ghost in the margins

For years i would come home afraid of what changes might have struck this old city, or worse, what might remain unbearably the same, streets and habits rotting on the edges of time while life happens elsewhere. i suppose it was a projection of my own fears of time, and each visit would bear the fruits of my expectations in new sidewalks or deeper potholes, friends and family still caught in the joys and sorrows of a decade past, and myself straining against the future like it was a vast chasm i had no choice but to throw myself over.

but recently this has begun to shift, perhaps as i make peace with time, and the family home becomes not the forshadowing of a tomb but a storehouse or museum to its memories, a treasure chest of the past from which the story of this life is being written. in "Man and his Symbols," Jung tells of a recurring dream in which he was continually on the verge of discovering a new wing in his house, some lost corrider older than his ancestors which at any moment he might stumble into. later he realized that this new wing was really a new idea or direction he was about to embark on, his discovery of the archetypes, and that dreams contain a prophetic element or at least a 'cryptomnesia,' whereby we might discover what was already known but forgotten thorugh the intricacies of our occluded symbology. similarly i now walk through this house looking at the bookshelves, through old cabinets and boxes, as if with each visit their contents might grow older, or i grown more comprehending of what was always there, photos from our childhood at the beach, hurricane lamps filled with seashells, heirloom candlesticks and hundred year old poetry books that seem to cry out with that much more significance. i look through them as if these objects might contain some secret to life only now readable, and wonder that i never saw them before.

one such set of objects, which i was excited to come upon, were the set of encylcopedias belonging to my grandfather Wilson Lee Johnson, in which, as the story goes, after his heart attack and confinement to bed he proceeded to work out in the margins and endpages a solution to world hunger based off the chemical composition of yeast, which seems an awfully marquezian tale. my father had looked through these formulas once, without comprehending much, but then chose to forget them as time moved on and the pain of his father's death and then his mother's death last year made it difficult to look any closer at his family history, which for a genealogist must be the sore blow of closing a chapter on the past. but as he told me, he had never had much interest in his father's artifacts, nor knew much about his life to begin with except that he had aspired to be an artist and a writer in his youth.

i expected the strange often heiroglyphic chemical formulas that abounded in each margin, but there was something else being worked out in this man's head too, that as i read further dawned on me gradually as being an entire cosmology of life and alchemical struggle against death and disease in all forms. stuck between many of the pages were articles clipped from papers with which he would update the aging encyclopedias, and from these emerged wild theories and aphorisms about being in time, charts of correspondence between the electromagnetic spectrum, the planets, chemical elements, and the human body, a subtle numerology and cryptographic word play which seemed to seek as its object a total description of reality and its effect on the human body and mind, synchretizing whatever information it could find into a progressively more complex and phenomenal world view, where god is equal to light, and life derives from the sun's chemical illumination. amidst these notations and scrawls were veiled referances to a prophecy or vision of the future that he was given, perhaps in connection with the passing of the icarus meteor in june of 1968, or with his heart attack, which undoubtedly threw him into this wild speculation and cabalism that as far as my father knew had never been a part of his father's life before that.

also among his papers were a book of poetry and some short stories, but these seem to have come from an earlier period, and whatever possession or illumination he sought to articulate in his last years remained mostly in his head. except that he seemed to know it would not be lost, for in one passage he describes the body's projection of self after death into the future where its descendents would be able to access it, but in another passage asks not to be remembered for that would take precious time away from the rememberer for their own present and future. but perhaps what seems like a theory of the continuation of the soul through DNA and heredity holds some truth, for though we never knew him, as he died when our father was still young, we his grandchildren seem to be working out his themes and visions in our own lives, devon's chemical experiments with photography and time, scott's computer science, my own experiments with linguistic alchemy, and all tinged with an edge of the spiritual or occult that seeks to step out of time towards some ultimate sense of reality altogether. so whoever this man was, and though he will (and perhaps wanted to) be forgotten, i suspect in him was the workings of a great modern alchemist, and i can only seek to honor that in my own life and tasks, as if destiny was something not just created from the images of one's own childhood, but passed down from generation to fruitful generation like another well loved and worn family treasure.