Ghosts

¿Qué es un fantasma? preguntó Stephen. Un hombre
que se ha desvanecido hasta ser impalpable, por muerte,
por ausencia, por cambio de costumbres.

-James Joyce, Ulysses

`I am just a human being — solid, needing food and drink, needing covering too — But I’m invisible. You see? Invisible. Simple idea.
Invisible.’

-H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man

When you start spending most of your time alone (some days seldom speaking to anyone) it is easy to experience the feeling of physical disappearance. Maybe the reason why writers write – and photographers take photographs – is just to verify if they still exist in the material world.

It is indeed an uncanny feeling, to realize one is becoming a ghost to oneself. But becoming a ghost to the others, to the others who know you, who care about you, that is not an easy thing to come to terms with. Not easy at all.

Then one realizes that writing does not give you a physical body: it does not, it cannot stand up for presence.

This I will never stand for this body, this presence, which nonetheless is. To be deprived from a body, from a physical existence: that’s one of the hardest tests of exile.

The experience of exile, the experience of the modern city makes us into ghosts. How does one recover a body, how does one become visible – and tangible – again?