Monthly Archives: March 2007

Ghosts

My continuing immersion in the seemingly-bottomless project of scanning negatives from former lives probably sensitizes me to ruminations on the past. This bit, the opening sentences of John Lahr’s review of J.M. Barrie and Tom Stoppard plays seems to have been written with my own obsessions in mind:

Can we agree that we’re all haunted? The ghost world is part of our world. We carry within us the good and the bad, the spoken and the unspoken imperatives of our missing loved ones. As children, we are dreamed up by our parents; as adults, when our parents die we dream them up in turn. Conversations rarely stop at the grave.
(New Yorker March 5 2007 pg 92)

Many of the people in the ghost-images I’m rediscovering are lost in the present (that is, I’ve lost track of them –they probably sail on, and now and again I’m able to reconnect with their current incarnations), but they’re certainly as real to me now, seen via Photoshop and Flickr, as they were then. Maybe even realer.

links for 2007-03-01