My Mentor as Ghost—Ghost as My Mentor
When we recognize the lasting presence of the ones who matter
We don’t need a dark night, a haunted house, or a horror movie scenario to encounter a ghost, as I discovered one day. We don’t even need a drama, not even so much as a story.
We can see a ghost in broad daylight in the humdrum dailiness of just going about our business—perhaps as I did not so long ago, or perhaps not. Who knows? We can see a ghost in part with our eyes, in part with our minds, and above all, in part with our hearts. We can see such a ghost anywhere, at any time. And this ghost, I realized, can be both without and within us.
We tend to think of ghosts as being frightening. Ghosts are visitants to scare us out of our wits. Apparitions are the stuff of nightmares, phantasms of terror, the traces of the dead visible as diaphanous wraiths to chill us under our skin, entities from a world we will one day ourselves know — if known it should be.
But these aren’t the only ghosts…
I didn’t warm to the man at first. I saw him across the table from me at a faculty meeting, smiling to all and sundry. He was completely at ease with himself, with others—or so I thought at the time. Not a serious person, I uncharitably assumed, not anyone to contend with.
As for myself, I was far from being at ease. I’d just begun to teach filmmaking at graduate level. The students in my class were more than capable, they were formidable. From across America, from around the world, they showed a thirst for insight and the courage to practice their art regardless of the likelihood of failure as they began their calling with so much yet to learn.
Not only was I uneasy, I was terrified.
Years later, when I heard of the sudden passing of my colleague and friend — for that is what the man across the table that day had become — I was devastated. Over many semesters of enlightening collaboration, he had taught me how to teach, mentored me on how to mentor, and revealed to me the symbiotic nature of the teacher-student relationship, the mutual exploration, the working together to find what works, to find truth. He had shown me how to assist those young filmmakers in each becoming the filmmaker only they could become.
Then, one evening — he at home in Portland, Oregon, myself in West Hollywood, California — he was gone.
It was years afterwards in England, in my family’s village in Hampshire’s New Forest, a very few miles from the south coast that, ambling along a quiet lane, I saw this man again, the back of him at least, fifty yards ahead of me. Or I thought I did — although I knew it couldn’t possibly have been him. How could it?
Same brown-green droopy jacket, same white floppy hair, same shuffling yet determined gait, same ineffable aura.
Uncanny…
I tried to throw off the absurdity of my perception. A second or two of reasoned reflection would do it, I thought. But it didn’t. Nor did the seconds following. I couldn’t bust the ghost. This was him. Returned. And in England, in this village too.
We tend to think of ghosts as ethereal but this figure was solid as a rock, or at the least a living being. Like the revenants of Shakespeare’s time, the vengeful apparition of Hamlet’s father for one, this spirit was of the non-transparent kind, although unlike the antic prince‘s dad, betraying not a hint of vengefulness.
I continued to follow my mentor, back now in the world.
No Theramin, no Ondes Martenot, no spectral choir rended the air by way of eerie accompaniment. Only the sporadic cooing of pigeons, the gentle susurrus of a breeze through the surrounding foliage and the distant murmur of the dense coniferous forest half a mile away constituted the soundscape to this haunting.
The figure marched on. I continued to follow. I was sure he would turn at any moment, look around, see me. I was staring so intently at his back he must surely have felt it — or if as a ghost he didn’t feel anything there was always his sixth sense perhaps, to alert him to his pursuer.
How long was this going to last? Should I quicken my pace, catch up, pass him, glancing over for an instant to catch the profile I remembered so well…?
Why my hesitation? Did I not want the spell to be broken? Not want to lose my ghost? Have to grieve again for my colleague? But it was him, wasn’t it? So why hold back?
In the next second the figure turned into a driveway and I lost sight of him.
I hurried. Turned to look. The cottage revealed to me was a little way down the parting from the lane. There was no sign of life. No ghost. No innocent, unsuspecting strolling villager. No one. Had the mysterious walker time enough to traipse the yards from the lane to the cottage, open its front door, enter and shut it behind him? Or had he vanished into thin air? In the way of a ghost?
I was left uncertain. It didn’t seem possible that in such a short space of time, twenty, thirty seconds maybe, although I couldn’t be sure, that quietly sauntering figure could have covered such ground.
However improbable though, wasn’t it more likely they could than that I had witnessed a ghost?
I know I had seen someone, my iPhone photo was proof of that.
Ghosts had appeared in the village before. Years ago, I’d heard of a local tough who on encountering the wraith of a wandering woman in the middle of the night, had fallen off his motorbike in a state of shock. A friend of my mother, meanwhile, had grown accustomed to the poltergeist that would wreak daily havoc in her home. Even the name of the village — derived from the Anglo-Saxon for the noisy stream noisy still after fifteen hundred years or so — contains in its syllables the ghost of that forgotten language.
Had I encountered a newcomer to that local community of the departed? Did it matter though, I asked. What I had experienced within myself resonated either way. And no one, no rationale, no reason, no hard facts can take away the better ghosts within us. Those of those we fear, the bullies, abusers, predators, monsters of one kind or another, we might — with endeavor and patience — find ways to exorcize… one hopes. The echo of a soul we respect and love, however, can never be completely stolen from us. Its reverberations, however faint, however distantly plangent, never fade to silence but endure, a quiet counsel interior and intimate.
This is evident in the presence of the man I thought I saw, perhaps did see, the presence of his soul apparent here now on this page, in its sentences, their tone, rhythm, and idiom. Because years ago, even though we were faculty together at a film school, passionate about our exploration of the art of cinema and filmmaking with our students, the man whose ghost I may or may not have seen, also prompted me to return to my other love, a love of prose, of novels, of reading, and by showing me the humility and courage of the writer, spurred me to start writing myself.
Just as he — or his simulacrum — turned from that village lane and vanished before I could catch up with him, so with his sudden passing I had found myself walking along another path not of gravel or tarmac but of the hours, days, and years, advancing step by step on a journey that — as he had for so many others — he’d left for me to make.
In memory of Gill Dennis (1941–2015)
Peter Markham
December 2024
Author:
- The Art of the Filmmaker: The Practical Aesthetics of the Screen (Oxford University Press) 10/23
- What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay (Focal Press/Routledge) 9/20
