An uncanny return

Among the many articles and books that could be considered part of the beginnings of spectral criticism (if it is a form of criticism at all) there is much written about the haunting effects of technology. I experienced such a haunting today as I happened upon something I wrote last July. At the time I was very busy with school and would often come home after my girls had gone to bed. I began to worry about the effect this would have on my daughters and I drew inspiration from one of my favorite photos of my oldest. This post was taken from my now defunct blog, Musings of a Mad Man. Take it for what it is, unedited and imperfect, like the author it pretends to represent.

This picture staring not back at me, but just beyond me, will be gone tomorrow; wiped from the memory of the remembering machine that holds my fragile keepsakes, my remembrances. They, like me, exist only virtually, nothing concrete here. Will she remember this moment when she’s grown…this precious time, while she is young, when she desires nothing more than the love of her mother and father? Yet in the photo she looks off, afar, away from the eye of the lens, away from me. Somehow, at this delicate age, she understands, intuits that she will have to leave, defect from her home where her parents did their best but fell short so often. How will she remember me? How will she remember us? Will she remember or will she depend, like us, on a remembering machine, which violently rips away the moments of pure perception replacing them with ghostly simulacra? A compendium which pathetically announces, “This is your life”, and we believe? As my memory fades, replaced by images, specters, I smile at my new recollections. They perform adequately in many ways but miss the embraces, the gentle whispers in the ear, the warmth of bodies. Will the photos reveal that I was often absent or distant, like her gaze? Will the photos replace the memory of my non-presence or will they reinforce my ghostly presence? Will I be erased by lying phantasmagoria resulting in fissures of psychosis and disconnect from reality? “He was never there.” This haunts me, yet I am now absent, distant, returning only after she has been overcome by the fog of sleep, watching her rest. We must forget if we are to sleep and it seems at once natural that we must forget if we are to die, to rest, finally.