#summoning ghosts

[broci]

Inn good spirits

[dragonageconfessions]

CONFESSION:

I always thought the Death Magic class should have had a summoning ghosts spell. The mage sees one their companions in trouble so they cast on the enemies. Ghosts appear from the ground and swirl around the enemy making them vulnerable for a set time. 

Kind of like this maybe?

[vasilinaorlova]

Violent exclusion of ideas is like exorcism. The hope that demons possess people is undying. It is also a hope that ideas come from the outside. They are; ideas circulate. Yet, they also become a part of our personality. The personality is an aglomeration of demons with which we made some sort of peace. (There is no other tone of speech about the Soviet past but prideful and nostalgic. Demons of the Soviet times are part of what we know as best about ourselves.) When the talk is about haunting, the subject of it is specters, an uncertain entity between demonic and, perhaps, angelic. But when the subject is coming straight from hell, it has a demonic essence. Along with summoning, people perform exorcizing; sometimes in the very same gestures and words (incantations).

[vasilinaorlova]

Apocalyptic pictures of the future are curiously predicted by cultural production, sometimes in great detail. In the example which follows, the coincidences are almost ominous. (And why everything bad should come from the antipodal to the USA part of the world?)

“...The Russian thistle plant has recently created a new kind of environmental hazard: the radioactive tumbleweed [...]. The Russian thistle shoots its roots down 20 feet into the earth, sucking stronium-90 and cesium into its system from contaminated areas. The head of the plant eventually breaks off to become a windblown radiation source. Hanford [Reservation in Washington state] now spends millions of dollars each year managing this form of contamination and has crews armed with pitchforks patrolling the reservation in trucks to wrangle the radioactive weeds.” (Masco, 2004, 533).

It can’t help but reminds the novel by The Day of the Triffids, written in 1951 (!) by English sci-fi writer John Wyndham. It is about dangerous carnivorous plants, which walk the earth and communicate. They were engineered by the USSR’s laboratories and apparently accidentally released; they are useful for oil extraction and kept as pets, provided their striking sting is cut. But it regenerates in time. One night humanity watches a meteor shower, and the next day everyone except for rare survivors, is blind. Triffids sense that their day has come: they become killing humans. 

The remaining human colonies patrol islands, the main character and his friends settle on The Isle of Wight, exterminating seeds of terrible plants. The novel ends on ghoulish portrayal of the falling strategy that some of the humans use--the feodal-type non-monogamous-living fortresses that triffids break one by one (an erring part of humanity), and on the hope for the future: “We believe now that we can see our way, but there is still a lot of work and research to be done before the day when we, or our children, or their children, will cross the narrow straits on a great crusade to drive the triffids back and back with ceaseless destruction until we have wiped out the last one of them from the face of the land that they have usurped.” (Wyndham, 2010, 256)

The airborne seeds of triffids were the source of impurity and contamination:

“It was not vapor. It was a cloud of seeds, floating, so infinitely light they were, even in the rarefied air. Millions of gossamer-slung triffid seeds, free now to drift wherever the winds of the world should take them.” (Ibid, page-?)

References

Masco, Joseph. “Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post-Cold War New Mexico.” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 19, Issue 4, pp.517-550. 2004.

Wyndham, John. The Day of the Triffids. RosettaBooks, 2010.

[vasilinaorlova]

Gordon describes haunting as “that moment (of however long duration) when things are not in their assigned places, when the crack and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up...“ (Gordon, 2008, xvi).

Godron, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis--London, 2008.

[vasilinaorlova]

mutant sensibilities / summoning ghosts

“The women, in each facility, had been told the paint was harmless, and ingested deadly amounts of radium after being instructed to "point" their brushes on their lips, to give them a fine point; some also painted their fingernails, face, and teeth with the glowing substance. The women were instructed to point their brushes because using rags, or a water rinse, caused them to waste too much time and waste too much of the material made from powdered radium, gum arabic and water.”

Radium Girls

[vasilinaorlova]

The anthropologist and expert in "mutant subjectivity" Magdalena Stawkowski graciously included me in the "acknowledgements" section of her article "Everyday Radioactive Goods? Economic Development at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan" which came out in The Journal of Asian Studies. I am honored; I admire Magdalena's work. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-asian-studies/article/div-classtitleeveryday-radioactive-goods-economic-development-at-semipalatinsk-kazakhstandiv/2EACD4C80D593C13CFB22D7A10887603

[vasilinaorlova]

A definition of trace. Trace is something thanks to what the agent has a possibility of reinstalling a story, a person, something:

“...a disappearance is real only when it is apparitional. A disappearance is real only when it is apparitional because the ghost or the apparition is the principal form by which something lost or invisible or seemingly not there marks itself known or apparent to us.“ (Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 2008, 63).

The “real” has a strange delineation here--obviously disappearance is real regardless of whether it has left traces or not. Yet it becomes “real” to others, to observers, by virtue of leaving traces (which it always does). Trace is revelational and yet enigmatic, because it is merely a trace--a ruin, or a bone, or a photograph, or a story that narrators are reluctant to tell.