Everyday Ghosts
by S.B. Julian
It's
interesting how ghosts tend to appear in mundane
venues – the world's most ordinary and
insignificant places. Ghosts are exotic additions
to spots where no other exoticism exists.
Apparently one recently visited British Columbia's
Lieutenant-Governor in her office. It didn't
creak and moan in a spooky attic or in the garden
at dusk outside the conservatory; no, it merely
sat on a visitor's chair in the office, watching.
Distracting the L-G. Maybe she was drafting dull
memos or answering boring emails, and wanted to
be distracted. Everyone longs to make their
workplace less boring. Sometimes we imagine
presences that may or may not be there --
presences missed during humdrum days at the
office, laundromat, bank machine, grocery store
or other spots notably non-numinous.
The more we re-write
history for reasons of ideology, the more active
become the ghosts of the past. Ghosts are
restless spirits of people repressed or banished,
trying to make their way back into the world's
attention. Historical figures banished in one way
will reappear somewhere else, haunting the places
they used to flourish in when alive. Somehow they
seem to redress unbalance. We might argue that
the more we censor the past the more we need
ghosts.
It's not only
historic personalities but historic social habits
that erupt again in our thoughts, haunting us as
products perhaps of our secret underground
unconscious desires -- products of taboos.
I have proof:
on the morning of Halloween, at the laundromat I
smelled cigarette smoke. I swear it was there, a
ghostly odorous emanation, even though no one was
smoking and the walls were plastered with “No
Smoking” signs. The diagrams on these signs
made the images of wasted lungs look like
skeletons: very Halloween-ish, very appropriate
for the day. Halloween! Night before All Saints
Day, when the un-saintly ones get out and express
themselves.
More ghostly
things happened to me that day: at the cash
machine outside the bank I put my card in ... and
it disappeared. Some evil force stole it and left
a creepy message: “insufficient funds”.
This meant
less cash with which to buy Halloween candy at
the grocery store for the trick-or-treaters that
night. I knew I'd have bad luck there and sure
enough, a black cat crossed my path as I arrived.
A free one! Just walking along! We never see a
free cat any more since the “lock up your
cat” lobby forced everyone to keep them
indoors – for the sake of birds. This one
must have been an apparition. The spooky crows in
the trees overhead seemed real however. They
cawed raucously, jeering at the cat who vanished
down a dank alley. These crows had spent the
summer killing baby robins, for which cats got
blamed – a criminality of crows they were,
black against a darkening sky. They soon flew off,
evaporating like black wisps ...
Some people
say that ghosts are mere imaginings, products of
our need to hang on to things we've lost, things
like history and the habits that used to live as
robust choices in our personal lives. This seems
to suggest that ghosts are “real”, and
that whatever we ban comes back to haunt us.
In my town,
the City Council decided it was wise to ban the
statue of Canada's first Prime Minister because
some aboriginal people didn't like walking past
it. His statue's gone now, but Mr. Macdonald isn't:
I saw a shadowy top-hatted frock-coated figure on
Government Street the other night, flitting round
a corner under the moon as the clock chimed
midnight.
He'll stick
around. History has a way of not going quietly.
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