To Make a Ghost

Booo...

Disclaimer: What follows is a train of thought that was born in me during my usual middle of the night, or very early morning wakeful hours of lively insomnia and any inconsistencies in the narrative should be attributed to stream of consciousness writing that evolved with each thought. :)

From the urban legends that begin with "someone my neighbor's uncle's friend knew once, was travelling at night.." to the more 'in your face' white faced, creepy looking beings in the horror movies that breathe life in to those genre defining jump scare moments, ghosts seem to fascinate and scare us.

While I always associated our fascination with them and those enduring tales of their spooky proclivities to that threatening 'unknown' in death that has always stumped us, I never much gave real thought to why ghosts or rather the idea of ghosts creates such dread in us or how the idea originated in the first place. It's like they live in this blind spot in our rational perspective of the world, as if to remind us of the inevitable curtain call.

Then I theorized maybe it's nature designing our brain to have underlying contingencies in case that while relishing of those precious moments that we call life, in all its flavors and shades, we forget that we come with an expiration date - a singular moment when everything we call the world and by extension ourselves -  every thought, memory, dream, desire, sentiment - will dissolve in to nothingness; a void that will consume everything until there exists nothing.

Is it the fear of just this impending moment that made us create ghosts? I think not. 

I think what makes us dread the idea of beings who survived that all consuming moment is our fear of what comes after. What are we if we are not this?

I also think it's the fear of loss of control; if someone stops existing, they should stop existing. If they become something else, something incomprehensible to us because we simply do not know, we are no longer in control. Death becomes the ultimate check to our powers. We are erased and the 'I' in us is threatened.

But you see, the 'I' always has to stay in control of this waking life. And so, there were born, right in the infancy of man kind, tales that gave shapes and forms and details to that great unknown. And once manifested in our version of reality, they had to have weaknesses, and predictable behavior and of course, they had to benevolent or evil. No shade of grey - beings who while scary, were in essence, inferior to us because of their one dimensional functioning and limited scope of existing. 

And with that masterful stroke of poetic creation and connivance, we found a way to combat our fear of the unknown by giving it form and then made a fantastic reality out of nothing, in which we were once again the masters.

Ghosts became the portraits of the best in us and the worst in us, but stronger and not bound by our laws -physical and societal. They became the poignant depiction of mortality, the reassuring promise of continued existence.. of holding on, and they became the pictures of amoral, personal justice. How many colors have they been painted with over the centuries?

Simply put, they showcase before us our desperate need to quantify, classify and then take charge of our own mortality, in some fashion possible.

Their thriving, evolving 'lives' in popular culture, mythology and even urban legends is proof that they are reminders indeed - but not of death; but of our fear of what comes after death...of a darkness resistant to the light we bear that follows existence.. of that truth that we are born blind to.. that we are not in control, we never were.