Or the idea that we are surrounded by entities,
phenomena, that we cannot see, cannot smell, cannot touch, cannot even be
imagined because they’re being is so far removed from anything we have
experienced. Phenomena that may come to us in dreams, stand by our bed as
shadows, float through our minds as premonitions and intuitions. There may be
places that have a certain ineffable aura, an energy that cannot be defined, but
that finds its way into music, such as the voices and rhythms that have come
out of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
Or ghosts. Who hasn’t at the very least momentarily
wondered if ghosts are real? One of the greatest plays in the English language
is propelled by a ghost. When Hamlet stands at the parapet of Elsinore castle
and follows his father’s ghost, an entire spectrum of thought occurs, an
endless ramification of alternative actions, strategies, and consequences
emerges. What does actually happen is really only the shadow of a thousand
other unrealized possibilities. Possibilities in which Ophelia lives and Hamlet
triumphs. So that what makes this play tragic is nothing at all predestined but
the result of impulses and hesitations, a combination of arguments pursued and
aborted, a jumble of trajectories as random as the balls clicking together on a
pool table.
In all my sixty-six years on the planet I have not
encountered a single ghost. This is extremely disappointing. Because the
encounter with a ghost would provide evidence of an afterlife, evidence that
one’s identity may persist in some form outside the body after the body has
perished. Evidence that we possess a soul, an essence that endures. Most ghost
stories declare a situation in which the soul of a dead person has assumed a
ghostly presence because of an obsession, an unresolved trauma. The ghost, as
in Hamlet, craves justice. The ghost wants the living to find its murderer and
have revenge. Or vindication, acquittal, conciliation. These are qualities of
an existence on earth, and are fundamentally social. Would such things exist in
eternity? Are there beings, such as the plays and movies of the western world
suggest, that go straight to paradise? And if the soul is eternal, why does no
one seem to remember a before-life? Did we once inhabit a paradise and somehow
fall into mortal development in the womb of a woman in order to spend X number
of years as a human being? For what reason?
And what of the ghost itself? How do they speak if
they have no larynx, no vocal cords, no throat or neck with the attendant and
necessary membranes for making sound, or lungs for pushing those sounds into
the world with air, or lips and a tongue and a palate for shaping those sounds
into words? Do ghosts speak by some form of telepathy? Not having met a ghost,
my only means of assumption is based on stories and plays and movies. The
expression of ghosts in fiction.
There are numerous people who make claim to proving
the existence of ghosts, but they’re means, however compelling, lack the
empirical rigors of actual science, and cannot be believed.
I do believe, however, that in many ways we become
ghosts to ourselves. We haunt ourselves. Old memories assume an obsessional
proportion that can’t be resolved or shaken from us. They cling. And the older
we become, the more ghosts we seem to accumulate. It is as if our being became
a haunted house in which each room held a certain ghost. These are not simple
memories but unresolved energies that crave resolution, frustrations that were
frustrations when we experienced them, and continue as frustrations in an
inaccessible past.
Ghosts aside, there are other dimensions. And where
there are other dimensions, there might also be other beings.
In 2007, physicists at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison devised a method by which the violent birth of the universe
thirteen billion years ago could be detected in the form of tiny, vibrating
strings of energy. These elusive entities are critical to developing a sound
unified field theory. A “Theory of Everything” in other words.
The mathematics of string theory indicate that the
world we know is incomplete. Not a big surprise. Anyone who has taken peyote,
psilocybin, or studied physics has had firsthand knowledge of this. String
theory determines the existence of six extra spatial dimensions curled in tiny
geometric shapes at every single site in the universe. We call these entities
strings so that they’ll have an image, but in reality they have no image. They’re
infinitesimal knots of energy that have specific properties, but not the
properties associated with a three dimensional universe, such as color, mass,
and size. They exist purely as mathematical entities. What is weirder, is that
these entities cannot exist unless they’re moving in a ten-dimensional
universe. It is the exact geometry of the entities that determines what kind of
particles will exist in a given universe, and the kind of properties it will
have.
So: there are more things on heaven and earth than
were dreamed of in Horatio’s philosophy, whatever Horatio’s philosophy happened
to be.
So much for the unseen, for the invisible, for
worlds and dimensions that we cannot apprehend through our normal five senses.
But what if things that we do see that have no real existence? The borders of
countries and states, for instance. In reality, there is no Colorado or
Wisconsin or Iowa or France. No England. No Mongolia. No Cambodia. What was
most recently Yugoslavia is now eight different countries: Kosovo, Serbia,
Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro. What divides these
countries is determined more essentially by language and culture than an
imaginary line on a map. Lines on maps do not exist; yet I cannot remove them
from my mind. I cannot imagine a North America or Central America or South
America without a Brazil or a Panama or a Mexico or a California or a Wyoming.
Which leads one to wonder: how many other
assumptions are rambling and rumbling around in my brain that have no reality?
I think of myself primarily as a poet. That has been the most general and acute
sense of identity that I’ve had since about age eighteen; forty-eight years. Is
it a profession? No. Not at all. It’s a divine calling. Poetry is more akin
with shamanistic or religious pursuits rather than a standard career because
one, there is virtually no money in it, and two, one does not carry the burden
of responsibility in the same way that a defense attorney, commercial airline
pilot or surgeon does. It is, in fact, a flagrantly self-indulgent, selfish
pursuit, in which the poverty of the practitioner sometimes becomes somebody
else’s burden. A parent, a soon-to-be estranged wife, a kind and saintly
sibling. Most poets find a means to making a living in the academic sphere, but
teaching, like working in a bookstore, is a form of midwifery. The ongoing
struggle to find time and place to do one’s writing, is more apt to cause
disputes among friends and family than harmony. Wives, husbands, friends and
children all go neglected for the siren-song of the muse. It’s a strange
identity to inhabit, particularly in the social arena.
The point of this is that we are born with
identities, we create them. The phenomenon of identity is an interrelation
between our internal emotional world and the external world of facts and vines
and helmets and reindeer. And, however real it may seem to us, it isn’t.
Identity is an ephemeral, protean circumstance of mood and serendipity,
geography and language, costume and time. Morality, ethics, rectitude,
mannerisms and beliefs are all very real on some level, but have no basis in
actuality, in the empirical world of quantifiable events. Can there be any
wonder, then, that there is a propensity to believe in ghosts? To believe that
certain places are inhabited by spirits? That there are entities that endure
when our body has succumbed to one or more of the thousand shocks the flesh is
heir to?
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