Whether we believe in ghosts (or not), one thing cannot be denied: ghost sightings have been recorded from time immemorial. Well into the 21st century, the ghost remains a staple of story-telling, a vessel by which we understand the supernatural, the otherworldly, or our mortality related griefs and anxieties. Our most common associations with ghosts, these days, come from spooky season horror stories about unsettled spirits with unfinished business. The first images the word ghost conjures for me are of the deceased, come back (from wherever they’ve gone) to send us a message. I think of trick-or-treating children covered in white sheets, two holes cut out for the eyes. I think of Casey Affleck covered in a white sheet, two holes cut out for the eyes. I think of nightriders on horseback covered in white sheets, two holes cut out for each of their possessed eyes. I think of burning crosses, evil spirits, trick-or-treating, and objects suddenly knocked over in all the other rooms of our shared night. Obviously we think of ghosts in all the ways the word has accreted meaning over the centuries. But, I imagine, if asked, most folk would defer to the idea of ghosts as supernatural or paranormal phenomena.
What the ghost must be, always, is absolutely ungraspable. It is what remains beyond the ken of living beings, outside of temporal bounds, above the laws of physics that govern our fragile bodies. Surely you can fall in love with a ghost, be held by a ghost—but that love, that holding, not given to the decay of living things—can never constitute mutual reception. Death stands in the way. And the ghost can only give where the living can only take (or vice versa).
The ghost remains for us an object of fascination. We want to see a ghost (even if we decidedly do not want to see a ghost). Some part of the psyche craves the spectacle of the unexplained, confirmation of things beyond the world of the senses. Haunted houses, for example, are a regular attraction at carnivals, fairs, and theme parks. And ghost sightings at places like Japan’s Blue Tree Meadow, in the shadow of Mount Fuji, are an evergreen topic of conversation among campers looking for a late night thrill. Even living in sin with my sweet stargirl, we’d visit the Marfa Lights viewing center on Route 90. The Marfa Lights are said to appear randomly at night on the dusty, West Texas horizon and remain as much beloved myth as they are mystery. We’d sit there together on warm nights. She’d sketch. I’d gaze. Mostly it was a nice and quiet place to enjoy each other’s company on a weeknight while also basking in the presence of otherworldly possibility.
What I most loved (and still love) about her is how consistently she surprised me. The fortunate benefits of being a cynic (more on this in a forthcoming post) is that my baseline expectation of people is myopic selfishness. A cynic is never disappointed by what they already expect, which is not much. My stargirl, on the other hand, so consistently defied my expectations with her selflessness, creativity, and warmth that, even now, I believe in the goodness and kindness of people in part because of her.
Why this digression? Because one night my beloved star girl shared with me her own theory of the ghost. These apparitions, she reasoned, had to be beings/images displaced from their proper time, things and people who’d wandered accidentally into another manilla folder in the grand cabinet of cosmic chronology. I loved this (and loved it so much more when a kernel of her theory on ghosts was interactively explored in BioShock Infinite).
I miss her, my ghostly stargirl. So much. And no, she’s not dead. She’s alive and, I think, quite happy. Theoretically she doesn’t have to be a ghost. I could, as Frank O’Hara suggested so many years ago, pick up the phone and say hi, let’s have a Coke. But, in so many ways, my beloved stargirl remains a ghost. That person doesn’t exist anymore. And what I have left, what I hold on to when I’m called to remember what sincere love and intimacy feels like, is my memory of her and our time together.
Among the living, it would be unfair of me to place that idealized memory on her.
That’s really the thing about ghosts. It’s not so much that they’re scary, or governed by some unusual physical properties, or even expressions of our inmost yearning (though they may manifest as any or all of those things, unbound by place or time or one’s subconscious). Rather, ghosts are manifestations of what, in the chronic condition of our waking lives, we cannot seem to digest, understand, let go, rid ourselves of. An insistent (maybe incidental) presence that begs apprehension and evades comprehension (or vice versa).
Honestly, most days I’m not convinced that I’m not a ghost.
“Ghosts appear in place of whatever a given people will not face...”
—Whole Ghost from Gravesend by Cole Swensen
Cole Swensen’s Gravesend (2012) begins with the question Have you seen a ghost? and continues as a lyric investigation into the semantic, anecdotal, and historical variations of the idea of the ghost. Beyond the dedication page, the text itself is not biographical, eulogistic, or even personal and narrative in nature. That’s not really Cole’s style. This is a text that pledges fealty first and foremost to the experiment of language and the kaleidoscopic lens it sets over our lives.
A handful of pieces in Gravesend are based on interviews Cole conducted and then edited/shaped for lyric and aesthetic integrity. The interviewers are not explicitly named (except in the acknowledgments), providing yet another literary ghosting effect. Who’s speaking in any given interview remains a mystery, a communication from beyond identifiable bounds. Throughout the text, she treads lightly (hovers?) over a subject, a word, a set of experiences that has defied concrete meaning to provide as wide a perspective on ghosts as possible.
When we transition from the question have you seen a ghost? to the question of what is a ghost? we are being asked to step out of the subject and into the object. In this case, there is no tangible set of laws, metrics, data that we might use to define the object. As already stated, the ghost defies every attempt at concrete meaning-making and comprehension. What we instead have is conjecture, theory, narrative that aligns itself with what we know to be true of our lived experience.
What is a ghost? asks us to contextualize the ghost, to embody the ghost, and in so doing, begs the question what it would take for us to become the ghost.
(I saw a ghost once. I wouldn’t realize it for another two decades.)
The expression (and practice) of ghosting really gained traction in the awkward teenage years of the 21st century. I can’t imagine that the idea and practice of leaving someone in the dust, without a word or notice of their intention to leave, actually started in the 21st century. Several single, unwed mothers from my native 20th century can attest to the fact that men have been ghosting women from time immemorial (and certainly vice versa, as was the case with a brother of mine whose Colombian wife left him left him with her son and won his house in a divorce after she got citizenship and a tremendous boob job).
This topic (ghosting, not boob jobs) has been written about ad nauseam by more qualified individuals, hundreds of communication majors with robust networks of socially informed snitches and more than three friends to share their observations with. But I suppose my being ghosted does lend me some authority in the conversation. My experience grants me, at least, an informed opinion.
What strikes me as unique about ghosting as we know it today is that it develops concomitantly with the ascent of social media and widespread usage of dating apps. The term too is unique, making of a noun a dedicated verb. To ghost. This was also the case with the noun “friend” after the rise in popularity of Facebook. He friended me. She friended me on Facebook. The proper verb, prior to Facebook, would have been to befriend.
This is not, as the educated are wont to say, a dumbing down of language. Language will do what it does. There’s no such thing as a stupid use of language, especially if one has succeeded in communicating intentions. Regardless of efforts to normalize or regularize language as a static and fixed set of grammar rules for acceptable vocabulary, language (like ghosts) remains a malleable and highly contextual thing that exists in air between people.
To ghost, in that sense, is a fitting descriptor of the behavior we’ve all either experienced or witnessed. Remember, ghosts require witness. They must, in some way, announce themselves as distinctly othered from what is conceivably real. Think of some of the most famous literary ghosts. Hamlet’s father cannot shut the fuck up about whatever he wouldn’t shut the fuck up about. Ghosts are greenstick fractures in the ontic.
But, unlike the ghost, the 21st century person or people ghosting their object announces nothing (other than their glaring absence). Naturally, as in language, we situate ourselves as subjects interacting with objects. As human courtesy, we allow for the object to possess sentience, its own subjectivity, its own dignity. At our best, we respect the other’s subject-position as that which can (and should) resist, protest, affirm, or consent.
Ghosting curtails the possibility that the object might do any of the above—it avoids any possibility altogether in favor of the ghosting subject maintaining its own subject-position and authority.
This can be useful and sometimes, unfortunately, it’s the only way for a person or people to safely extricate themselves from an abusive or dangerous relationship. But mostly, let’s be honest, in the age of dating apps and social media, ghosting is a form of avoidant behavior.
I remember reading and teaching the infamous New Yorker story Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian at the height of its viral popularity. The story chronicles a twenty-year old college student (Margot) dating a thirty-four year old guy (Robert). At first it seems sweet. That is until Margot begins to realize he’s not quite who she thought he was, or, who he made her believe him to be. Eventually she cuts ties, ghosting him in the process. Later in the narrative, she does text him once to declare it finally done. But, when she encounters him later at a bar they used to frequent, she realizes he’s not quite done with her. Ultimately (no spoilers) he proves to be an abusive and genuinely foreboding presence. A piece of shit.
In this workshop I expressed my general concern about Margot’s initial ghosting of Robert. How the sudden absence, without language, can wound and be left to fester, causing resentment, bitterness, fear, etc. There were a handful of vocal defenders in the class, the worst of which assumed my voiced displeasure with ghosting was an apologia for Robert and his demonstrated malevolence—something I suppose generations of children reared in identity politics (myself included) are conditioned to do, deflect on behalf of a perceived gap in privilege and power. But no.
I just think it’s a cruel thing to do. I get it. I’ve had similar breaks with people when it felt genuinely precarious to engage in the kind of conversation that might bring resolution and finality to something that’s already done. Ghosting is nevertheless an unkindness that makes it absolutely known to the other that they have only ever been an object, now an object displaced, one not worthy of acknowledgment or the respect, dignity, and courtesy afforded other sentient subjects.
As a funny post-script to Cat Person, in 2021 Alexis Nowicki published an essay in Slate titled “Cat Person” and Me. In the essay, Nowicki reveals how she discovered that Roupenian lifted wholesale details of her real life affair with a thirty-something male she calls “Charles”. What’s especially heart-breaking about this is not only learning that Roupenian’s story borrowed liberally from Nowicki’s real-life relationship with “Charles”, but that Cat Person’s discomfiting representation of him (as Robert) couldn’t have been further from the truth (as Nowicki knew it). “Charles” was a gentle person, from what Nowicki recalls. He died not long after learning he and Alexis had been the inspiration for Cat Person (though not necessarily as a result of). Turns out Roupenian had, in fact, met “Charles” and gleaned from him some details of his relationship with the much younger (fifteen years younger) Alexis—details that would inform her story.
Regardless of this fascinating footnote, Roupenian crafted a narrative that spoke to thousands of young women and men who’ve had to deal with the ambiguity of dating in the 21st century. And, as an author, she’s well within her rights to borrow the details of another’s life in crafting a fiction (even, in this case, without their consent). It’s an unfortunate truth of the writing life and the reason I don’t have writer friends (though distance has never done much to protect me from the appropriative gaze of writers unwilling to credit their sources).
We might use all kinds of Freudian frameworks to call Roupenian’s story a masterpiece in projection or we might laud it as an accurate account of sexual harassment and the pitfalls of dating as a young woman in the 21st century. But as we carry onward, dealing with the unwieldy effects of a climate crisis, ghosting (while generally acknowledged as unpleasant) is becoming normalized on all levels—from the interpersonal, to the corporate. It is fast becoming best practice. To be ghosted, the object of a ghosting, is to be left with the specter of the individual or entity you thought you knew. And, abandoning any sense of objectivity, I have to say it’s one of the most cowardly and grotesque aspects of life in the 21st century. The startling lack of accountability is the very same that justifies turning a blind eye when and where active engagement is necessary. We’ve become so conflict averse that we’ve forgotten, sometimes conflict is necessary. Instead, we’re allowing ourselves to become practiced in indifference. But I guess if you like it, I love that for you.
I think Alexis said it best in her essay: