about specters as poetical periphery of the existence

The Anatomy of the Mist
The ghosts of the common imagery have something in common with the mist, the smoke or the steam. The mist inhabits a ghost; its inner-self is one made of mist. A ghost is the specter of someone from another dimension, a delicate image of a person living some other life coordinates. The spectralness of a ghost is revealed by its defiance upon gravity.

In order to talk about the subtlety of this form of existence, one needs to report to hazy matters: mist, smoke or steam. To understand them is to reveal their rarefied essence and dual nature. Standing at the boundaries of the material world, they have an insignificant weight compared to the other matters, they have indeterminate dimensions and in constant change. Their appearance is so complex that one cannot describe it by the means of Euclidean Geometry. They are so subtle that they mingle with light making the usual conceptions of dimension and form inoperative. By interacting the tectonic forms, the mist or the smoke turns the volumes into vague and smooth figures, it eats them away, abolishing their details and their spatiality, diminishing them to a mere specter – like an X-ray photographic image reducing the body to a skeleton.

A wandering ghost is walking slowly as slowly as the smoking people in a tavern or the bodies at the steam bath are moving. A space haunted by mist becomes thicker. In this thick space the gestures seem large and slow the details faint. The mists, the smoke and the steam retain the images sequentially decomposing the motion, making us perceive the movement as contaminated by slowness.
 

The Dream as a Peripheral World
The spectrality of the dream is a filter that obscures the notion of weight. As the dream’s characters are able to instantly change their locations to different ones situated at certain distances one can say that they have spectral metabolism (speed=distance/time; if the time is small enough tending to instantaneity the speed extents to infinity therefore being unusable to define the concept of space as we usually perceive it). Hence in the dream’s universe the weight vanishes making timeless motion possible.

From a diving montagne-rousse coaster the world appears hallucinative, like in a dream. The speed totally transfigures the perceiving the images briskly registered on the retina are void of details, the vectors determining the frames are much too rapidly dislocated. The steep descent brings forward images reduced to snapshots. The raving images surrounding us in an amusement park determine our taking off from the real, and therefore the “de-realization” of our real normal world. Using this kind of images is a definite procedure of the MTV video-clips.

Wandering trough the streets or landscapes at top speed makes the space tear into ”slices”: the nearest plane moves rapidly as the others slowly glide. This proximity space which we are dragging on has unstable features and becomes the source of anguish in Ray Bradbury’s novel 451F. The advertising banners on the highway are much too long for a coherent perception and therefore they could become a pleading for a normally well-balanced world.

The dream erodes weight, speed, time, color; it dims. The space in dreams is somehow distorted like in myopic perception or as being seen through side vision. There is no sun in dreams nor shadows, and the limits of sharpness of this virtual space are odd. It has other configurative rules: not everything that is found closer is seen most accurate. The instability on the perception relies on identification problems also. In dreams faces are replacing one another, a known voice gets an unknown figure, a certain space you used to call your room or your home all of a sudden gets other dimensions, other form from which you can only recognize certain corners although it still is your room, your home. When you are reading a book in your dream you cannot distinguish the written words. Though you understand what you are reading, the meaning of each word separately remains unveiled.

Peripheral Worlds
When we look at the world, we build and project interpreting grids. Besides the concepts we have created those grids can be images or feelings that we have. The worlds in which the ideas of distance or weight have lost their meaning are also part of our reality. These are not only parallel worlds that do not influence on our existence but worlds we have created and which affect us too (Karl Popper-the third world concept). If we do understand that our reality consists of different perceptions given by differentiated use of our interpreting grids we will understand the need to redefine our common concept of the space. This could be done by using vague, non-measurable terms however relieve for the complexity of this phenomenon.

We can admit that dream, fairy tale, reverie or memory are concepts that describe worlds impossible to be reached, in which things hard to predict happen and which are spread beyond worlds where common sense can be used. The peripheral world suggested by dreams presumes central one facing it. The peripheral world has “degraded” existential attributes, meaning by that a change in its existential rank and not the usual negative sense. These worlds operate in other existential rank.

The periphery mediates from space (in Heidegger’s accept) to spatium. It is a specter of the center. Reducing the aspects of a certain entity by overlapping a filter (like an X-ray photograph) a specter becomes visible. The peripheral spectral worlds could represent the link between nothingness and us. They enclose our world like outskirts of the existence. We need the specters as they point out subtle bonds with other worlds.

Space as a Palimpsest
In order to become a specter a place needs to cease to exist in a particular way. It must somehow disappear from people’s common perception and then appear again into their memory. Some of its features have to vanish, to be destroyed. Thus the city by night is a specter of its day appearance. By night the city is its own X-ray photographic image. The darkness diminishes our perception over distance and space and lets us recognize/discern, identify and understand only the town’s skeleton-its streets revealed by city lights.

Following destruction the places change into a palimpsest space of the memory like cemeteries are. Our reminding memory of places we once knew is the reign of the ruin. The way we held ruins in our memory resembles the way we perceive spaces in the dreams. The instability of frames in the dreams, the sliding, the metamorphoses are able to suggest a perceiving mechanism fitting the peripheral worlds. The identity of an entity from a peripheral world cannot be described in terms of discontinuity or detachment from the surrounding space; all are linked together like in a magic universe. In order to act upon this osmotic state of being we need to identify all to a continuum that causes the altered identities. Memory and imagination are the support of this Proteic tide.

Ruins rise from the earth and end up in our memory. A ruin is a specter through which we can distinguish a dimmed, misty world we have created ourselves. The swing between equivocal worlds, hard to be determined in their nature, the interpenetration or the overlapping of the ontological layers of the ruin relates to their poetical nature.

The ruin stretches over its proximity impressing on the space some features of its own. This space becomes full of our memories. A palimpsest space, a narrating space in which the ruin swings between our world and our tale’s fiction, fabricated world. What we do find out about Ancient Greece when admiring Greece’s ruins is nothing but a world from our imagination, an idealized and therefore false Ancient Greece. You can easily see that when you tell somebody about the fact that the temples from the Acropolis where colored like our Disney-lands.

---

translated by maria constantinescu