Something kicked my bed hard a few nights ago. How hard? It woke me, but in dream terms it was only the amount of impact that would be given if your bed was head-butted by a huge talking fish. It was a little less that when the utility that keeps the bed in one spot lifts and drops it for non-payment- more like the sensation when a small electric vehicle shaped like a hat hits the bed and the small electric man inside gets out to scratch his head. There were several options but as consciousness dawned the choices narrowed to two. Rationally, I know Seattle is rife with faults, bless its heart, but if I were allowed to select either a ghost or an earthquake, I'd prefer a ghost.
I've never really thought much about them: ghosts. I suppose they are our dependent clauses. They are our messy carbons. I could go on. Unlike angels, unclear beings who sustain poorly rationed faiths, ghosts have been created from a surfeit of identity. Ghosts exist in details. They've evolved from early mercenaries whose mission was vengeance and whose soul could be paid to rest into something more parochial and decidedly more personal. At some point the tentacles of the self reached beyond the pattern life. (I don't mean to suggest that a life's purpose must be exhausted like the flame's fuel or it rekindles some otherworldly aura. Ghosts have nothing to do with the dead on whom they are based.)
The individual does not pack a single personality. We are each mimics and we each covet what others are. To cope, we people the inanimate objects of our environment with Persona Babies. When that won't suffice we give personal narratives to actions. We assign actions personality traits. That reason the doll moved from where I left it or the door slammed is because of some anger or longing. To be haunted by these remnants of excessive egotism is to be chased by the scary faces we've just made in the mirror. If we did not psychoanalyze them, if we could just allow ourselves to be haunted by generic spirits- by the dead as a club that would be far different than having the touch put on you by the ghosts who are our contemporaries and equals. We are no longer terrified by the echoes in our bicameral brain, but by the identities we have formed ourselves.
Every ghost these days is a previous tenant which should say something of our feelings about property. My first expectation, surfacing from sleep was that the bed-kicker was just such a previous tenant. Probably killed by the asbestos and come back to warn me not to put any decorative hooks in the ceiling. I had forgotten about earthquakes. My exact half-waking thought was: "Damn! Now I have ghosts. Ter-rific. Well, they can go... I'm not moving out." It was a few moments before I thought of alternatives.
You can't blame me. There is something otherworldly about the motion of an earthquake. A fluid relation between walls and floors is not found in any living experience except in an earthquake. I don't suppose a ghost has the weight behind it to move my bed as much as it was moved. They are subtle in material- the breath of intent clothed in a sheet- diaphanous beings in velvet breeches or a wedding dress. (Why are we only haunted by jilted brides? We're never haunted by bridesmaids resentfully clomping up to our bed in their hideous mauve organza. 'Boo. I am cursed to stalk eternity. In this dress')
It might be possible that I suffered a sort of bilocation and kicked my own bed. If so, it is another talent wasted. It is a great pity that none of us can profitably occupy two distinct spots simultaneously- the best we could ever hope for is the ability to climb from our bodies, kick ourselves in the backside and get back in again.
Though it took the broadcast news nearly ten minutes to acknowledge it, what had happened was a sort of tectonic hiccup centered somewhere around Mt. Vernon. It can't have been more than a 4 point something or a 5. If Seattle were to have the spurs dug into it and to jump any significant amount, my dog and I would be buried alive in books, and if forced to read my way to freedom, I have a horrible feeling that the closest books would be Lady Murasaki's "Tale of Genji" and Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse".
I have to purge additional books. 3 boxes are on their way:
I've been more enthralled with the paper they wrap pomme frites in, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I can't like everything the canon lassos, John Dos Passos
Pity I don't grade on a curve, Saint-Beuve
Do go, Victor Hugo
LOL, Heinrich Boll
