on ghosts

uncertainty & its unsatisfying stopgaps

unexplained phenomena—
hearing voices,
shampoo bottle flying across the room,
lights flickering—
insert your own hearsay,
your own experience—

i find the “idk maybe ghosts???” explanation a little…
simplistic? convenient? boring, even?

many gripes with the concept of spirits.

first of all, why you assume human spirits?
do other beings get to have spirits?
why not suppose a ground sloth ghost?
are you being haunted by a dire wolf?
cyanobacteria?
who gets to inhabit this spirit realm,
and is your conception of the supernatural
a bit more human-centric than the natural world
seems to suggest?
do all these spirits continue on forever,
so that this planet’s spiritual dimension is just
absolutely choked,
    teeming,
        bursting
with the ghosts of the extinct?

are you making up the rules as you go?

and then there’s the trouble of “essence.”
your spirit is your essence? right?
but what even is that?
we know it’s not your personality,
because those change.
slowly, over a lifetime,
and sometimes all at once
from a particularly nasty head injury.
memories, too: not part of your essence.
those rot with brains.
so whatever a spiritual essence might be,
it’s at least as alien,
as unfamiliar,
as unsatisfying and
       as beautiful
as the concept of particles,
       d i s s i p  a  t  i   n   g,
re-converging,
taking new forms,
forming new shapes,
    new beings,
        new minds.
why make comfort from
half-thought notions of,
ad-hoc conjectures of
ghostly continuity
when the continuity
of atoms, of particles
is already here,
    known,
    reliable,
and much more strange,
otherworldly,
and aesthetically poignant
than any sloppy ghost story?

don’t become a ghost.
become everything.
become part of the next experiment.
dissolve into the whole.

from Substack’s image generator (who’s api/model? don’t know), with words-on-top by me. the prompt i gave it was “scientific animism become everything” and gosh i love the weird shit our collective intelligence dreams up for uncommon phrases like this. apologies to all artists losing opportunities to the venture-driven companies creating this tech. someday i’d love to pay an artist to make the art here, but today it’s either shitty graphics & photos from me or this stuff. would my abstinence help anything? probably not.

ok but what about those unexplainable phenomena?

i don’t know but maybe
just
leave it unexplained?
don’t fill the gap with
extraordinary claims?

i don’t know what you saw
what you see
and won’t explain it away.
there’s more to the world
than what we’ve measured.
it’s hard to even know what to measure.
hard to know what tools to carry.

two things i think of,
anytime i hear a ghost story.

one: a podcast episode,
don’t remember which,
dude being interviewed
previously appeared
on a ghost-hunting TV show
as “the science expert.”
show producers quickly learned
to keep him in the van,
behind flashing lights and knobs,
because he wrecked the first couple episodes,
what with his level-headed “maybe it’s
old radiators”
so they parked him outside.
the psychic, though.
the psychic they kept.
you want a psychic on your walk-throughs.
psychics know how to ratchet up
    drama
        attention
            ad revenue.

two: physics TAs in college
told of a haunted storage room
in some other university’s physics department.
strange flashes of light!
reported by many
over years.
mystery eventually solved
by a nerd with a fencing foil.
holding the tiny sword steady,
but noticing it undulate—
what made it move?
infrasound?
machinery droning,
a frequency too low to hear?
yes.
and what’s more,
human eyes come in pretty standard sizes,
and the infrasound droning in that closet
creates a resonant frequency in people’s eyeballs.
makes your eyes vibrate.
makes you see things.
flashes of light.

this story might be nothing but lore,
but helpful lore nonetheless.

the universe is full of unexplained,
even unexplainable things.
some we may someday suss out.
some may remain eternally mysterious.

but why should the causes look human?
why are we so quick to explain away
with anthropomorphic ghosts,
    gods,
        angels,
            demons,
                aliens?
(yes, come to think of it,
all of my arguments here apply to aliens, too)

every discovery reveals that
this universe is less familiar,
less expected,
less human
than we ever dreamed,
and more complex,
more fractal,
more elegant
than we ever hoped.
our bodies are brief patterns
painted by particles born in stars,
and loud infrasound can resonate eyeballs.
why should any explanation
look anything like us?

tell ghost stories.
create helpful lore.
dream wild tales that
    nourish,
        heal,
            embolden.

here’s mine:
the swirl and dance of particles,
the endless experiment of forms,
and the thrill of all we’ve yet to know.