Can something be bone-chillingly heart-warming?
– On the Interiority of Ghosts –
The experience
What we expected were gimmicky wax figures, cheap jumps, and maybe some voyeuristically gruesome folk-history. What we got — and this was quite in spite of the hen-do in group puncturing the highly skilled tour-guide’s dramatic delivery — was a genuine haunt. This summer, my sister and I bought tickets to an Edinburgh Fringe event entitled, The Edinburgh Haunted Vaults. Encountering my first genuine haunt was not easy — but when they meet you, such things cannot be avoided, and in them there is much to learn.
The Edinburgh vaults developed under a bridge connecting one of the city’s hills with the centre of town. The level bridge made trade transport simpler. As more buildings developed around and above this bridge (which is still visible as the Cowgate today) stone cellars roughly seven metres cubed started to form underneath. Into these vaults, due to the city’s overburdened infrastructure and accommodation during the enclosure period, accumulated the outcasts and the lowlifes, there ne’er-do-wells and rapscallions, the humans outed by other humans for no reason other than birth. The unwanted, unwashed, unlanded landed in the vaults. Picture: lightless passageways requiring the pitiless usage of children as mine-canaries; water-porous limestone boxes, humid; dark and slippery walls holding thirty at a time; sleeping, eating, and defecating in the same space. A place of forgotten torment.
When my sister and I descended, we realised that any this-worldly sound effects or wax figures would have disfigured and disrespected a place already pregnant with energy. If it was experience we were looking for, there was no need for that.
The vaults had been rediscovered by an Edinburgh University student in the 1970s, who, when bouncing a ball off the wall of his room, kept encountering an irregular ‘bump-back’. Initially assuming it to be an echo, he tried to conclude — due to its inconsistency — that some other student was playing a game with him.
But the corridors didn’t extend that far? There was no student on the other side.
With the subtle application of a friend’s sledge-hammer, the vaults were rediscovered. They thus became a short-lived party-spot, until a band’s drummer, packing up entirely alone one day, heard chains scraping the floor of the next vault along.
A White Witch’s movement moved in and set up a stone circle in one of these vaults. But the women of this pagan community kept feeling hurt in this room: intense pain under the fingernails, and air being expelled from their lungs against their will. Historians later figured out that at this exact line of longlitude and latitude had been the chamber of a certain Nicol Edwards. Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Edwards had been James VI’s chief witch hunter. The chamber in which he tortured women for false confession, while the king watched on in glee, had been in the exact place where, four hundred years later, women engaged in intense magical work physically felt the same pattern of pain. (The torture instruments, without going into detail, would have effected those exact sensations. Little did these women know this.)
Bare in mind for this piece: mysterious sensations with no obvious physical cause can be (1) historically consistent and (2) corroborated by this-worldly human beings.
When the founder of the modern witch group, a man, tried to expel the dark energies that therein resided using his own magic, he heard a scuttling up the walls, which, when it stopped directly above him, caused him such a spook that he ran for what felt like dear life. (The chambers are sealed-off to rats.) Our guide — this was Friday 13th — told us not to enter the circle. When one cocky member of a tour a few years ago entered the circle, he looked defiantly at the tour-guide and his nose started bleeding. When an older chap did the same in another tour, he had a heart attack and died in hospital a few days later. She told us even ghost-squads with ouija-boards — people trained to cope with haunts — were frightened off, never to return. They say that Lord Provost Nicol Edwards, chief woman-torturer, is trapped in this circle with every single woman he had abused.
While the tour-guide was telling us what had happened to women here during the witch craze, a certain rage started to bellow and beckon, to quietly quicken, to well up within me. My eyes started to hurt. This desperate sense that something could and should be done overwhelmed me. And yet it hadn’t and wansn’t done.
These women were wantonly tortured to the extent that the memory lingers almost half a millennium on. Why do humans always need someone to blame? Why did independent healers have to suffer from the metaphysical insecurity of Renaissance Europe? My sister, who is very sensitive to energies, said that my eyes became bloodshot. As people filed out of the vault, I stayed inside, much to my sister’s dismay. And I tried the Lord’s Prayer.
It did nothing.
And then I thought of something. A light shone in the darkness. A light which the darkness could not overcome.
I have been involved for three years now in an example of what one might call a ‘de-haunting.’ In brief: a group of sex-workers called ‘the Winchester Geese’ existed during the middle ages in a place called Southwark, over-river from the City of London where theatres and brothels were illegal. In the ferment which would give us Shakespeare, these women were so-called because the Bishop of Winchester, whose palace was on the Southbank, gave them ‘licence to sin within the liberty.’ The Church thus protected and legitimised the profession of these women in life, and benefitted from the desperation-money of lonely men, less lonely revellers, the party-hungry and the fun-seekers. No doubt abuse was rife, but the final tragedy came with the cards these women were dealt in death: the Bishop, so-called defender of their liberty, buried these women in unconsecrated church land. In medieval symbology, these single women were destined for hell. One Winchester Goose possessed a friend of mine, a certain John Constable — who for a while became John Crow — and revealed to him the geographical location of this pauper’s burial pit. The location was, a few months later, corroborated by Jubilee-line construction workers, digging for electricity pylons, who discovered an estimated 15,000 human skeletons, most of whom were women and children.
The resonances between Crossbones and the Vaults struck me for two reasons: firstly, a trans-historical and spiritual experience of pain was corroborated by this-worldly humans in the present, independently of the original receiver(s); secondly, both instances concerned the church-sanctioned abuse of women.
It was not just that two examples of unfinished business were remembered in a particular place and unlocked at a later time — but that that there were resonances in the very nature of that business. Though locus genii, or spirits of place, these stories share.a common experience: things happened in different cities, but the abuse of women by a puritanical hegemonic structure is not limited by place — it has happened everywhere. The pattern was the same. The pattern seemed to be: ‘I never stopped being hurt, yet no one ever said “sorry, you don’t deserve this” or “let me help you”. No one considered what it might be like to be me, no one realised my interiority.’
So, I decided, upon the apparent failure of that very prayer which centres our culture as an assuaging of guilt (yet whose church has all-too-often caused guilt) to do two things, while touching one of the stones: firstly, to intone a poem-prayer received at Crossbones and intoned each month in our vigils for the outcast:
Here lay your hearts, your flowers, your book of hours
Your fingers, your thumbs, your miss-you-mums
Here hang your hopes, your dreams, your might’ve beens
Your locks, your keys, your mysteries.
Secondly, I spoke an edited version of the Lord’s Prayer which my mother sent me on the day of my first Santo Daime ceremony. Little did she know that I was at such a ceremony or how the Divine Feminine figures into its hymns. She knew not that upon sending me that SMS, I was worshipping the Rainha da Floresta, or Queen of the Forest: God’s feminine aspect.
Our mother, who art in forest
Hallowed be thy name
Thy forest Queendom come
Thy will be done (’n’ dusted)
In heaven as on earth
Give us this day our daily being and medicine
And forgive us our wrongs as others forgive us
Tempt us to goodFor thine is the Queendom
Tree power & glory
Now and foreverAmen
The cliché that ghosts are those with unfinished business is a cliché for a reason. To do what you can to begin to transfigure such suffering into a reality checked, a pain understood, a story remembered can be the only response to any such uncovered torment. What I felt at the final syllable defies language.
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
- (T S Eliot, Ash Wednesday)
Yet to give some vague sense-impression, I would use the analogy of a pressure-cooker. Some (far from all) of whatever had been heating, whirling, ruminating in that circle for so many centuries was realised and released, was revealed and relieved. Some comfort was found. (Not least for me.) I sensed something, as in a glass darkly, of an independent life-their-own — lives of which my empathic experience has only the foggiest. Lives cruelly cut short. Deaths unendingly elongated with no purpose except to the end of one psychopathic culture-carrier.
What is it like to be a ghost?
In trying to connect my Edinburgh haunting experience to ‘real life’, the question always remains open regarding the inner horizon of spirits encountered. This is not just a question of mechanisms: of whither, what, how to, wherefrom. Such attempts to reduce, repeat, connive-with, conceal even are always met with tears or anticlimax, a brick wall or a shoot-self-in-foot moment. Is it just coincidence? Are memories stored as ‘stone-tapes’ to be unlocked any time a similar emotion occurs in the same place? Such questions are tail-chasing rather than tale-tracing. Petri-dishes are here uncalled for and impossible. Rather than getting lost in the sauce, the key is to ask what can we learn. The real puzzle was asked of me by a friend: ‘do they react to you?’ Put another way, how do they feel?
Initially, we might find that question one of the easier ones to answer. Surely frightened. Surely traumatised. Perhaps vengeful. But try to interview a haunt and you’ll always end where you began: in the pattern (that same pattern which unlocks it in the first place). The same things happen. Responsivity is limited. This ultimate exemplar of the Unknown Other — a ghost — often appears to be caught in some kind of glitch.
Nowhere has this strange reality been better captured than in the bone-chillingly heart-warming short story, Par Avion. Told from the perspective of the haunter (rather than the usual hauntee), this literary marvel speaks to our desire to empathically connect with ghosts. Similar to the film The Others in that ‘the other’ in question is not the unknown unreachable but that of the concrete, physical, realisable. Flesh and blood in this story are the site of not of viewpoint, but of radical alterity; instead, memory and trauma become the active locus of consciousness. Such ostranenie strains at the boarders of sense, and yet shifts our way of seeing to a place not usually inhabited by us — a glimpse is caught behind the veil.
In Thomas Nagel’s essay What is it like to be a bat?, he posits that this is not as easy a question as one might wish. We may say — bats sleep upside down, they eat fruit, nuts or cow’s blood, they echolocate by squeaking. But this is not what it is like to be one: this is just what a bat does. Bridging behaviour and inner life is no facile endeavour. In a practical fashion, Par Avion, explores what it might be like to be a ghost.
Par Avion was written by the medium, Marlène Dotard, between the world wars, at a time when seances were in high demand from widows desirous of communication with the loved lost. In a pithy scene-setting preamble, the tale begins with a warning by the medium that hauntings are not mere projections.
‘ “What is on this side of the connection may not be reflected on the other side.” ’
The rest of the writing is told from the perspective of a disintegrating ‘I’.
‘I did not know I was dead. Marlene was on one knee clutching her face on our stone kitchen floor. In my desire to console her, why I did not know. Yet, I was aware that I could neither stand nor speak. The ease with which I could see all sides of the room at once, and move about as I pleased, was liberating, like being granted the freedom to fly with one small condition attached; I could no longer meet the simplest of my objectives. How was this lack to be explained?’
Dread and excitement are woven fine, a clothing for this soul…divine? Not quite yet. The use of a semi-colon, the dislocation of the two clauses, leaves witnesses with a question: is it merely the inability to will-the-way which is the ‘small condition’ hinted. Or is that pivot some greater terror?
The protagonist tries to imagine a way to reverse what dawns on him as an “unfortunate transformation” — even by “waking up.” [112] Time becomes not only useless but immeasureable — “was it a few hours ago, or had months passed since I ceased to be a man.” The only “units of measurement” he can find reside in his “wife’s face”: “the intolerable force of her sorrow is the anchor that draws me towards her.” But this being, once her flesh-and-blood husband, is not entirely passive to her desire: even between the living and the dead it takes two to tango. He becomes aware that he must “cease to deny the inevitable” and allow their “souls to unite in perfect knowledge.” Yet love bears all things — and even death cannot seem to part them. He cannot quite live again except in this in-between place, for what would it mean to? In love, even through death their wills are one for each other, some great barrier keeps them apart.
“Her fear was the clue; the fox-hole, where a small and supple shape hid amidst the deafening compression and noise, waiting until the clamour of the shelling stopped, and the whistle blew. To part with the instinct to survive, stand to my full height and embrace the steel cacophony that awaited us sons of France, was my last worldly act, and after that this, blissful communion with the consoling breeze.” [112]
She wants him back. He is back, but not in the way he wants to be — not in the way she wants him to be either. “Marlene has…seen my decapitated ghost, hovering in pieces above her.” [113] But she cannot see what it is like to be him. All she sees in death is the grotesque. His alone is the confidence that their “narrow lives” can “open out towards” a “shared destiny” of “celestial dissolution.” [113] They long for one another, but each cannot accept one other’s current state. How can such a riddle be answered?
The story is interspaced with a radically different style: italicised, neologism-ridden and highly psychedelic, these descriptions detail some other state of consciousness altogether unfamiliar. They are both otherworldly and described in the detail of a scientist. And they couch the haunter’s lengthier forays into the inner drama of his living-lover’s world.
“Landscapes of spirilla, star formations of chameleon-like bacilli hover quietly above forgotten formulae…
…Shimmering in our veins, immobile as blank ink, dreams of crystalline forest involuted in time, fossil enigmas of microorganisms unfettered by eternity…
…The slow and swaying enzymatic reactions in a gravitational cadence, shadowed by constellated dreams, desiccation of lava and tectonic ruptures pathogenic in time.”
Synchronised is macropsia with micropsia — phenomena are widened-and-shrunken — like seeing the small through a telescope or the distant through a microscope. Writing is eternalised. Grief is made concrete. Love links the living and the dead.
But why this mention of pathogens and microorganisms? A scientifically stylised symbol? If so, it is one which we are soon urged to take as literally as possible. Back in the dimly recognisable world,
“I cough, Marlene winces, and sneezes into her hand. There is blood in the palm…Flies are gathering over the windows, Marlene touches her neck and perspiration breaks over her forehead, there is fever here, and the plague spinning its spores.
Luminous mauve, iridescent violent, sleeping electricity, strange music strange melodies in the blood, delicate as dragonflies, amethyst destinies of improbable vistas.
I have joined her in life and in doing so condemned the living world to death. I touch her face but all she sees are the sunken red eyes of the abyss, diseases pouring through the decaying cavities of its grotesque smile, drawing her soul back from whence we came.”
The merging of their will leaves us with a question we must ask in time: has she simply lost the will to live, or is the occultic force of his death-presence killing her? To this one can only answer, yes and yes! In our language which divides — the law of excluded middle must become for us the lore of included muddle. Love here is a unity of two wills-with: and if one is dead, its consummation must to that resort. The other way of reading it would be, because of his inability to return-to-life-as-flesh (to will himself out of death) her will-for-him absorbs his inability to will. And yet, in spite of the bone-chilling terror of her grotesque visions, his presence as her dis-ease is depicted heart-rendingly as ‘forgotten formulae’.
“…[V]ibrational microbial mesmeric wings stretched wide across the gulf of consciousness.
My vital energy is theirs, billions of wriggling beings passing through my extremities to Marlene, following the path of our love into beds of wild flowers and butterflies.
Here everything quietly rumbles. Only the oblivion of time can dispose of destiny. You will become a planet, you will become cellular, you will become the antibiosis of every living thing that creeps and crawls and aches towards the eclipsed sun.” [115–6]
So it seems
If undead spirits be there only because we want them to be — be that as ways or toys, for love or curiosity, in valour or voyeurism — then their interiority has been denied, and harm may well come. Gawking at ghosts only tortures more. Without being free for them we cannot be free from them. But by trying to understand the story of suffering which centres their cry for help, we take into account the inner life which they seem to possess.
