A Taxonomy of Ghosts – Notes

NY – Cocktail bar – Realising how shallow (and white) American history (or the consensus version) is... constant searching for 'authenticity'.... “The oldest Cocktail on record – its recipe published in 1860...” the newness, the way old America, native America, doesn't exist... So much is surface appearances...

Magic, mystery and hauntings are depthless, a couple of generations beyond living memory... But this is part of what makes it an interesting place to be (my slightly different cultural perspective and) the close proximity of past/present/future... a kind of raw, emotional honesty... nothing is buried deep here (see stories of hauntings from Indigenous burial grounds)... The ambition and giganticism reminded me (on the fringes anyway) of Middlesbrough writ large... A culture which is wholly NEW... therefore counter cultural movements (steam punk/ vintage etc) inevitably retroactive, antique/kitsch/recycled as opposed to new, disposable and polemic (can feel how this American impulse has filtered back into our own)...

I never felt as terribly 'English' as when immersed in the nouveau of American culture... made me consider my own inclinations/interests – William Morris, The Wild, The Dead, The Unknowable...

Man's (cultural and technological) conquest over nature

27^th July 2012

Jack and Alison pick me up... I am taken to Walmart.... Out of my depth here....

Mildred's Lane

A ground hog (the size of a large family dog) jogs across the path ahead of me... I stop and look at it incredulously. It stops and turns to look back at me. For a minute we are locked in eye contact, human/animal animal/human gaze... broken as it turns away and shuffles off into the woods.

Something like a parrot is shrieking... grasshoppers and cicadas shaking and chirruping... there is always this constant, background weave of sound...

Mildred's lane is a strange place – a home, an ever-evolving art work, a communal space, an ecologically aspirational/conscious working space, a wilderness...

Named after Mildred who grew up, lived and died in the original house... we enter Mildred's house... shrouded by trees, faded, crusty blue paint, eerie dark windows (so easy to project faces peering out from within)... Robert tells me that some of the fellows originally stayed in there but “couldn't handle the hauntings” strange noises/atmospheres/happenings... It is so dilapidated, delicate, like it sits just on the edge of ruins but defiantly (symbolism of the ruined house?)... It is reminiscent of so many houses from Horror movies (how the American aesthetic has permeated our image of the 'haunted house' think Amityville and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) I guess this sort of primitive early building is what haunts contemporary American (and Western) imagination? One or two generations beyond living memory... closer to nature and the unknowable/uncontrollable forces of nature... the pilgrims/first settlers – the threat of the encroaching outside world (Indians and wild animals)...

Robert tells me that they are trying to keep it as preserved as possible – hence the escalating creepiness – I knock even though I know it's empty... out of a sort of politeness, a silent etiquette to any invisible occupants...

The whole building feels as though it's slipping down the hill... many of the culminating works from past sessions have made their way in here so it's a jostle of old, bat scented furniture (just think American lady Haversham of the 1850s) and contemporary art works... The house has reached a point of decay paralleling that of the original owner, somehow this makes me feel closer to her bodily/emotional/mental decline...

The basement where Mildred's husband Vincent lived and had his workshop, very creepy indeed with its broken, sandstone floor, filled with broken and rusty hand tools. It is darker down here and cooler.

There is a very ghostly atmosphere about this house (innate or projected?) perhaps this is why it must be preserved... And yet I can't help feeling that there is some tension here... It's the thick atmosphere created after an argument or around someone with profound difficulties... But is this all me? Imposing my own ideas/feelings/interpretations?... What do ghosts and ghostly encounters have to tell us about ourselves?... In thinking about Mildred I wonder whether she was just an idiosyncratic, involved lady; there was no audience to her life... she didn't have to preserve/look after things, just live according to life. Perhaps she was a wild woman too, barely held on by the constraints of 'conventional' society...

taxonomies/naming – the natural history museum dioramas – must kill and stuff (and possess) a thing... colonisation...

what the taxonomy of ghosts tells us about humanity... or human impulses/interests/intentions...