Ghost House 3
Living requires making relationships that you like and do not like. I spend some of my day dealing with those relationship I don’t like but I try, primarily, to focus only on those I do like. One of the relationships I really like is with my ghosts (for those who have my email address know if it is jeffghost–for this reason). I have many ghosts. I am not referring to Casper or anything conjured up by hollywood to vacuum dollars (or pesos) out of your pocket.
I am talking about positive ghosts that inhabit my corpus. These relationship inform my intuition, sharpen my instincts and keep me company when I am alone with my own conjuring in the studio. They also reside in my memory banks. This includes a friendly ghost keeping alive my first and last fishing trip with my dad (his free time passion.) Each time I see his broad smile in my mind’s eye after catching a big stripper on the Arkansas river, I thank my ghostly friend for keeping these memories alive.
For those who are rationalist or objective thinkers, I imagine you might think this post is the beginning of the end for this “wild and crazy guy”. I too once lived in this super-charged rational world thinking that I could change the world and create opportunities from thin air. My parent’s DNA, passed through to this first-born, meant that I am destined to try, to always think the best of people, work hard and dig deep–but most importantly solve a problem on my own. My dad would always say “try fixing something first.” That spirit of fixing things lives on.
It is now, in my waning years, me that needs “fixing.” Or rather, unfixing. I am having deep conversations with my ghosts:
- My art ghost is nervous. She wants to know why I am not in the studio more feeding her.
- My body ghost is pissed that I don’t walk my 5 miles everyday.
- My mind ghost is worried that the vapors that keep it visible are evaporating.
- My architect ghost is worried that as the art ghost takes precedence he will become irrelevant
- My food ghost wants more production from the garden.
- My photography ghosts wants more shutter action.
So, each day, I awake to new conversations with these ghosts. They all compete for my attention. They all want precedence. I find that if I nurture them gently, a bit at a time, I can be relaxed and rest assured that my work will reflect the truth and living a beautiful life. From Alain Badiou “Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy” (Verso 2011):
“But it is precisely the co-belonging of Good and Evil to what sustains itself only in silence and makes our soul into constant theater–the real place, without concept, of a balancing of sainthood and abjection, of the beautiful life and suicide.”
My ghosts help me keep in the beautiful life. Thank you to my ghosts in the house.
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