GHOST: Shadow and Simile

Jacquetta Hawkes:  Every living creature among us has taken an irrevocable step between the beginning of this sentence and its end.

Though it has duration, the sentence above is not about time. It is an image-sign. Like a shadow — absence relying on a presence. Real, but contingent. Like Ghost, an image-sign, like a shadow obedient to a presence. One ruminates, of what? The answer, ambiguous, eludes; slides away, a trace, beckoning.

Ghost is also like a spirit or, some say, is a spirit, an ephemeral existing beyond physical being as a body expires.  So a ghost is like an inspiration, an irresponsible potential, a latency inherent in every moment.

An ever-present shadow abiding, an unhurried soul, inevitable. Like art itself, always a shadow, a revelation, invisible until a transpiring and, as one consents, it glides across the threshold.  It crosses, they say, and some return, eliding, their tidings oblique.

James Hillman: Three dimensions become two as the perspective of nature, flesh, and matter fall away, leaving an existence of immaterial, mirrorlike images, eidola. We are in the land of the soul.

Images:

— Petroglyph image on basalt, Lake County OR Oct2020.

— Graffiti Ghost, Spray paint. Ghost (def.): Lingering image from removed graffiti.  Eugene OR 2020

— Skeletal Spectral, Mixed-media, Eugene OR Oct2020

— Eidolon, Ink and Water on Rice Paper (detail), Douglas Beauchamp 1973

Notes:

—Jacquetta Hawkes (1910-1996), a distinguished English archaeologist. from A Land (1950). Robert Macfarlane in Landmarks (2016) devotes a chapter “Stone-Books” to Hawkes.

— James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (1979)