Someone else

Okay a new one. I recognised the quote immediately, although it didn't much matter since I actually remember when I scheduled this post to begin with. It's the opening of Danielewski's novella The Fifty Year Sword.

The word 'ghost' comes from the Old Norse geisa to rage, Gothic usgaisjan to terrify (hence we get 'ghast'); outside Germanic the derivatives seem to point to a primary sense ‘to wound, tear, pull to pieces’. It's thought to have pre-Germanic origins but the sources are hazy; the word's haunted by the phantom of some other past, but we don't know the origin. We never do.

It's interesting that the sense 'pull to pieces' comes up. I think of the German der absoluten Zerrissenheit, a phrase Danielewski/Johnny left untranslated in House of Leaves. I also remember the torn up text of the Esau and Jacob chapter, and that old Hebrew word vayitrozzu which comes from the amazing root rzz meaning "to tear apart, to shatter". Finally I remember Sappho, all her destroyed papyrus manuscripts, left littered in rubbish heaps with IOUs and store records, waiting in the dark to be read again, reread in its ghastly half-rotten visage and its fragments, all of which becomes some kind of uncanny beauty that I still can't place my finger on.

Oh, I remember one more thing. A poem I read once, about a ghost in a house , by the sea if I remember. Lingering for days with a friend. More than a friend. More than days. It was a long long time ago. I don't remember any of the words. But I remember having read it, I remember remembering it, and something of that ghost and her house remains or lies dormant or reappears before me now, and I know she never really left me, and she was with me, in every moment, every glance and inhalation, every season, she was always there behind my eyes, on the tip of my tongue, always alone yet never gone.