My Belief Is: They Exist
The Original Farmer’s Market at 3rd and Fairfax is like a sort of souk for tourists and those L.A. natives who like to sit and reflect while drinking a cup of tea or eating a good lunch. I sat there this morning reading Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames, when I ran across this passage:
“Well, yes. Everyone is attended by ghosts,” Iggy said. What matters is whether we begin to attend to them.”
“How do you mean?”
“With some people, the ghosts are transparencies, barely visible as they hover around, sit at the table next to them and so on. They are particularly hard to see in bright sunlight. Sometimes, when memories are revisited, there is a flickering of light and shadow, image and text across them, and for a moment they flare up and then vanish.”
“So are you saying that ghosts are our memories?”
“Ghosts are the things, the shapes we make with our memories,” she said.
“Ah. So if some are light like…”
“Like well-worn lace drapes blowing in the wind.”
Black smiled.
“Yeah, like that. Then what are the other ghosts like? The ones we attend?”
“Like thick black lines drawn in a notebook. They are visible, brooding dark clouds that we drag around with us like reluctant sulky children. We feed them and they grow big and their haunting dominates our lives. We love them and we hate them and we are always measuring them for a coffin, yet we cannot let them die.”
“Why?”
”Madness, my friend. Madness.”
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