The Sunday Poem: All Stories Are Like This

Pliny tells a story of a ghost who wished his bones dug up;
He came at night, a haunt and clanking spirit, chained,
To scare the renters out of his apartment in the night.

But a philosopher took the spot, since it was cheap,
And worked till late at night. Clanking was obnoxious,
So when the ghost appeared, he made it wait.

Finally, his letters done, he rose and marked the spot
Where the skeleton arose bechained from garden plot.
The next day, of course, a putrid corpse was found.

Pliny himself, much less said philosoph, are much alike;
Both beyond their moldering days, alive only in the write.
And yet, who reads Pliny? None. Athenodorus? Who?

Somewhere there’s a plot where ancient Romans rise,
And clank their way to knock on busy students’ doors.
Each serves as Pliny to his ghost, mostly for a grade.

And here I serve as Pliny too, retelling ancient renters’ tales
Because my fancy caught upon the grave; if Pliny can’t,
Then must I create small verse to be a ghost for us.

This arises from a pointer in John Crowley’s blog to a project entitled The Whole Five Feet, wherein a writer in New York named Christopher Beha is reading through the five-foot shelf that is the Harvard Classics. Basically, it’s a collection put together in the early part of last century of 5 feet of books that could substitute for a liberal education. My house being what it was, as a child, we didn’t have this; we instead had the Britannica Great Books Of The Western World, which is where I first read Jonathan Swift, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Plato, and Homer. This would have been when I was ten or eleven.

Most people do not have Gargantua and Pantagruel in their home libraries. Indeed, I don’t today. The very notion of what makes for an education has shifted significantly. Today, I am told that spelling isn’t important to pin down at this developmental stage, so “inventive spelling” is allowed for my children.

The funny thing, of course, is that certain things always recur. We might not have Gargantua himself, though some argue that we have the echoes of the Abbey of Thélème. (Try tracing from that to St Augustine to Aleister Crowley and thence to Satanism, Wicca, and controversies over D&D — it isn’t hard).

So when I see a perfectly old-fashioned ghost story mentioned in Beha’s post on Pliny, one that would be at home in M. R. James or on the Twilight Zone, or even in the hands of the director of a modern Japanese horror film, it prompts some pondering on what exactly survives us, as storytellers or as readers.

Pliny himself wanted to live forever as a great name. He may or may not be making the grade. But then, over the truly long haul, we live on more as echoes than as sounds, more as retellings than as the original story.