In March of 1848 the Foxx sisters of Hydesville, NY convinced their family and neighbors that they had succeeded in discoursing with the dead.  Although the girls later admitted it was all a hoax, they were able to persuade reasonable adults that the knocking, rattling and voice-altering strategies contrived for their own amusement were actually messages from beyond the grave, and as folly will, the practice spread, gaining substantial momentum at the beginning of the American Civil War with its thousands of newly dead and millions of grief-stricken relatives and friends desperate for some last words from their late loved ones.  The practices of such chicanery – complete with hidden accomplices, floating sheets, scraping furniture and effusions called “ectoplasm” – even found ratification in the White House, where Mary Todd Lincoln was inconsolable over the death of her son Willie.  Later, she would seek to communicate with Father Abraham on The Other Side.  The spectral malarkey continued to thrive (though not without the occasional accompaniment of chicken feathers and hot tar, as the industry spawned a contrary debunking industry as well) in some regions until the First World War, which supplied a new surge of gullible bereaved.

 When James Merrill (the literary connection here) presented us with The Changing Light at Sandover (the Ouija board being just another medium through which the dead were supposed to express themselves), the board was already relegated to the status of a toy or parlor game (mass produced by Hasbro).  But as a trope, it was ingenious and infectious, luring many into willing suspension of disbelief, though few readers took up the planchette to converse with the likes of Napoleon, Sophocles, Cleopatra and their own ancestors.   Merrill himself, by the way, before he died recommended that people find better ways to squander their time.

 In the light of this history (familiar to me because I once wrote a story about a Ouija-foolish woman and because I recently spent a year reading about Mary Lincoln), I have been surprised to discover that Americans have turned to Facebook in an attempt to converse with the dead.  Granted, I’m immune to almost all the fun and frolic most devout Facebookers experience, but this one was, well, beyond the beyonds for me: educated adults who vote, drive, reproduce, golf and even wash their socks sending messages to their lost love ones on Facebook.

 Maybe I’m one of the last skeptics concerning the powers of Facebook, but I see only three viable possibilities.  It’s conceivable that those posting such spectral memos are simply grief-addled, which is perfectly understandable among very close survivors – lovers, family, confidantes.  Or perhaps this posting involves a kind of display mourning (see me being sensitive), which amounts to a contorted species of self-promotion.  Finally, some may believe that Mark Zuckerburg has actually succeeded where previous aspiring spiritualists have failed: he has created a platform which facilitates communication with those beyond the grave.

 I’m open to persuasion on any of these options and can easily understand the first, but if such messages as “Still thinking of you, bro,” really do either provide evidence of sensitivity or do in fact find their way to the ears (or spectral organs of hearing) of the departed, how’s it work?  Inquiring minds . . . .

 Admittedly, I am equally mystified by other contemporary funerary traditions, such as stenciling the name of a departed loved one on a Toyota windshield, but then neither have I understood wasting a good ship on a dead Viking or burying numerous doll-like shabti with a deceased pharaoh.  Aiming at the practical, I believe, I have asked my wife to, when it’s clear that I’m really dead, have my remains burned.  To get a head start, as my own fragile belief system would suggest.

An earlier blog post addressed where writers find their inspiration. As a college student, my inspiration usually comes from a specific prompt, rather than an open-ended opportunity to seek out new inspiration. The idea of writer inspiration drew me to one writer in particular, nineteenth century author Herman Melville.

Melville idolized Nathanial Hawthorne and did not hide that fact.  When the two met, Melville discovered his literary ideal in Hawthorne and proceeded to write “Hawthorne and his Mosses,” an essay that reveals Melville’s view of Hawthorne’s exceptional literary skill. Hawthorne, several years Melville’s elder, had yet to write The House of the Seven Gables, which he completed in January 1851, but Melville had already been struck by the author, only contributing to his utter adoration when The House of the Seven Gables surfaced. Melville remarks in “Hawthorne and his Mosses,” “It is curious, how a man may travel along a country road, and yet miss the grandest, or sweetest of prospects, by reason of an intervening hedge, so like all other hedges, as in no way to hint of the wide landscape beyond.” In dissecting the very nature “concerning the enchanting landscape in the soul of this Hawthorne,” Melville is brutally aware of the “intervening hedge” present throughout Hawthorne’s works in the form of emotional awareness and sensitivity. Melville’s appreciation for Hawthorne’s work appears in his story “Bartleby, The Scrivener,” which appeared in Putnam’s monthly magazine in 1853, giving the author plenty of time to consider Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. In his essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville reveals “you will almost always find that the author himself has somewhere furnished you with his own picture (31).” Melville withholds vitality in Bartleby, a literary technique that responds unquestionably to his adoration of Hawthorne’s emotional animation. Melville seeks to entice and fuel a certain thirst for emotion, one that he quenched through reading Hawthorn’s work. Therefore, the stagnancy in Melville’s work directly relates to his response to Hawthorne’s work. Melville’s attraction speaks to the theme of writer inspiration and may account for much of his literary technique.

This term I am privileged enough to be a part of Professor Warren’s Literary Theory class. One of the theorists we have touched upon is Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), whose theories about Marxist tradition possess a timelessness that is very attractive to modern day social media aficionados such as myself. Benjamin explores the ways in which our world has become an audio-visual world in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. This essay is visionary in that Benjamin focuses on the history of the future as it relates to his present time in 1936. The fragmented style of the essay is much like a piece of artwork itself. Benjamin plays on the montage style in order to allow room for all of the many intruding forms of artistic reproduction that are beginning, in 1936, to rely on mechanical function. Benjamin focuses on the relationship of various forms of artistic reproduction, such as film, to its audience and determines that sacrificing the tangible qualities of the original object for the abstract and separated nature of film, theater, or paintings provides a degradation of its original authenticity. The audience, or the masses, concentrates on the diluted presence of mechanically reproduced art as a means of disconnecting, of reaching a state of passivity that lends itself to non-thinking.

Benjamin’s theory raises questions about digital technology and the plethora of handheld devices practically begging me to consume myself with on a regular basis between, and even sometimes during, class. Benjamin’s essay is prophetic in that it is the history of now, whenever that may be for the individual reader.  In reaching out to people through my Iphone I am merely touching a screen in hopes of establishing some sort of connection with flesh and reality half a mile away from me, but far enough for me to choose layers of abstract separation as an excuse for diluting authentic connection.  Movies provide that same level of distraction discussed by Benjamin in that they offer an escape from concentration. Rather than be absorbed by the action, we, the masses, passively absorb it- make no effort to become a part of it, but rather lend ourselves to distraction.

Benjamin’s essay, while it will not keep me from my Iphone and favorite movies, will certainly be on my mind the next time I reach for my phone to text, call, skype, snap chat, heytell, whatsapp, Facebook, or tweet at a loved one.