hauntology ovenbird As I lay in the forest amongst the butterflies and the fireflies and the burning horses and the flaming trees as a spiral of children climb up to the sun waving goodbye to you and goodbye to me as the past pulls away and the future begins I say goodbye to all that as the future rolls in like a wave, like a wave and the past with its savage undertow lets go –Nick Cave, from “Sun Forest” The present moment is thick with ghosts–spectres of the past and of every unrealized future. Each choice means expunging every other possibility and so a thousand futures die every minute only to haunt the ever unfolding present with their echoes. Now in my 40s, my ghosts far outnumber the living. They drop the needle down on an old record that pops and crackles and I hear the translucent voices of all the people I might have been and all the people I might still become as time passes through me. I am the only survivor among every self I could have been. Why fear death when I have already died inside of every hour I’ve lived? I will die again and again to meet the future in which we stand together on the unmarked graves of our pasts, not ghosts, but whole and alive in each other’s eyes. 251118 what's it to you? who go blather from