Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

turned away, the dog turning with him and trotting alongside him through the gray, knee-high weeds, moving like a dark leaf carried along on a stream. Only after they’d vanished into the woods did it occur to Mickelsson that he’d forgotten to ask who it was that was supposed to have seen the ghosts, and when, how often, how long ago. Not that it mattered. It was interesting, faintly—living in a house that was supposed to be haunted. Perhaps in fact some childish, irrational corner of his brain had hopes of seeing them. He imagined himself casually telling his colleagues at the university that he lived in a house where there were supposed to be ghosts, dropping it at Jessica Stark’s dinnertable, for instance. But though he was interested in the whole idea of ghosts, in a distant, rather academic way—casually interested in psychic investigation and what prescience might possibly imply about the freedom-determinism issue—interested, that is, as a professional philosopher and occasional reader of paperback books (My Passport Says Clairvoyant, An Experience of Phantoms, Physics and Psychic Research)—the idea that he himself might ever meet a ghost was, alas, unthinkable.

The image rose up in his mind of Pearson’s blurry, gray-blue eyes, his masklike, lurid face with its tuft of goat-beard. That he chose not to have much to do with people seemed evident. It was perhaps for that reason that one couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking, could no more know for sure what he was thinking than one could guess the opinions of a tree. He was a warning, Mickelsson thought, staring blankly, unconsciously poking at the ashy tobacco in his pipe. Karl Jaspers again; the idea that solitude in Nature may mean a temporary replenishment of selfhood, but to remain solitary is to risk impoverishment—to risk vanishing like a cloud dispersed, or sink like old man Pearson into the woods. His gloom deepened. Having fled to this house, he could not imagine finding his way back.

Abruptly he cleared his throat, put his pipe in his pocket, dusted off his hands—he could not remember now what he’d been thinking—and started back toward the house.

Back in the room he’d chosen as his study he returned to the dusty but interesting business of unpacking his books and old papers. He came across the notecards for a piece he’d started some years ago, and then for some reason dropped, on Dada and modern political recklessness. The cards were yellow, the ink, from a ballpoint pen, blurred and fading. He’d written the notes when he was teaching in California. He remembered the sharp thrill of the discovery: that the Dadaists, as early as 1915—the final “apes of Zarathustra,” one of his notes proclaimed—were expressing exactly the same disgust and despair one found in the graffiti on university walls in 1965: “Stop everything!” Nineteen fifteen, when his father was eight years old, his grandfather still brooding by medieval reasoning on problems already a century defunct; 1915, when his father was perhaps already inclining, subtly, non-rationally, toward the unmeditated, neither theistic nor anti-theistic love of life—love of cows, pigs, chickens, horses, ducks, goats—that would shape his character and perhaps, for a time at least, Peter Mickelsson’s own: a time when farming was sweet, no sound but the gentle creak of harness-leather, the occasional hiss of steam, and the horizons of consciousness were walnut groves, hedgerows and hills.

The movement known as Dada came into being in Zurich in 1915 and eventually exported its people, “art,” and outbursts to wherever an audience could be attacked. The name Dada is French babytalk for anything to do with horses, including horses’ fecal matter, and like the movement, the name had no direct positive significance. Dada was in its outward form a nihilistic protest against everything. According to a Dada manifesto, its “position” was:

No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more democrats, no more armies, no more police, no more nations, no more of these idiocies, no more, no more, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING.

Another note:

Dadaist Arthur Craven, invited to lecture at the Exhibition of Independent Painters in New York in 1917, appeared drunk and proceeded to belch and swear at his audience. The address was concluded by police when Craven began to strip. (Cf. lecture from inside diving bell.)

He had intended to argue that Dada had won, more terribly than the Dadaists—lovers of suicide though they were—had dreamed they might. Another note:

No social emotion is more vital in America today than a sense of personal helplessness, uselessness, and impotence. Everyone more or less has the sense of existing in the shadow of vast uncontrollable structures, impervious to human desire or need. (To elaborate: computers, I.R.S., Pentagon, etc.)

Under the notecards he found, ironically, a sheaf of his grandfather’s sermons: “The Responsibility of the Lilies of the Field,” “A Father’s Harsh Love,” et cetera. He got a vivid image of the old man pacing in his study in the manse, his right hand making furtive little gestures that, strange to say, would expand only slightly, if at all, when he rose behind the pulpit on Sunday morning to attack his congregation. (He was a small man, doll-like. It was odd that he should have conceived large sons.)

Under the sermons, and under his own ream of notes on Martin Luther, then notes on Nietzsche, near the bottom of the cardboard box he was unpacking, he found a photograph he couldn’t remember having seen before. It was a color snapshot of his wife, Ellen, lying on a sofa, in a black dress, their one-year-old son sitting beside her, smiling at the camera, dressed in red trousers and a striped blue and white shirt. Ellen’s hair was straw-yellow, and she was thin, surprisingly pretty. He had not remembered for a long time how pretty she’d been in those days. He