To say I am standing outside in the cold, the snowblowy cold, hatless, a gray overcoat—this would be a lie, this would be fabricated—as I am sitting inside, in my warm home, at my desk, trying to convince someone (who? why?) that I am a somebody standing outside. I am not only trying to convince someone of this, I am also trying to convince myself. If I can’t convince myself, if I can’t feel it, if I can’t transport myself to that someone, or rather transmute my sitting self into that other, standing out in the cold, hatless, gray overcoat, if I can’t vacate me and successfully inhabit the other by way of metaphysical transplant, then it feels false and fraudulent.
What are the necessary conditions for initiating this conversion?
There has to be warmth. What do I mean by warmth? I mean I must feel myself warmly within the other, I must not remain coldly adrift between worlds, that would be akin to glacial limbo, and I cannot remain inside myself, the sitting scribbling self, because then I stay hyperaware that I am here, sitting, scribbling, attempting to travel …
I want to go somewhere. That somewhere is within me. Outside of me within me.
Within me, at a distance, is a man standing in the cold, the snowblowy cold, hatless, so his hair is freezing, standing on end, frost-shocked follicles, gray overcoat, collar turned up … he is standing out there, waiting, he thinks of himself at a crossroads, it helps him if he thinks—I am at a crossroads—or maybe it doesn’t help, but it comforts him to think that he is standing at a crossroads, because to be standing at a crossroads feels symbolically profound and romantically rich, while standing outside in the cold, not at a crossroads, is just standing outside in the cold, not at a crossroads, and this doesn’t allow him to scratch his mythological itch and savor.
I cannot reach him, this man. I am trying through words. I’d say valiantly, but why valiantly? I’d say desperately was more like it. I have always labored to find the right combination of words … it is like trying to find the right combination for a lock that doesn’t belong to you. You do it by feel and ear. By touch and instinct. You never know the code. The numbers are elusive. Always changing. That’s okay. You maintain a fool’s credulous faith that through feel and ear, through lust for touch, you will somehow discover the right combination. You have done it before. You will again.
It also helps to think that the man in the cold occasionally flashes with the urge to put a bullet through his brain.
I could not do it. But this man, this man could. If I can get inside of him, I can derive and co-opt that feeling, that hope, that despair, that escape valve. This man is my escape valve. My outlet. He is the bullet through my brain. If I can find my way into him, I can find my way out. Through him, I can have different experiences. Like: I am standing outside, hatless, freezing, sentimentally attached to my gray overcoat, his gray overcoat. If only is the mantra the man repeats.
It begins with if and ends with only, a graveyard whisper in three syllables, the granulated crunching of icicle crickets, a haiku moratorium.
Is this illusion or is it travel? Are we talking transubstantiation or delusion? Where’s the proof, and who is it exactly that’s calling for the proof to substantiate this claim? Is going somewhere within going somewhere? What does that mean—going somewhere?
Writers are body snatchers with an incurable need for transference.
What’s being transferred? What do you imagine is being transferred?
To wander as a ghost means to suffer terrible cold.
The man standing hatless in the cold is cold in a human way.
The cold experienced by ghosts is far more subliminally taxing. It is existential cold. The cold of desiring existence and not having any. Of being corporeally deprived.
Maybe I’ll write a book titled Ghost Stories and find stories that fit into this catalog. But right now my needs are much simpler. My immediate needs concern the man standing outside in the cold. I must enter him. Or not. He may disappear and then another will come and perhaps that will become the one I need to enter. Need is a funny word. It hides many faces.
Apparitions are entry-points, masks, portals, personas. The pressure in my head is temporarily relieved when I go into them, the others. I don’t disappear. I redistribute who I am, and who I am not, into viable locations and placeholders.
John Biscello 