Hope everyone is enjoying a nice holiday season.
A few nights ago we were talking about Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, and specifically, how the “ghosts” visited upon the dour and miserly Scrooge made their appearances to him to impart a moral lesson about charity, the goodness of human relations and respecting the spirit of a cherished holiday.
I found it an interesting notion, that “ghosts” should visit the corporeal to impart a kind of wisdom that we ignore or reject in our everyday life. Dickens’ novella was originally printed in 1843, and within that context it is worth noting that these ghosts were in a real sense typical of the Victorian tradition – imbued with insight into mortality and a kind of conscience that the still-living routinely lacks, as well as the notion that their appearance to the living should represent a kind of soul-missionary type of exercise. As if, the veil between the living and the dead should/can only be broken as a means to assist the living in confronting an injustice or moral dilemma. Like smashing the glass to grab the emergency fire axe.
As ghost hunters of a modern age, armed with digital devices, it’s an antiquated notion, as the perception that we and others who shine IR lights into darkened warehouses and abandoned house retain is that ghosts – the spirits of departed souls – are typically tethered to this world due to some post-life malfunction of theirs. Unfinished business, fear of harsh judgment by their Creator, traumatic death, endless searching for a loved one or for a way out. We wish to help them - not the other way around.
This is probably rooted somewhere in our evolving notions of death, influenced by culture and modernity. It forces us to confront the reality that, no matter how exacting and digitally precise our evidence gathering may be, we are probably enslaved to our own biases as to what a ghost really is, why it is ”still here”, and whether we are really trying to help them (as if we could), or finding way, through an exploration into the notion of mortality, we are really trying to help ourselves.
