On the Existence of Ghosts

[Torkelburger]

On the Existence of Ghosts

--after Ezra Pound

If there is such a thing as a ghost, it isn't the
manifestation of a dead person's apparition

or something that appears as of
a nebulous image.  But rather it is one of these:

memories of long-forgotten faces
and nightmares conjuring our past in

a time that we hoped we would never again recollect, like the
horrific remembrance attached to a childhood home, or the time we were hopelessly lost in a crowd.

These thoughts are like a rose's petals,
blooming to life, vivid at first, but withering as time moves on.

They've been buried deep within a 
profusion of passing years, something reflecting the flashback of the tribulation like the wet

surface of a murky pond.  The ghostly trigger is a black
root of an oak planted in the ground, a trunk grasping at the sky with its bough.

[Semicircle]

I like your concept of ghosts as memories. When I think ghosts, I think an accumulation of memories that repeat themselves. In this regard, they could take any shape. A nebulous image is plausible if believed to be there.

The kind of ghosts, as the subject of myth, are the continued memories that someone has have after death, since thoughts do not take physical form. What you seem to be describing; though, is the sensation of feeling like a ghost.

Photographs of childhood hold ghostly qualities because it's hard to recognize yourself like you were before. Everything that happens before you becomes a ghostly quality in the future because you feel so distant from what you were before. You are a new person every second, straying further and further from what you were originally.

If you feel like you were always the same, you wouldn't be concerned with the idea of ghosts. That kind of thought process often correlates with people becoming ghosts; they don't recognize life ever ending.

[Torkelburger]

Thank you for these insightful thoughts. I completely agree. Yes, that is what I was after. You say it so beautifully that your post reads like a poem as well!

[Thunderembargo]

this sketch conjures the ghost of Washington Irving, I can hear him now, craning for Ichabod, writing the headless horseman into existence with rain pelting a darkly lit bureau (Candlelight flickering and dim shadows cast through a cold room) and Irving - himself - with only a stammering acknowledgement of the apparition only just now having moved past his domicile, continues to work on through the winter night