pomegranates

recently, i had to put my scholarly areas of interest into three categories, to which i broadly define as ghosts, death, and love.

Ghosts

This is a haunting. I do not think of hauntings as necessarily negative things. memories can be hauntings. actions can be hauntings. loved ones. Lately, I have been hearing voices. that is a thing that has never happened to me before. a few weeks ago i woke up because I heard a man’s voice say a woman’s name. I have begun to see people in my dreams I do not know but who are important in the life of someone I love. Avery Gordon introduces us to this in Ghostly Matters: “Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. The ghost, as I understand it, is not the invisible or some ineffable excess. The whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, your attention. Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way, I tried to suggest, we are notified that what’s been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us.”

So even if I am only know just seeing and hearing specters and voices, it does not mean that they were not there before. I believe it means I have spent more time in proximity to someone whose ghosts are constantly present, and my own ability to slip in and out of worlds is allowing me to meet them. Greet them. I have always felt compelled to certain places, to walk on the same ground as those who are buried or died where I stand. To walk on the same land as our dead has always felt important to me. To greet them. To know them. To feel them.

This morning I cut open a pomegranate that I bought yesterday. A lost romantic fruit my lover once called it. It was red and juicy, like the blood of Persephone and stained my hands as I scraped it into a bowl. Is it a love song or a haunting? Outside it drizzles and I read as I ate the seeds, adding months to my eventual time in the underworld, to a place and world that I am starting to hear more of...