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I feel like a ghost. It’s less like a dead-child-haunting-a-Victorian-house type ghost and more the type of meandering Shinto-like-spirit you’d find in Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. Less BOO! and more like I know that I have a body but I’m not sure if it matters anymore? Like, outside of the walls of my apartment and with my immediate circle of flesh-and-bone-sacks I hang around, do I even exist? Speaking of walls - I don’t think I’ve thought about the short story The Yellow Wallpaper as much as I have this year. If you’re not familiar, it’s a fairly quick read. It was written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins and hailed as a cornerstone feminist text. It’s also just a masterclass in subtle horror; the kind that is so minute and mundane and sharp and coaxing so as to get inside your own skin so fast you didn’t know it happened. It was written at a time when occurrences such as postpartum depression were seen as mental states requiring bed-rest with no reading or writing or exercise. These consisted mostly of conditions which were deemed “women’s ailments”, but also covered a whole host of other false assumptions about mental illnesses and general other-ness. In short, the main character is inferred to have just had a baby and is in one of these depressive states and is ordered on bedrest for three months. She stays in a room and slowly becomes obsessed with the yellowing wallpaper around her. It’s written in a diary format, as if she is stealing time when she can hide the documentations of her state in the room and with the wallpaper. As time goes on, we witness her imaginings (but are they imaginings?) grow larger and more and more real to her to the point where she is convinced a woman is in fact hiding inside the wallpaper. I’m not going to give away the last image of the story, because it must be read, but it is chilling and thrilling and wow I feel like we all maybe have our own small woman living in our walls. In a different, though similar, vein I recently watched the 1947 version of Black Narcissus. Initially I saw the trailer for the new series which came out this year, and was intrigued because nuns and repressed desire are two of my eternally favorite subjects It’s based off of a book by Rumer Godden, who grew up in British-occupied East Bengal during the First World War. Though I can’t vouch for the book because I haven’t read it yet, I know that one of the themes Godden wanted to touch on was the obvious cultural disconnect between the nuns and the people they “came to serve”. The original film touches lightly on this, but in its tone-deaf and racist old-Hollywood ways, including multiple actors in brown-face (the only Indian main actor was Selar Sabu who played the royal prince), it seems to negate this central theme. Essentially, the story is about a group of nuns who, by the invitation of the Indian general, are to make a convent from his old palace that was previously used for his father’s women and salacious activities, housing its own ghosts from times passed. Over the course of time in the old palace, which sits high upon a mountaintop, the Sisters come across multiple obstacles individually which cause them to fall from their preconceived notions of themselves (and of God) one by one. For example, Sister Philipa who is the resident gardener is tasked with creating a vegetable garden. In one scene she has a brief moment of confessing doubt to the Sister Superior where she seems visibly distressed. Later on we find out that instead of vegetables, she has planted exclusively wildflowers all over the property, a nod to her “madness” and she ends up leaving voluntarily, citing that the fresh air on the mountaintop is too much for her to handle. The whole story culminates in one Sister Ruth’s obsession with the handsome groundskeeper and her audacity to don a dress and lipstick to seduce him. It quickly escalates the climax of the film and the eventual ending. None of these happenings are ever overt, yet are smooth and slippery and leave you questioning if it really is happening. This is what I relate to the most in this time - that insidiousness. As with The Yellow Wallpaper, it is a slow and mostly mental (but is it just mental?) turn of not just events, but complete transformations of interior (and often, sequentially, exterior) landscape. This is how I feel in my current state of affairs. Rather than haunting and aimless, I often feel simply intangible, inconsequential, incorporeal. And what is a ghost if not the absence of the corporeal? ***** A couple of months ago, after getting off the phone with my best friend where we had a conversation which flowed as easily as if I was talking to another part of myself, I became unreasonably angry and frustrated at my phone speaker. I had a pointed disdain towards the device and its little stupid innerworkings, as if it was intentionally thwarting the interaction. I was speaking to my dearest friend but even then I felt a disconnect. It must have changed her voice! It sounds like her, but there must be something off. The audio compression has bastardized her intonations! It has flattened her vocal texture! No matter how close I press my ear to the opening, I can hear no more fine detail. I proceeded to go down a maddening rabbit hole of trying to find some article or at least academic paper that could corroborate my claims and that there is scientific evidence that a schism exists emotionally when using digitized forms of communication. Does a phone speaker itself distort a voice, and what does audio compression actually do, and what is it made out of and is there evidence that iron and aluminum may make you clinically crazy? My findings came up short and unsatisfactory, but something that did stick out in my lunacy was the simple fact that speakers reproduce sound. This sounds glaringly obvious, but it felt enlightening and traitorous all the same. It is therefore then the likeness of my friend’s voice, but not her true voice which I hear. A mimicry. A mockery. Over this past year our social interaction has become increasingly pixelated. Everything has become one step removed from physicality. The word pixel is a combination of “picture” and “element”. An element of an image, not the whole. Pixels are literally a sample of an original image. A copy of a copy. I was convinced - am convinced - that I am not speaking to my friends, but rather a vaporous pastiche that has become their digital avatar. A ghost. If you have ever heard the term “Uncanny valley”, it’s a concept first introduced by Japanese professor Masahiro Mori. It’s the idea that when robots become more human-like, they are more appealing to us, but only up to a certain point. When they reach the point where it feels too close to human, we start feeling an uneasiness. We recognize the image or the object as human-ish, but not all human and that is unsettling to us. What’s to say that this concept doesn’t translate into our digitized and pixelated correspondences with our loved ones and our community? In CorpoReality, Inc. digital ghosts can hear the voice of their friend, infer their presence, have a conversation, watch a film online simultaneously, see the pixelated shape of a friend’s new baby, but it doesn’t grab the same. It has no teeth. Or rather, maybe just like baby teeth. Not only do I feel this lack relationally, nothing else seems to stick to my mind these days. Ideas, articles, conversations. I felt this start to happen even before this Great Long Period of Entropy. It seems that pixelated interactions land on my brain with the strength of a velcro ball catch game. It sticks for a moment and then eventually slowly peels itself off. Too heavy to stay without something material to anchor to. Something to bookmark the moment. I have had some wonderful conversations this past year. Insightful, hilarious and compassionate dialogue. I just wish I could remember more of it. I used to be in a habit of writing bits of dialogue down, just to remember it. But I find when I’m on the phone or facetime, my brain doesn’t place the conversation in a concrete place and it becomes endlessly elusive, a mush. It still exists somewhere in my mind, but it doesn’t quite have a home. My brain archivists have filed it under “Miscellaneous, etc.”. It’s not the same as when I am at my friend’s dinner table and she is making us a soup and pouring a brilliantly floral apertif and we are divulging our trashy pleasures and talking about wars. I link those scripts and those moments of connection to a slightly uncomfy but worn-in wooden seat and warm flickering light. I remember the way we paused and both looked at the candle for a moment. My brain, but more importantly my body and my senses, are unconsciously taking notes which mark these ordinary moments specific from other moments. It simply isn’t something that can be translated virtually, where the reference point is always my same environs. I’m not saying that I don’t want to chat with my friends or family who are far away. Most of the time, I enjoy when I do and often I’d rather some form of a hello than none. But in the words of the poet and sage Kendrick Lamar: I'm so fuckin' sick and tired of the Photoshop…Show me somethin’ natural like ass with some stretch marks. Show me what she’s looking at when she’s complaining about her mother-in-law. Show me the adagio strokes of small wrinkles collecting around my friend’s eyes. The imprints of our digital ghosts only seem to remind us of what we are not receiving. ***** When I was younger I pinpointed a phenomenon I called unofficially “The Sunday Feeling”. You know, the feeling when it’s a Sunday late afternoon and there’s not more you can do but wait for dreaded Monday to come and school to start again. It’s also the same feeling when you’re on vacation and you’re the last ones to leave. These are those purgatory-ish moments when you can’t quite invest effort in a new project and you’ve already packed all of your bags and cleaned everything. It’s a listlessness that reverbates off of the walls and lands back in your lap, looking at you all shrugged shoulders and an apathetic and unhelpful “Now what?” Serendipitously, in the midst of all of these thoughts I came across an article written in August of 2020 aptly named “The Lost Name for the Emotion We’re All Feeling Right Now”. It refers to the Ancient Greek word acedia (a word I immediately associated with Sarah McLachlan’s hit of a similar name, whose music video feels eerily relevant to the current moment.) It is a word that seems close to apathy, but is actually more specific. Ancient monks would refer to it as “the noonday demon”. It is described by the monk and theologian John Cassian as a state of being “horrified at where he is, disgusted with his room … It does not allow him to stay still in his cell or to devote any effort to reading”. This feeling is so specifically familiar. I have had no attention span to offer to anything. In Douglas Adam’s book, “The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul”, he diagnoses this moment precisely: In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.
Though this state is one I have been much more familiar with this past year, I also have started to oscillate more towards another feeling. Or maybe I am just getting more comfortable with my wallpaper ladies, starting to enjoy them and give them outfits and names. The term “ghost” also implies a faint trace of something - the outline, the idea, the skeleton. It is an impression, a suggestion. A fill-in-the-blank. I have found lately that I am more drawn to shorter forms of entertainment, for example. Short films, short stories, essays, even conversations. Rather than chastise myself for such a short attention span, I have started to embrace it. I think in the midst of such entropy I crave the feeling of completeness. This, coupled with the capacity a short storytelling leaves for imagination to fill in the rest. There is time for you to continue the storyline rather than have it done for you. It’s a quiet and mostly internal activity I have enjoyed, though it has taken me time to get comfortable with doing it. Projecting my own forms upon the wall, embracing a warmer type of solitude, one which exists as a growing relationship to myself and can admittedly teter on the delirious. In the book Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, a book I can only characterize as wholly atmospheric, warm blue and misty, she describes that, Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.
I would venture to say that the common thread woven through these ghost-like musings, texts, narratives, images that seem to be amplifying my current state, is the compounding of undulating desire and the daydreaming for a consummation of that desire. To hear the trace of my friend’s voice and to not also smell her faint perfume illustrates this gap of yearning eternally present, it seems. But I am learning that there are great merits to being in the simple and pure state of desire. We often want to rush past it, but then I remember again, as Marilynne Robinson has translated so acutely, To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing - the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.
When do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? Whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. The gathering of desire is a gathering of the senses. An inventory, a wrap sheet of all that you are anticipating. Of all that you enjoy about the thing you are lacking in the moment. To wait longer is to widen your vocabulary with which you describe, or perhaps even see for the first time why you miss that thing. Our desires are being cultivated, are fermenting beneath the surface of our own skins. Bubbling slightly, collecting structure like your favorite sparkly wine. ***** My grandmother has said often for the last couple of years that Life is happening so fast. Our information gets in and out of our heads laying on our pillows before a traditional newspaper can hit our doorsteps. Young people have figured out how to tell a story in five seconds, albeit while assaulting our eyes with the pace of editing. Netflix is now going to be putting out a new movie every week, as if that’s some great innovation or feat. You are expected to form an educated and public opinion about a topic you just learned about in one hour. My grandmother wrote me a letter for the first time ever this week - “I had a bit of wine” - explaining her upbringing and why she holds the values she does. We clash a lot and she is an intense and stubborn Dutch woman who knows how to hold a grudge. But I know she’s been through a lot of trauma early on in her life and I try to remember that. She was apologizing for not always getting it right, whatever “it” is. She wrote about how there were dreams and goals she wanted in her life, but her path took a different turn. She once mentioned wanting to photograph for National Geographic. She came from a lower working class and put my grandpa through college once he got out of the army so he could be a dentist and they could rise to the coveted Middle Class. She once lived on saltines and ketchup. She wanted a nice house in the best neighborhood and to go to the best restaurants whenever they wanted. They worked a lot and were smart and frugal with their money. They worked too much, my mom says, with a hint of resentment. My grandma admits that now that she is older, she doesn’t have the energy to pursue many of the things she wished she had when she was younger. “Life is a conspiracy”, she wrote. I told her that was a good line and thanked her for the letter. Life is a conspiracy. I’m not entirely sure what she means by it, but maybe in the context of her letter it’s that sometimes we want things, and we put it off and put it off that when it comes time to enjoy them, we are too tired, or we’d rather watch TV. ***** Though this is initially a lament of a lack of physicality and grounding, it is ultimately an ode to desire. Through the apparitions and voids, we find the outline of what we actually long for. Like the nuns on the mountaintop coming face to face with themselves, like the woman with the yellow wallpaper unleashing herself from the prison of her forced bed-rest, And perhaps even my grandmother in the act of simply writing her letter and acknowledging her past desires. I am finding there are quite a few benefits from being untethered to our usual pillars. For one, the result of a lack of outside voices and distractions means I have had months and months to really come face-to-face with who I desire to be and what I want to pursue. Less influence impressing upon me is terrifying in one respect (god forbid I am wrong), and ultimately freeing because no one is really witnessing my pursuits and trials of thought and practice and the type of incubation required when really getting to the ambered center of the self. I’m not tempted to laugh-off or over-explain my current pursuits or thoughts because there just simply isn’t enough people to be self-conscious around. So even in this our incorporeal state, our half-waking state, even in our listlessness, we are able to desire. I spent a long good part of my life demonizing it. A puritanical habit that has taken years and years to shake. But to desire is to remember that you are alive and there are things to want and things to love. So perhaps, yes, it is okay to welcome the ghosts, here and there or to even be one every once in a pandemic year. —————————————————————————————————————————————————————— There will be another “Addendum” issue of the newsletter out on Friday, including some new Field Notes. Mostly, it’s me geeking about how I hacked my phone to be a Kindle of sorts and I’m just really excited to share it with anyone who cares to be a quasi-neo-somewhat-luddite as well. If you don’t already subscribe, head on over to coaterak.com so you can get it straight in your inbox. Wow, so easy. If you know anyone who would enjoy these musings as well, feel free to pass along! Also, always feel free to write responses back to me - I love your feedback :). Thank you, as always, for your time, support and audience, my friends.
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