Status: Re-uploaded for colibri 20/09/12.
No Room for Ghosts
I
There’s no room for ghosts in the city. Where the buildings are sleek and minimalist, like tombstones for more soulful forms of architecture, nothing is more quaint, irrelevant or harmless than a ghost. Nobody has time for the past where the landscape is a patchwork of layered scenes that must be kept up with, where to be missing for a day is to be forgotten. Footprints vanish quickly, and history doesn’t often run deep. When it does, it is altered, re-written, and preserved only in those parts that are most easily displayed.
The thriving metropolis isn’t afraid of fading, but roars into the future with wild abandon and both feet on the accelerator. Progress overlooks no nook or cranny in its crusade against redundancy. To the eye that loves youth, every haunted corner is a waste of space to be filled, demolished, or paved over. Even in the parks and on the lonely, high-rise battlements, noise drives weary spirits out. Long ago, the ghosts evacuated, and only I lamented their leaving, because I couldn’t follow them.
I come from a different kind of place- a mythical elsewhere that is the antitheses of my urban surroundings.
Out in the country, where I was born, ghost stories abound. There’s no real record of a gothic tradition in Australia, but you can ask anyone with an older property who their resident apparition is, and they’ll have an answer for you. It’ll be a woven saga of animal deaths, most likely, or of wandering stockmen, rural accidents, echoing nighttime sounds and lingering sentiments.
My aunt’s farm, for example, has an abandoned vegetable patch sprawling nearly two acres behind a sagging fence of stumps and barbed wire. My grandfather tended it every day when he was alive, but it was strange being in there after he died, and so by familial agreement the plot was left to seed. My little sister and I would climb the fence and hack our way through the overgrowth on our braver days, but we had no real appetite for adventure. Far from creating a jungle world, its gradual transformation only made the place eerier.
The strawberries mutated as they were left unpicked, and the few remaining onions stretched skyward in an increasingly desperate struggle for light. Eventually, brambles strangled even the plum trees, whose skeletons scraped at the clouds with dead, blackened claws. When the wind howls in from the flats, the gate still creaks on rusty hinges. It knows it’s been neglected. We all know.
What else is there to think about?
It’s been five years since I was last there, but I still dwell on it from time to time. My grandfather’s garden has a place in my memory, and it sticks like a bone in my throat. That’s part of the beauty of ghosts. Good ones make a home inside you, so that running away only makes you feel their absence more keenly.
Despite knowing it like the back of my hand, I’ll never be comfortable in this city, and ghosts are to blame. The ones I have will always long for quiet, parochial pastures where they know their memories can flourish. Whenever I take them away from their proper places, they beg to be brought home to rest. They long for cosy nests in knitted rural tapestries, where community is a thing to be unravelled over cups of coffee when the rain is too heavy for work, or on a long and unproductive day in wintertime.
Their collective mass grounds me as I prowl this strange, yet familiar, environment. I feel like a parasite walking along the exposed spine of the city, which bridges the harbour like a cat’s arched back. The weight in my chest pulls me closer to the coldness lapping at its pylons, and I lean over the railing. Beneath the bridge, I can see the cavities where seagulls nest amongst gang signs and submarine reflections.
I think about the blocks that stretch behind me. Traffic floods the city’s veins with neon. Smog displaces the air and captures light pollution, so that even when the clubs start closing the horizon stays the fuzzy, ochre shade of dusk. In the streets, any hollows are filled with rubbish or people, or both. There is no such thing as a void.
Shadows pool in the skyscraper canyons, the back alleys and the nameless underground mazes. They offer me no comfort. Darkness as I knew it in my childhood was surreal and starlit, or else something unexplored, which had a canopy of green possibilities, and smelled of pungent earth. It was either a vast or a buried thing, and thus the domain of spectres. By comparison, these shadows are flat. Where the streetlights flicker and the windows are blind behind wooden boards, they may be menacing, but they threaten society’s fringe dwellers with future erasure- there is no hint of the past in them.
No, the city has no space for the dead. The forgotten here wander in bodies of flesh and blood, without graves to occupy. They are weakened by hunger, and their skins feel the sting of autumn. Such people are not ghosts, but they are the excluded living- the less than human.
I know, because I used to be one of them.
The thriving metropolis isn’t afraid of fading, but roars into the future with wild abandon and both feet on the accelerator. Progress overlooks no nook or cranny in its crusade against redundancy. To the eye that loves youth, every haunted corner is a waste of space to be filled, demolished, or paved over. Even in the parks and on the lonely, high-rise battlements, noise drives weary spirits out. Long ago, the ghosts evacuated, and only I lamented their leaving, because I couldn’t follow them.
I come from a different kind of place- a mythical elsewhere that is the antitheses of my urban surroundings.
Out in the country, where I was born, ghost stories abound. There’s no real record of a gothic tradition in Australia, but you can ask anyone with an older property who their resident apparition is, and they’ll have an answer for you. It’ll be a woven saga of animal deaths, most likely, or of wandering stockmen, rural accidents, echoing nighttime sounds and lingering sentiments.
My aunt’s farm, for example, has an abandoned vegetable patch sprawling nearly two acres behind a sagging fence of stumps and barbed wire. My grandfather tended it every day when he was alive, but it was strange being in there after he died, and so by familial agreement the plot was left to seed. My little sister and I would climb the fence and hack our way through the overgrowth on our braver days, but we had no real appetite for adventure. Far from creating a jungle world, its gradual transformation only made the place eerier.
The strawberries mutated as they were left unpicked, and the few remaining onions stretched skyward in an increasingly desperate struggle for light. Eventually, brambles strangled even the plum trees, whose skeletons scraped at the clouds with dead, blackened claws. When the wind howls in from the flats, the gate still creaks on rusty hinges. It knows it’s been neglected. We all know.
What else is there to think about?
It’s been five years since I was last there, but I still dwell on it from time to time. My grandfather’s garden has a place in my memory, and it sticks like a bone in my throat. That’s part of the beauty of ghosts. Good ones make a home inside you, so that running away only makes you feel their absence more keenly.
Despite knowing it like the back of my hand, I’ll never be comfortable in this city, and ghosts are to blame. The ones I have will always long for quiet, parochial pastures where they know their memories can flourish. Whenever I take them away from their proper places, they beg to be brought home to rest. They long for cosy nests in knitted rural tapestries, where community is a thing to be unravelled over cups of coffee when the rain is too heavy for work, or on a long and unproductive day in wintertime.
Their collective mass grounds me as I prowl this strange, yet familiar, environment. I feel like a parasite walking along the exposed spine of the city, which bridges the harbour like a cat’s arched back. The weight in my chest pulls me closer to the coldness lapping at its pylons, and I lean over the railing. Beneath the bridge, I can see the cavities where seagulls nest amongst gang signs and submarine reflections.
I think about the blocks that stretch behind me. Traffic floods the city’s veins with neon. Smog displaces the air and captures light pollution, so that even when the clubs start closing the horizon stays the fuzzy, ochre shade of dusk. In the streets, any hollows are filled with rubbish or people, or both. There is no such thing as a void.
Shadows pool in the skyscraper canyons, the back alleys and the nameless underground mazes. They offer me no comfort. Darkness as I knew it in my childhood was surreal and starlit, or else something unexplored, which had a canopy of green possibilities, and smelled of pungent earth. It was either a vast or a buried thing, and thus the domain of spectres. By comparison, these shadows are flat. Where the streetlights flicker and the windows are blind behind wooden boards, they may be menacing, but they threaten society’s fringe dwellers with future erasure- there is no hint of the past in them.
No, the city has no space for the dead. The forgotten here wander in bodies of flesh and blood, without graves to occupy. They are weakened by hunger, and their skins feel the sting of autumn. Such people are not ghosts, but they are the excluded living- the less than human.
I know, because I used to be one of them.