Conversing with Ghosts

When there's nobody there, sometimes there is. That's when the words start, when you learn what you want to say. Someone told me once to write a letter to a departed lover, telling her everything I wanted most to say, but never send it.

Blogging isn't really a form suitable for that, because you never know when your departed lover may show up virtually and read. So that's not a real option here.

Yet, in a way, posting to a personal blog can be a way to accomplish what the person who gave me that advice meant. She meant to get the feelings out, to not hold them in.

Even when your lover has vanished, presumably never to return, you may still have a lot to tell her -- that you need to tell her. These conversations can never happen for real, so they enter the realm of the imaginary.

You might call them the source of fiction.

You can use a similar technique to talk to many beyond ex-lovers, for instance with those who have died, or to friends who have inexplicably fallen away somewhere along the line.

Or, at the extreme, to talk to imaginary friends. Now, you either are completely crazy or you have truly entered the realm of fiction at its best.

I've been hungry for good fiction lately, but reading non-fiction -- great, long, detailed works of history or analysis, science, biography.

But it's fiction I yearn for, both to read and to write. Truth is (a funny phrase in this context), I've been working on my novel, but in fits and starts. Meanwhile, non-fiction is what dominates my days, as I continue to churn out voluminous works on various subjects just as I did back in the days when journalism was a paid profession, instead of an elaborate euphemism for being unemployed.

Itinerant writers, nomads of the word -- that is what journalists have become. They find piecework, they may trade their services for something they need in return, like a phone or a hat.

They might write for food.

Society is changing so rapidly that what we used to call journalism may no longer be fully capable of telling the story of that change. Especially since the story-tellers themselves have largely been disenfranchised, disintermediated.

Still, of course, there is fiction. The imaginary world where your words might still matter, even if those you most wish would hear them no longer, or more probably never even really did, exist.

After all, should someone turn out to not be the person you thought she was, the only logical conclusion is that you imagined her in the first place. You can be riding on a bus, traveling along the main street in your town, and glimpse someone who looks a lot like her walking along on the sidewalk.

Is it her? Could it be?

Does it matter? Of course not.

You turn away, to look at the other side of the street. No matter who that other woman was, she is not someone you know now...or ever knew at all. Just another candidate for a character in your novel, that's all.

Just a figment of your over-active imagination.

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