There Are Spirits! Unholy, Dead, Haunting – There Is No Rest

Lisa R. Parker

Spirits, are you there? Every time we beckon, we call. And lo! they do appear as though they are here and now. Spirits are violent and historical; we live through and by them. For thousand years we are teaching love and peace but they would be called upon and all these good Spirit theories vanish. Among spirits Spirit of Marx is great which is haunting our lives. Haunting is historical says Derrida. We are being haunted and we are condemned to live through and in them. Every time when humanity faces problems they would be beckoned; Spirits, are you there? Hegel Says, “reason is spirit when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself.

The coming-to-be of spirit was indicated in the immediately preceding movement in which the object of consciousness, the pure category, rose to be the notion of Reason.” It is this very spirit -reason that was resurrected by him as universal spirit inhabiting nations. This spirit was criticized by Marx; he analyzed those spirits -the industrialists of philosophy and art who till then had lived on the exploitation of the absolute spirit. So haunting is historical; in every juncture of history a spirit-specter is being invoked and it haunted the humans. We are mortals only spirit is immortal, it has all right to haunt us and make us immortal. We believe in spirits, in past, we live present through past.

Spirits are in us, in our morality, our culture our way of life. We don’t see them only we feel them. Derrida says; “specter is becoming- body a certain form of spirit”. We have learned it from our ancestors that’s why we find spirit worshipers everywhere. Many traditional Indian Baniyas invoke the spirits of their fathers and fore fathers in their houses and shops. What exactly they do by invoking the dead fathers? They are invoking their spirits (reason) that knew the art of haunting (exploiting) people. We never let our fathers die; we are habitual so we make offerings to them. We are haunted by ghosts from birth to death; one spirit exits then one enters, then one exist and another enters -this goes on and on. Why they never leave us? Because we have memories; we can not get rid of memories and history (it is also memory). Whenever we try to get rid of them, to get rid of memory they would appear and say as the ghost of Hamlet says-

Ghost- I am thy father’s spirit,

doom’d for the certain term to walk the night;

and for the day confine’d to fast in fires,

till the foule crimes done in my dayes of Nature

Are burnt and purg’d away: but that I am forbid

to tell the secrets of prison-house;

I could a tale unfold…

and we obeyed and spirit won. Spirits are buried in graves, memories, histories. Museums and ideologies. One has to know it in order to invoke them, one should know them in order to bury them so far they could not move and roam and haunt. Marx described and diagnosed them notably that of its unifying project and tried to bury them. He commanded them but they were waiting in the folds of history to reappear and bury the spirit of Marx. It goes on thus there is no rest. Valery wrote about this problem of spirit, ” the European Hamlet looks at thousands of specters. but he is an intellectual Hamlet. he meditates on the life and death of truths. his ghosts are all the objects of controversies; his remorse is all the title of our glory……if he seizes a skull, it is an illustrious skull–“whose was it? — this one was Lionardo…..and this other skull is that of Leibniz who dreamed of universal peace. and this one was Kant qui genuit Hegel, qui genuit Marx,…Hamlet does not know what to do with all these sculls. But if he abandons them! ….will he cease to be himself?”. we love spirits so we have book of the dead, the theories and practices that make them appear according to wishes.

This spirit is abstract as well as concrete. It is this spirit that has taken a form of empire, it this very spirit that baptizes humanity with its morality, law, custom etc. This was controlled by power, production mechanism, art, literature etc.; for its possession there were wars in the history. I through my art try to identify them, let them reappear on my canvases to bury the spirits of good and decorative art. Spirits command spirits this is the rule. As in France spirits ousted one another, heroes of the mind overthrew each other rapidly during the wake of modernism so it could happen here in our country too. New Ghosts are waiting to make their entry since good art is making its exit.

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