Ghosts

Ghosts are real, as real as the sky: the trace of absence, an invisible cradle to presence, the past, a doula to the present, and the elision of what was, a nativity now to what is and might be. The secret spectral scaffolding of the moment is massive, though seldom appreciated for the sheer magnitude of its creative contributions, inconspicuous as they are. We are easily deceived, admittedly, the vast majority of the cosmos constituted by the space in between atoms and elements, the entire universe primarily dark matter and energy, and yet, our attention focused squarely on what we can touch, taste, hear, smell, and see. Is it any wonder that phantoms have been relegated to the realm of the imagination at best? Belying our brazen confidence in science and reason, however, there lies our tacit awareness of the slippage of the moment, and the ghostly reverberations left in its wake. We know, intimately, beyond what we normally contemplate or articulate, the phantasmic dimension, surrounding and suffusing everything, an amniotic oasis of absence embracing us from the disappearance of some prior purpose, persons, or substance, a virtual ecto or protoplasm incubating all in each moment and only possible because of the vanished and vanishing. We are nothing without nothing. In a sense, all we ever encounter are apparitions, for gone are the days of the false notion of the immediacy of knowledge, the time it takes for light to travel to our eyes forever fixed at the cosmic speed limit of 186,000 miles per second, the visage of a beloved already a shadow, the moon, a memory from more than a second ago, and shining stars illuminating the dark canopy above, by the time we behold them, some there but not there, ghosts of the night sky.