This week, I started out with the idea to write about the question, “Why do we love our ghosts?” and somewhere along the way, the question melded with an abandoned draft about bells and untold family narratives. Thanks for reading!
The group self-guided class “Writing Beyond the Known” opened on Monday 9/23, and it’s still available for sale through Monday 9/30 at the sale price of $40.
Bells
Elizabeth Bishop’s autobiographical short story “In the Village” (1953) opens with a scream:
A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies…. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came to live, forever—not loud, just alive forever. Its pitch would be the pitch of my village. Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.
The scream, we learn, emerged from her/her protagonist’s mother as she was being fitted for a new dress by the village seamstress in the “large front bedroom with sloping walls on either side.” (I have seen this Nova Scotian bedroom that Bishop writes about! Felt it.) The child’s young mother has returned from a sanatorium following her husband’s death and the mother’s breakdown. We learn that it is the mother’s first new dress in two years, and she “ha[s] decided to come out of black, so the dress is purple.” As the mother is being fitted for the dress, the child, “[u]naccustomed to having her back,” stands in the doorway, and then falls into a reverie, listening to the clanging sounds from the village blacksmith and imagining the details of the shop. This reverie is interrupted by the mother’s scream.
Clang.
The pure note: pure and angelic.
The dress was all wrong. She screamed.
The child vanishes.
Later, when the mother is calm again and sitting on the porch with her sisters sipping raspberry vinegar, we learn that the child has taken refuge in the blacksmith’s shop, a dark and moody place that mesmerizes and comforts her.
In the blacksmith’s shop things hang up in the shadows and shadows hang up in the things, and there are black and glistening piles of dust in each corner. A tub of night-black water stands by stands by the forge. The horseshoes sail through the dark like bloody little moons …
Does “In the Village” chronicle a traumatic childhood’s compensatory dreaminess? In part. But it also chronicles something else. Survival through careful noticing. Learning to create spaces that make it possible (for child, for adult writer, for reader) to take in the story.
*
I’ve been thinking about memory and ghosts, hauntings and how we write our lives. How the stories we only know our own small part of—which are all the stories—are always haunted by the parts we don’t know, can never fully access.
In painting, pentimento is the word for “a visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas.” It is Italian for “repentence.”
There are pentimenti in any life story. The traces are everywhere, we are born into a world filled with the visible traces of what came before we got here.
Traces of story hang in the air, as the scream in the story inspired by Bishop’s own mother, “a slight stain in those pure blue skies…. Its pitch … the pitch of my village. Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.”
*
What reverberates down through a life?
In an early Christmas memory, I am kneeling by my grandmother’s coffee table—a varnished and delicate dark wood piece with an oval of lighter varnished wood on the top. I’m studying the small coppery-gold angels flying in a circle by the light of the white candles below them, the lightweight metal fan blades at the top turning by the candle’s heat. Metal sticks hang down from the angels, hitting bells below them. The quality of looking I associate with this memory is somewhere between “reverie” and “mesmerized.”
Often, though, when I think of my child self, I imagine my character one who wanders onstage during the denouement of a play. I’m Fortinbras showing up to inherit the throne after the main action of Hamlet has already occurred, if the main action had been the secret torments of an eccentric and charming southern family partly made up of alcoholics; the throne, inherited trauma. After the Sturm und Drang, I stride in to survey the scene, the Prince of Norway in pigtails. But there’s no Horatio to fill me in, just the static-y feeling of the unsaid, the unrevealed.
I didn’t know as a young child that I was surveying damage (or its covering up). But thinking of it now, I see it—my childhood— as a scene of relative calm after the ruckus of the play’s climax. The alcoholics have calmed down or died. The shouting and violence are over. Jokes are told, children are cherished. But each person holds themselves still and slightly apart from the other so that none of the secrets spill over, keeping the traumas separate from the new generation.
Of course, the traumas don’t stay separate. The untold reverberates. You can’t unring a bell.
*
It is possible to grow to love our ghosts. We may already love the traces of ancestral spirits some of us feel around us like lingering whiffs of ambergris. But we may also grow fond of the hauntings. The unsettled and never-fully-knowable. We can leave space for them. Indicate their presence. Indicate the partially known, the hinted at, the felt.
Here I lie on my many mattresses, my rest interrupted by a princess’s pea of family secrets. And here I go, rising up from my interrupted sleep to write.
*
I’m small in a dim and peaceful room, kneeling by the coffee table. I study copper angels as they fly their circle by the light of white candles, turned by candles’ heat. The angels hold sticks, hitting the bells below.
This is Christmas in a dim room with family nearby letting me be unto myself. It is a reverie by the tangerines and that particular smell of the burning snowman candle, his black hat melting away. I am the poet-child, left alone to puzzle over mystery, here at the beginning of my life during the denouement.
Fabulous. Pulled myself out of a reader’s trance several times to pen my own hauntings. I hope some version of “Growing to Love our Ghosts” makes its way outside of Substack?
I loved reading this. The way you describe traces is especially helpful for me because it’s a reminder that so many aspects of our lives are connected in ways we might not even know.