Gogma’s Ghost
2017
This time of year when the wind blows past the HVAC units in our apartment it makes a groaning, whistling sound. It reminds me of how Gogma would sleep on his bed by the balcony door and sometimes dream of what I can only imagine being deplorable squirrel behavior. He would moan, growl and cough outrage in his sleep and then wake up looking sheepish.
When I hear it now I think of ghosts. Not in a sense that ghosts are some sort of spiritual entity, etc. But how memory lays heavy and sticky on present experience.
This little well use apartment has seen members of 3 generations of my family. Unrecognizable from when my grandmother shared it with a siamese cat and a brakefront full of ceramic statues which folks would call kitschy as a pejorative but for me have precious associations of grandmother-love. Especially the Hummel of two pigs using the outhouse… Later I would laugh as they are standing and dressed as George Orwell’s pigs but as a kid more tuned into the scatalogical humor of accidentally opening the bathroom door
My mother’s remains sat in an urn in the grandfather’s clock for a full year before I fulfilled her wishes to have them spread. This clock was given to me when I was 4 and is a striking piece. There is much weight to it. Big brass counterweights and chimes that shift around when the wind blows the building - another ghostly sound in certain weather.
This clock was in another Hoboken apartment when I was a child. Early memories of falling sleep in that apartment to the red winking lights on building tops.
There is a heaviness to this like dust on eucalyptus leaves in a forgotten umbrella stand in the corner.
Ghostly, quiet day in Hoboken. Glad to be inside with fresh coffee beans to grind and everyone involved with introspective activities looking up from time to time when the HVAC moans.
from TS Eliot’s “Family Reunion”
Chorus
In an old house there is always listening, and more is
heard than is spoken.
And what is spoken remains in the room, waiting for
the future to hear it.
And whatever happens began in the past, and presses
hard on the future.
The agony in the curtained bedroom, whether of birth
or of dying,
Gathers in to itself all the voices of the past, and pro-
jects them into the future.
The treble voices on the lawn
The mowing of hay in summer
The dogs and the old pony
The stumble and the wail of little pain
The chopping of wood in autumn
And the singing in the kitchen
And the steps at night in the corridor
The moment of sudden loathing
And the season of stifled sorrow
The whisper, the transparent deception
The keeping up of appearances
The making the best of a bad job
All twined and tangled together, all are recorded.
There is no avoiding these things
And we know nothing of exorcism
And whether in Argos or England
There are certain inflexible laws
Unalterable, in the nature of music.
There is nothing at all to be done about it,
There is nothing to do about anything,
And now it is nearly time for the news
We must listen to the weather report
And the international catastrophes.
[Exeunt Chorus.]