Ecce Signum

Happy Fall, y’all! We finally have some seasonally-appropriate weather. And some seasonally-appropriate animals, like this young opossum which stopped by for a visit a few days ago.

The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for October 2024 is: Ghost stories fit right in during this month. What’s your favorite classic ghostly tale? Tell us about it and why it sends chills up your spine.

Maybe it is because I have recently been reading a collection of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges, but the first story which came to mind when I read this month’s question was Ambrose Bierce‘s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” While not a ghost story in the traditional sense, nor supernatural in character, it is the story which most disturbed me when I first read it as a teenager. I had read many more immediately frightening stories – Jaws, the Stephen King collections, and scores of others from books and magazines of the 1980s. Those stories bothered me for days or weeks (lookin’ at YOU, The Shining!) after reading them, and caused many a sleepless night. But they eventually faded into the background radiation of the larger horrors of my childhood. Eighth grade, for instance.

But it was Bierce’s story which threw me off-kilter in the long term. In fewer than 4,000 words, Occurrence cast into doubt the entirety of my lived experience. I had no way of knowing if I was not experiencing something of the kind at any given moment. Maybe I had been hit by a car and the past week was all a hallucination as I slowly slipped off this mortal coil. Or maybe I had been crushed in the barnyard as I tried to coax recalcitrant cows into the milking parlor. I couldn’t be certain if that which felt real was actually real, or if it was some combination of dream, memory, and imagination.

[At the time, I was unaware of Samuel Johnson’s “appeal to the stone” and likely would have broken my foot trying to prove that this was, in fact the really real world, even though the pain of a broken foot is experienced by the same mechanism that tells us we are in reality in the first place, and thus this would have been a pointless experiment. Reality may not be subjective but it is often contextual.]

Like all the other scary stories of my childhood, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” slowly dissolved into the larger morass of my teenage years, leaving me with a continual sense of existential angst long before I had heard either of those words.

Then I read the story in college. And again after college. And as the 1990s became the 2000s and The Real suddenly found itself in competition with The Virtual, “An Occurrence” made its way back to the surface. People began asking interesting and uncomfortable questions about the nature of reality, consciousness, perception, and the mind. If we had a sufficiently lifelike Virtual Reality environment, could we fool someone into believing that it was the real world? And if something is indistinguishable from the real world, does it matter that it is not, in fact, real? Are we all just brains in jars hooked up to something like The Matrix? Is the entire universe really just a simulation running on a vast computer network? Barring obvious and unambiguous breaks in causality, such things are impossible to prove or disprove.

A few years ago I began reading essays by the late Mark Fisher, particularly those concerned with hauntology – the ghosts of lost futures which haunt the present. The protagonist of “An Occurrence,” Farquhar, is experiencing the ghost of his lost future in the time between when he is dropped and when the noose snaps his neck. Objectively the rest of his life lasts about a second. Subjectively it lasts several days. Which is the real future? In a sense, both and neither.  For an infinite moment he is neither alive nor dead. Schrödinger’s protagonist. Solipsism and nihilism fistfight in heaven.

And that’s not even getting into the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Somewhere out there is a version of reality where Farquhar slipped the noose off of his neck and dove into the river, alongside another version where he never traveled to Owl Creek Bridge in the first place.

So to sum up, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” did a serious number on my head, and continues to do so to this day. Reality may not be real. The most useful thing we can do is choose to believe and behave as if it is.

After all, what are ghosts, but restless spirits mourning their lost futures?

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