finishing up the day's cutting, feeling more than ever before the pains of age. The autumn chill had seeped into his bones, his breath came short, and his axe seemed to bite less deeply, yet stick more firmly, with every stroke. Though he knew there were malicious spirits abroad at that time of year, the slow pace of work necessitated by his age meant that he was unable to begin his long walk home until after the darkness had already begun to rise from the forest floor about him. So when his work was done he tied his lantern to his staff and, hanging it in front of him to light the winding path, he steeled himself for his long walk through the woods, keeping always in his mind a vision of his warm fireside, where his wizened wife and their black tomcat, Tam, would be waiting patiently for him to return.

As any night walker knows, the woods on an October night are alive with rustlings and shiftings. Leaves whipped up by the wind take on the appearance of a pursuer; a low-hanging branch begins to look like an arm, grasping and clawing after the solitary traveler. As the aged woodcutter trudged along, he reminded himself that the noises he heard were nothing to be alarmed about. "That one," he thought, "that one is just a clutch of acorns falling to the ground. And this one, this one is just a squirrel--like me he's caught out too late and hurrying to his warm den."

But as the depths of the forest closed in about him and the darkness pressed hard upon the wan light of his lantern, the woodcutter began to hear other noises-- more regular, more troubling. Small animals scrabbling around, he told himself; the wind whipping the leaves, he told himself. But even as he tried to dismiss the sounds, they began to resolve themselves into a pattern. He shuddered as he realized that they what he was hearing was speech--hissing, whispering, speech, the sound of dozens of voices overlapping.

"Tommy Tuppence is dead," the voices whispered. "Tommy Tuppence is dead," they hissed. "Tommy Tuppence is dead."

The woodman was glad that he had no idea who Tommy Tuppence might be, but nonetheless he was frightened, and he quickened his steps. But then as he hurried around a bend, he stopped short, for crossing the path mere yards ahead of him was a file of cats, nine of them, black as the surrounding night. Their tails in the air, they strode confidently up to him, almost as if they planned to rub familiarly against his legs; the thought horrified the woodcutter, and he was relieved when instead they described a circle around him, whispering all the while, "Tommy Tuppence is dead. Tommy Tuppence is dead." The nine cats turned a circle around the man once, twice, then they were gone, their hissing words hanging in the air behind them.

With a speed he'd not known for decades, the woodcutter took to his heels, and he didn't slow down or turn his head until he reached his cottage. As he burst through the door, his wife stared at him in horror and jumped from her chair, pitching Tam from her lap. "Oh, you look a fright, my dear! Whatever has happened?"

The woodcutter, not even stopping to catch his breath, told of the darkness, and of the nine cats. "And," he said, taking his wife by the shoulders, "though I expect you'll think I'm crazy: those cats were all talking."

"Well what on earth did they say?"

"They just kept repeating and repeating: 'Tommy Tuppence is dead. Tommy Tuppence is dead.' I've no idea who--" He broke off as the cottage filled with a terrible screeching.

It was Tam--his black fur puffed out and his tail in the air. Fixing the woodcutter with an unearthly stare, Tam cried out, "If Tommy Tuppence is dead--then I'm the king of the cats!"

With that, Tam streaked across the room, shot up the chimney, and was never seen again.

I like to imagine that the chorus of Bauhaus's "Bela Lugosi's Dead" is actually a similar secret communication, the announcement of Lugosi's death passing from goth to goth until it reaches the new king of the vampires.

Have you checked the children?

{Photo by Odlandscape.}

Yesterday I used some lines from Michel Tournier's The Mirror of Ideas to describe adult fears. Later in that essay, Tournier notes,

The child walking in the dark comforts himself with a song. Jean Cocteau tells that when he tried this remedy, he ended up being terrified by the words he invented to the song.

Children's fears burgeon that way--kids aren't yet all that good at the sort of denial of unwanted thoughts that most adults master; they're not as good at coaxing their minds away from the things that have scared them. If adult fear is rooted in death, a child's fear is rooted in a more general not-knowing: the world is large and little-understood, even by a perceptive kid. There is much to fear.

Returning once more to the book that kicked off I've Been Reading Lately's ghost and monster week, 'Salem's Lot: Stephen King marks that distinction between children and adults, writing that adult fears are

pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek to jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. . . . with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

That openness to fear lines up, too, with the position held by many who actually believe in the supernatural that children are more open to and aware of the otherworldly. They haven't yet, the argument goes, set limits on which of their perceptions they're willing to accept, which to dismiss before they even reach the level of consciousness. Rebecca West, in The Fountain Overflows (1957), her somewhat autobiographical novel of growing up in a poor and talented family, allows her young characters some of that perceptiveness. For a few months the children live with--and maybe even psychically generate--a poltergeist. In another particularly striking scene, late at night in a deserted stables, the young narrator's sensitivity is nearly powerful enough to bring to life--even for her mother--the spectral horses she sees stamping and snorting in the stalls:

My mother's eyes moved to my face. The horses in the stalls became luminous shapes. We knew that if we willed it, if we made a movement of the mind comparable with the action of throwing all one's weight on one foot, we could make them visible as ourselves.

All of which returns me to my own story of seeing a ghost, about which I wrote last October:

I have no memory of it, but I've been told by my parents, no wild-eyed new-agers they, that it happened when I was three or four, while our family was being given a tour of a house in Colonial Williamsburg. I turned to my mother and, pointing to the empty corner of a room and said, "Look, Mommy--there's a ghost." The guide blanched and told my parents that the house was rumored to be haunted.

Even though it's not much of a story, and I don't remember a bit of it, that surely has to land me squarely in the large category of "I don't believe in ghosts, but . . . ."

I suppose one could keep far worse company than William James.

October's about more than ghosts—it's about baseball, too!

{Yadi-o-lantern by rocketlass. Her Johnny-o-lantern is here and her Ozzie-o-lantern is here. Manny-o-lantern to come.}

To kick off the World Series, I've got a piece up today at the Poetry Foundation's website about baseball and poetry.

Play ball!

The unknown

{Photo by Secret Agent Martens.}

I know I rashly wrote yesterday that I was wrapping up my series of posts on ghosts and spirits, but it turns out that just like Jason Voorhees, I'm not quite finished yet. Hallowe'en's still a ways away; who knows how many times I'll lurch back into view with more scares?

From Moby-Dick (1851), by Herman Melville

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

Note how Melville moves from the potential, the seeming, to the definite: what we can see we cannot know, but what we cannot see we know deep in our bones. Good tellers of ghost stories have always known that; as Michel Tournier explains in The Mirror of Ideas (1994),

There is such a thing as an atavistic fear, digging its roots down to an ancestral past sleeping in our hearts; eternal humanity trembles with us in the presence of mystery. . . . It is the darkness itself that frightens--not the monsters hiding in it.

The merest hints of horror catch in the soul; the less a storyteller describes, the less he provides for our rational minds to attack and reject. As M. R. James wrote in "Ghosts--Treat Them Gently,"

On the whole, then, I say you must have horror and also malevolence. Not less necessary, however, is reticence.

Limn lightly the horror--give us, as Peter Ackroyd puts it,

the sudden stillness in a wood, or the sound of footsteps in an empty street

--and we will supply the rest. Even Stephen King, not someone usually associated with reticence, demonstrates that he knows the power of the undescribed when he uses it to create the most chilling moment in 'Salem's Lot. At midnight, a man at the gate of a graveyard raises his voice in prayer to his dark lord, then:

There was no sound but that brought on the breeze. The figure stood silent and thoughtful for a time. Then it stooped and stood with the figure of a child in his arms.

"I bring you this."

It became unspeakable.

By claiming to have come up against the limits of what language will even tolerate, King frees our imaginations to run on the darkest of paths, which of course they will do. For despite what we tell ourselves when encouraged by daylight, as the night steals in we remember that fear is built into the very structure of the universe. All that awaits us is the greater unknown of death. And while we feverishly distract ourselves from its approach, death for its part can afford to be patient.

From The Zurau Aphorisms (2004), by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hoffman

The dogs are still playing in the yard, but the quarry will not escape them, never mind how fast it is running through the forest already.

Is it any wonder that we take pleasure, however perverse, in telling ghost stories?

Premonitions and apparitions

{"The Ghost of Bernadette Soubirous," photographer unknown, circa 1890}

Too busy to do any real posting today, but in keeping with the Hallowe'en theme, how about a couple of warnings . . . (cue scary organ music) . . . of impending Death!

The first warning wouldn't have actually been all that helpful, taking as it did the form of barking. It's a memory of a story Thomas Hardy told publisher Sir Newton Flower, collected in Thomas Hardy Remembered (2007), edited by Martin Ray:

Here is an odd thing about [Hardy's dog] Wessex. One November night, William Watkins, who founded the Society of Dorset Men in London, went to call on Hardy after dinner, as was his custom whenever he was in Dorset. It was a night of wild storm. This is Hardy's story of the episode to me:

"For some reason Wessex rushed wildly round the house, growling and barking. He dashed at the front door; then came back again. Watkins and I opened the door, and Wessex ran out into the storm, still barking. I thought there might be marauders about, but we could find nobody. We came in; we got Wessex in. An hour later, Watkins, after a final cup of coffee, went back to his hotel in Dorchester, and died in his bed that night. What did Wessex know?"

Far creepier--though just as impossible to verify--is Alec Guinness's story, from Blessings in Disguise (1985), of meeting James Dean in Los Angeles; as with so many other stories this week, I owe D. J. Enright for including this one in his Oxford Book of the Supernatural:

[O]n the way back to the restaurante he turned into a car-park, saying, "I'd like to show you something." Among the other cars there was what looked like a large, shiny, silver parcel wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbon. "It's just been delivered," he said, with bursting pride. "I haven't even driven it yet." The sports-car looked sinister to me, although it had a large bunch of red carnations resting on the bonnet. "How fast is it?" I asked. "She'll do a hundred and fifty," he replied. Exhausted, hungry, feeling a little ill-tempered in spite of Dean's kindness, I heard myself saying in a voice I could hardly recognize as my own, "Please, never get in it." I looked at my watch. "It is now ten o'clock, Friday the 23rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week." He laughed. "Oh, shucks! Don't be so mean!" I apologized for what I said, explaining it was lack of sleep and food. . . . We parted an hour later, full of smiles. No further reference was made to the wrapped-up car. . . . In my heart I was uneasy--with myself. At four o'clock on the afternoon of the following Friday James Dean was dead, killed while driving the car.

A sinister, deadly automobile--sounds like a topic for Stephen King, whose appearance at Fenway Park recently was responsible for this week's delving into the ghostly in the first place.

I'll bring the week of Hallowe'en postings to close--for now!--with a passage from M. R. James's "A School Story." What's great about the passage is that you don't even need to know its context to enjoy the dread that grows through this account of a night visitation:

"I didn't hear anything at all," he said, "but about five minutes before I woke you I found myself looking out of this window here, and there was a man sitting or kneeling on Sampson's window-sill and looking in, and I thought he was beckoning." "What sort of man?" McLeod wriggled. "I don't know," he said, "but I can tell you one thing--he was beastly thin: and he looked as if he was wet all over: and," he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, "I'm not at all sure that he was alive."

In such cases, I recommend that one err on the side of assuming that the creepy stranger is, in fact, not alive.

Finally, for those of you who are bored at work: a Google search on "I don't believe in ghosts, but" is guaranteed to keep you entertained for many an hour. It even led me to a great line supposedly from Edgar Allan Poe, which, though the attribution appears sketchy, does seem apt:

I don't believe in ghosts, but I've been running from them all my life.

Deep, dark well

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Yesterday, following a very pleasant marathon on a beautiful autumn day, I was throwing a frisbee with my father, brother, and nephew in my brother's backyard when I stumbled over a cracked slab of concrete. It was about a two feet long and a foot wide, and though my brother had mowed around it for a couple of years, he'd never looked under it. My father, however, is not the sort to leave an inexplicable slab of concrete uninvestigated, so he started prying it up.

He quickly dislodged the concrete to reveal a narrow well, edged in poorly laid brick and strung across with cobwebs. As he and my brother leaned over to drop a stone into its depths, my mind immediately started running to ghost stories, to the thought of what might have been secreted away in that well, restrained under the slab, and now unwittingly freed to do mischief.

The well was far from ancient, no more than sixty years old--but in our fast-moving culture anything undisturbed for decades begins to seem a likely repository for the ghostly or malefic. What might that well have conjured up for M. R. James, whose characters so often suffer horrible fates simply because of their curiosity about the old and unexplained? I thought of James's story, "A Warning to the Curious," which features a cursed Anglo-Saxon crown, dug up in the dead of night, that must later be reburied at the same fell hour. The man who must rebury it seems possessed:

I never saw anything like the dash with which he flung himself at a particular spot in the side of the mound, and tore at it, so that in a very few minutes the greater part of his body was out of sight. We stood holding the coat and the bundle of handkerchiefs, and looking, very fearfully, I must admit, about us. There was nothing to be seen. . . . Yet, in all this quiet, an acute, an acrid consciousness of a restrained hostility very near us, like a dog on a leash, that might be let go at any moment.

The crown is reburied, but the damage has already been done--despite his furious efforts to rectify his error, the man is ultimately hounded to his death by the spirits he disturbed. What is done can never fully be undone. And as my brother and dad replaced the concrete slab--having, it seems, angered no spirits--I thought of John Bellairs, whose frightening young adult novels so often feature artifacts whose dangers are not immediately apparent; instead, they bide their time before unleashing their deadly powers of fascination. As we left the yard, I warned my brother to beware at least until Hallowe'en, to be sure to fight with all his will against any late-night urge, however innocuous-seeming, to go check out the well.

I don't actually believe any of this. I know that there's nothing in that well aside from spiders and mud. But so much of the fun of stories is a willful succumbing, and so much of what's fun about reading at this time of year is giving in to the idea that maybe we're wrong: maybe our rationality is just a way of closing off possibilities that are too horrifying to think about--a way of setting boundaries to the universe so that we can pretend to be its masters.

I'm reminded of a passage from the introduction to Michael E. Bell's study of New England vampire folklore, Food for the Dead (2001). Bell writes about a course in his first year of graduate school at UCLA taught by folklore scholar Wayland Hand:

My epiphany came the day Wayland told us about the disappearance of giants from Europe. This was not a rapid, catastrophic event like the extinction of the dinosaurs. It was, rather, a more lengthy demise with the final death blow administered by the Industrial Revolution. As Wayland talked about the giants, I noticed that he stopped lookin at us, and his eyes seemed to focus somewhere beyond the windowless walls of our Bunche Hall classroom. His voice, naturally soft, grew softer. He spoke about how Christians stigmatized the giants as devils, in league with Satan. He described how industry's widening circle of smoke and clamor finally pushed the giants from their homes. His voice dropped to a near whisper, and I'm sure I saw tears well up, as he described how the giants shrank, deeper and deeper into the forests and caves. Demonized, and no longer able to find refuge, the giants vanished. When Wayland concluded, It dawned on me that he wasn't talking only about giants no longer appearing in the folklore record. He was describing the extinction of a species. I thought, this is incredible: Wayland Hand, a meticulous, reasoning scholar--a professional folklorist--actually believes in giants.

Of course Hand didn't actually believe in giants--but he did believe, strongly, in stories, which generate their power in part by being just convincing enough that we're temporarily willing to reject reality in favor of their slightly different explanation of the way the world works. As D. J. Enright notes Dr. Johnson saying,

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, 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.

And as the wind whips past my windows, kicking up a rustle of leaves in the cemetery next door, I'm willing--for the length of one story, one novel, one October night--to think that maybe there's something to those hoary old tales. There may not have been anything in the well yesterday, but maybe we were just lucky. In a different story, on a different day . . .