how to speak in ghosts
writing is easy (sorry)
LIFE RX 14 OCT 24
the seven of wands, and an excerpt from Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human:
I took from my bookshelf a volume of Modigliani reproductions, and showed Takeichi the familiar nudes with skin the color of burnished copper. “How about these? Do you suppose they're ghosts too?”
“They're terrific.” Takeichi widened his eyes in admiration. “This one looks like a horse out of hell.”
“They really are ghosts then, aren't they?”
the aleatory
Anything you make must have a ghost in it—the ghost of yourself.
Otherwise, you’re marking time, satisfying your own sense of productivity, writing pages that you will only have to delete later.
This is fine, by the way. How else would anybody learn?
Writing is more of a performance than it first appears because it requires a very particular attunement of presence. The sentences you write are different in quality from the sentences you keep. The sentences you keep come from a different layer of awareness than the ones you end up having to edit out. That’s because awareness is the instrument you play. You make many little recordings and collage them together.
So, how do you ensure that there is a ghost in your writing?
First, unfortunately, you have to be alive. That means awake, paying attention, honest, unafraid, with a good enough sense of humor that you’re willing to make fun of yourself and enough bravery that you’re willing to upset others. Full of spirit: “inspired.”
If you are especially hard on yourself and find such a state uncomfortable, you might have to “vomit out” your drafts. You might be under the impression that writing is hard or you hate doing it because you hate the groundlessness of being present and alive so much that fight it and judge it. Which I think we all do sometimes. But it really doesn’t have to be that way. The ghost will still find a way onto the page, but it will have to sneak past you.
Those of us who grew up closely identified with hard work or achievement might have a different problem, especially if we’re always trying to outrun the fear of who or what we are without an A+ to prove something. We might work in a hollow, anxious, floating mode and write down a lot of meh simply to feel like we’re doing something. This was my issue for a long time, although it took me quite some time to figure it out. I was so prideful about my ability to be productive that I produced a lot of ungrounded and ultimately not very interesting stuff. The harder, truer work would have looked much less valorous. Maybe even lazy.
And yet, sometimes what looks like laziness is actually laziness.
Writing is hard not because it’s actually hard, but because you have to be alive to do it. And while there are general rules and observations about how to play the instrument called awareness, they have to be amended and discarded on a nearly constant basis. Nothing is quite right all the time, even if you know yourself well, because you are called upon to know yourself in an endlessly differentiated string of moments.
the assignment
don’t rush the ghosts
writing prompt
Identify the place in your field of vision where the words come from. (From within your skull? From behind? From the place on your temple where horns would go if you had horns? Lower left hand?) Deliberately choose a different spot, and write from there instead.
a chune
“Laid in Stone” by Lansing-Dreiden
The more I think about it, getting a burned CD might have been the best way to be introduced to something new. Low commitment (truly funny to remember how many records I bought because I liked something about the cover and the names of the songs). But enough object permanence that you stand a chance of actually listening to it instead of skipping through. That’s how I was introduced to Lansing-Dreiden. I think I still have the PMEA Honors Band CD binder around here somewhere. The guy who burned it for me still lived in Pittsburgh, apparently, but I’ve never seen him in all these years since I left, which is somewhat suspicious because in Pittsburgh, you see everyone from your past constantly. You can’t go anywhere without seeing one or two past situationships. And speaking of ghosts, the record store we all loved is now a vape shop called fucking Keystone Vapors. Pittsburgh really is a very shoegazey (shoe-gothy?) place. The Donnie Darko soundtrack hit this place like a Mack truck.
credits: Salvador Dali tarot deck by Salvador Dali
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
“Laid in Stone” by Lansing-Dreiden
Dear diary, I am presently marinating in my ghosts AKA back in Pittsburgh. (Thus the guest post from the Salvador Dali deck.) To my surprise, some of the more difficult ghosts are the more recent ones. Especially girlboss ghost of 2021-22. She was so stressed out that she regularly had blood vessels in her eyes burst. WTF. Breathwork don’t solve it all babe. Sometimes it’s just a cuckoo idea. But also, the more I think about this ghost, the more I think she didn’t fail, exactly—she was just taking the long road. And the only way you fail at taking the long road is if you … keep fucking taking it. XS