Dan Fishback: Embracing the ghosts

On Halloween morning, I get up and realize I have no costume. I open my closet full of everyday clothes: velvet jackets, pirate hats and shirts made out of queen-size Lady Brown Sugar pantyhoes. But nothing out of the ordinary -- no costume. Damn.

I decide there must more to Halloween than just outfits, so I search the Web for info, sidestepping the resume I need to prepare, the thesis I need to write and the various online newspapers that I check every morning.

"Enough already," I've taken to yelling at my computer screen when the daily news pops up -- "stop bothering me."

The clunky Dell sits directly across the room from my bed, to which I sometimes retreat on particularly bad days with particularly high death tolls. But the screen still faces me like a neon tombstone and when I turn away, I know it's still there, nagging me. So I always manage to get out of bed eventually, finish my Web-rounds and get back to work.

For now, all newsmedia are minimized. The only open window is labeled, "The History and Customs of Halloween." I read about the Celts, who believed that on this day, "the disembodied spirits of all those who had died throughout the preceding year would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. It was believed to be their only hope for the afterlife."

I can't avoid eyeing the minimized windows lurking at the bottom of the screen, their titles cut off: "The Guardia..." "The New Yor..." "Mother Jo..." I look back up: "The disembodied spirits of all those who had died throughout the preceding year..." According to this Web site, the Celts dressed up as demons to frighten away spirits looking for human vessels. People assumed disguises to avoid the dead -- avoid the past.

What a nice idea -- a vacation from history. Perhaps today I will close all those minimized windows, leave the responsibility of my computer altogether, run outside and drink and dance. Perhaps today I will evade the ghosts.

But I can't escape from myself altogether. On a normal day, I'd be writing my column now, so, still driven to gather multiple sources before deciding on a specific history, I read through another Halloween Web site.

This story is quite different: "The Celts celebrated rituals at this time to make contact with their ancestors who had died before them. This contact was not made in an atmosphere of dread, fearing some retribution from the dead. Rather it was done in a spirit of expectation, in the hopes of obtaining guidance from those in the next world."

These Celts didn't try to scare away the phantoms -- they welcomed them. They opened their bodies and minds for communion with ghosts. In this story, the dead used this day to live through the living, returning to the other world at midnight, leaving the quick with their wisdom, with their histories. An amazing thought -- to let the dead live through you.

At an anti-war protest in D.C., I saw people wearing the names of Palestinian and Israeli children killed during the Intifada. As they marched, they shouted into the air, demanding peace. They opened themselves to ghosts.

To escape the dead, the Celts of the first narrative became dead themselves. To avoid the past, they dressed as ghouls, denied their own lives. They wanted to safeguard themselves from possession -- from being "possessed," owned by the dead.

But the dead do own us, and not just on Halloween. So when we avoid our responsibilities to them, we appear as zombies walking the earth.

I don't know which Celtic narrative is more accurate, and I don't particularly care. So I choose the second one. I choose to open myself to ghosts, to let the past guide my actions, inform my thoughts.

On this Halloween, I won't ward off spirits -- I'll invite them in. I reach for a full-length magenta smoking jacket and a tube of purple lipstick. I maximize the windows at the bottom of my screen. I read the ghosts. They enter me.

Dan Fishback is a senior American Identities major from Olney, Md.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.