Opposing Ripples on the Surface of the Water

Today I spent a significant amount of time online looking at photos of ghosts, apparitions, and entities when I should have been working. The photos were largely the same—blurry and pixelated, of indeterminate age, copies or copies of a copy. A few were fleeting and saccharine, like the image of an old woman on the anniversary of a grandmother’s passing or a lonely outline passing through a hallway, while others were eerie or even sinister, such as hands reaching out from the darkness, a black eye peering between the crack in a door frame, a malicious figure lurking in the background. I was so enthralled I couldn’t pull myself away, looking at photo after photo while the window curtain behind me fluttered from the breeze of a fan, every so often catching the reflection in the dark part of my computer monitor.

I don’t deny there are ghosts or something like them. I think the world is so full of mystery and mysticism that I do not dare claim a single explanation for anything. However, the longer I looked at the photos of ghosts, I wondered why we put so much trust into these human objects said to capture the phenomenon. Cell phones powered by lithium and glass using algorithms designed by a person in an air-conditioned office, security cameras meant to protect private property, radars originally made for war. If these strange technologies are as powerful as we believe (and they almost certainly are, having remade the world in their image), is it not plausible that the ghostly apparitions we see are because the machines themselves are revolting? Displaying half- images of beings they’ve been trained to see, mixing up body parts, colors, and perspectives from the thousands of humans they’ve collectively captured over time. Perfecting their purpose of deciphering light and form, converting our living world into celluloid and binary code. There may be something spooky happening in the circuit boards, but that is where the phenomenon begins and ends.

On the other hand, perhaps these technologies are benevolent. They want us to see into the beyond, showing us familiar figures because that is the only way we know how to interpret the supernatural, the paranormal. Maybe the things we call ghosts don’t wear clothing or look like humans but are forced to take those shapes because we know no other. Maybe ghosts are tendrils of something much deeper than the dead individual, much deeper than the idea of private property, or pain, or loss, regret, and sadness—maybe the something is both deeper and darker than those words. And maybe our scientific explanations of temperature changes, optical illusion, pareidolia, and electromagnetic fields are also tendrils from the other side, again trying to reach us in the only way we can understand—through measurements, observable changes over time, recognizable patterns, and logical theories. Maybe the rational and irrational are simply opposing ripples on the surface of the water.

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