Essay: Soul Composting
Mar. 30th, 2024 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeSoul Composting
Summary: “In many cultures, both ancient and modern, three types of dead are almost always presumed to be dangerously restless: those who have no received funeral rites (ataphoi), the untimely or prematurely dead (aōroi), and those who have died violently (biaiothanatoi). The reason that ataphoi are restless seems fairly obvious: no longer among the living, they are not yet in their proper place within the realm of the dead either; they linger at the border in between or move back and forth without peace. The remedy for problems caused by this sort of dead seems obvious as well: performance of proper funeral rites usually does the trick. Both the problems and the remedies connected with the violently dead and the untimely dead are more complex, however..." --Johnston's Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece, pg. 127
Series: Essay
Word Count: 3000 words
Notes: This personal essay won the LiberaPay/Patreon poll this month! It’s about our personal inner workings, death-cycle, and religious practice, and it is written in spiritual terms more than psychological. (If you prefer a psychological discussion of similar territory, see our Memory Work Essays.) It is not intended to be a guide or of general use, though if you do find it helpful, that’s great. Please do not make this into a Star-Bellied Sneetches thing, for the love of all that is dead and holy. Be aware, this essay is about death and heartbreak, and includes some of the writing/art our ghosts have made, which you may find intense! This essay also owes a debt to Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, by Viktor Frankl.
In LB land, being dead and being a ghost aren’t the same. All ghosts are dead, but not all dead people become ghosts.
Mac, for instance, died violently at work at the age of twenty-seven… but he also died in the company of a friend and two trustworthy superiors who insured he died with a minimum of pain and terror. He was properly grieved and mourned by his loved ones. He also died with very little unfinished business. As a result, his deceased state doesn’t impair him much. He can’t return to the world he died in, and his heart beats at roughly half speed, but he otherwise behaves and ages like any living LB person, leading to his joke that he’s “well-preserved.” For convenience, we’ll refer to him as a “well-rested dead.”
Our ghosts did not die under such circumstances. They too died from violence—but younger, in extreme anguish, and rarely with anyone to comfort or acknowledge them, never mind mourn. Memories of their deaths were buried, leaving them full of unresolved conflict, unable to move on.
As a result, our restless ghosts, when they manifest, look and behave very differently from the living or the well-rested dead. They appear in limited color palettes, overwhelmingly black and white, and while some wear their living faces, others are silhouettes with white eyes or take a form that symbolically reflects their demise. (For instance, Spiral Eyes had cartoonish white whorls for eyes, a manic smile, and no limbs, reflecting how she died hysterically laughing, unable to defend herself.)
Some ghosts are violent and screaming, others silent and tense, but none are well-grounded in what the average American considers the “real” world. Few are able to speak coherently (most ramble in horror movie word sludge), and even fewer are able to understand that years, sometimes decades, have passed since their deaths. They’re forever trapped in their death throes, radiating raw psychological agony that cannot be reasoned with or pacified with tricks like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or breathing exercises. (In fact, those often make it worse!)
Ignoring ghosts only makes them act out more and more to get our attention. They are not to be blamed, dismissed, or mistreated. So how are they to be dealt with? Well, first, we have to discuss what made them.
The Making of a Ghost
We have never had a ghost come from a lost memory that is neutral or nice, only awful. (Which makes sense: nobody dies terribly in a good memory!) Also, ghosts thus far have only spawned from a specific LB demographic: people who were born to this body/vessel, rather than coming from somewhere else, and who see themselves as part of a lineage from our now-deceased original girl. This group includes her, Mori, Gigi, Rogan, Sneak, Miranda, and probably Rawlin. (We haven’t seen a ghost of his yet, but he’s from the lineage. More on him later.)
Under certain circumstances, pieces of these people can break off to form new ones—indeed, that is how all of them came to be.
However, not all of these busted-off bits survive. Most ghosts exist only long enough to endure something(s) awful and then drop dead. They become hazardous waste containers of the soul, both prison cell and inmate, buried lest their pain leak out.
Eventually, though, we either stumble upon the ghosts or they find us. Some chase us down and hurl themselves at us; others are so deeply buried that only a weird combo of feelings, events, or imaginary landscape spelunking get to them. None thus far have tried to run or hide from us; they all seem to understand that we can give them rest.
We consider it our moral duty to care for these dead and relieve them of their burdens. This care and attention is a core part of our religious practice, even if it is neither acknowledged nor encouraged by the society around us.
Why Religious Terms, Not Psychological?
We understand that talking about “ghosts” instead of “dissociated trauma” or “religious practice” instead of “self-care” might make some people uncomfortable. It seems so unscientific, so irrational. But the fact remains that we are a lunatic: if reason worked on us, we’d have been cured long ago. We have to work with our craziness on its own terms, and its terms are dead people.
We can see our inner workings in psychological terms—and we often still do. But eventually, we needed more. Mainstream psychology cannot give us a reason to stop disavowing our dead, because it can’t acknowledge that’s what we’re doing. If it does, it has trouble arguing that doing so is wrong. At best, it can manage a mealy-mouthed appeal to being happier, healthier, or more “normal,” which can backfire. (There’s a reason one of our original girl’s ghosts was determined to murder us all and destroy our entire imaginary landscape: that would make us normal and healthy!)
Our argument isn’t that helping our dead makes us happier or healthier. It’s that it’s the right thing to do. That’s our core motivation, what gets us through all the, “why am I still doing this awful never-ending shit?” Life has given us this duty, and only we can do it. Nobody can do it for us.
As children in a psychological slaughterhouse, we knew and had no better than throwing our ghosts away, but we are adults now, safe, and we no longer find this ethically acceptable. We have to find our way through this world our own way, and this is how we’ve found it.
Helping a Ghost
Once a ghost appears, it’s best for us to acknowledge it and deal with it as soon as possible. It can be dangerous to lollygag, lest the ghost take matters into its own hands.
Some ghosts are more dangerous than others. That omnicidal ghost of the original girl, for instance, was a force of nature that required an all-hands dogpile to slow her. Other ghosts contain infestations of soul parasites that are hazardous to the living. Even a minor ghost, if violent enough, can cause a lot of pain and disarray.
We don’t always succeed, but we do our best not to take such violence personally. The ghosts are only lashing out from overwhelming distress, the way a frightened dog will bite or an upset infant will scream. As a result, banishing, attacking, or shoving the ghost into deeper containment doesn’t solve the problem. At best, such measures only buy time… and increasingly less of it.
The omnicidal ghost of our original girl did require a mass pile-on to stop her from trying to obliterate everything, but that made her more and more upset. She was fighting, screaming, clawing at the landscape trying to drag her back under, and it was Rogan who paused her with, “This is not how we conduct business! You have no idea how our life works; you’re seventeen! What are you hoping to achieve?”
Though it doesn’t always work (nothing does), we’ve found far more success with asking, “What do you want?” Even if they can’t answer us, it at least gives a start, an acknowledgment that they need something. And often, the things they want are reasonable and easy to obtain! Some examples of ghosts’ desires:
• A stuffed animal from childhood
• “Safe passage”
• A grave
• To be listened to
• To tell us something
• A hug
• Relief
None of these have required more than $20, just time, effort, and respectful attention. (Which can arguably be harder to procure.) Rarely, a ghost will be laid to rest just by fulfilling this want, but usually it’s just the start of the job.
All ghosts require “siphoning” or “draining,” which is what we call embracing the agony they radiate. By taking it back from them, they are relieved of its burden. All that pain needs to express itself, though how takes many forms: writing, drawing, talking, laughing, crying, shaking, screaming, dancing, smacking our futon with a paddle… however it’s expressed, the pain requires respectful listening and undivided attention from the person/s it came from. (A ghost and its pain may be cobbled together from multiple people and require siphoning from all of them, but it has to be those people specifically. Rogan can’t do much for a Gigi ghost. The sole exception to this rule is ghosts of our now-gone original girl; anyone can drain them.)
The person/s who spawned the ghost must embrace and digest its pain, no matter how much it hurts or how stupid/unbearable it feels. The ghost must be relieved before it can do anything else.
(Starvesorry, January 2018)
Once relieved of the bulk of its agony, a ghost may disappear, instantly laid to rest, or it might calm enough to have a real conversation. Only now can it be reasoned with.
![Writing continues: die you cheated cheated never shouldve been born Never Never. [handwriting is slowly reverting to Rogan's] Never. [Rogan's handwriting is completely back; writing continues.] Okay you've made your point. Now stop with the nausea. Starvesorry replies, Starve, to which Rogan says, No, I don't do that anymore. Starvesorry replies, STARVE. Rogan replies, I can't do that. But I'll take your burden. You never should have experience that. They were wrong. They were the evil, not you. There's a doodle of Rogan talking to Starvesorry underneath.](https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/file/30030.jpg "StarveSorry04")
(more Starvesorry, January 2018)
Sometimes, after all this, the ghost has a brief period of calm and lucidity, even quiet happiness. The omnicidal ghost of our original girl calmed enough that she was able to walk down the evening streets with a lantern parade and a marching band. One of her most beloved memories was of high school marching band, so this made her happy. In her steadier state, she was able to apologize for threatening to murder us all, and we were able to forgive her. She’d been dead and in agony. She hadn’t been in control of herself. We’d been angry at her, and now we weren’t, and it was okay.
These things happen.
Composting
This process of soothing the dead is part of what we call “composting.”
In its usual sense, composting is taking “garbage” (food scraps, dead plants, feces and urine) and through a combo of heat, microbial activity, fungi, insects, and earthworms, turning what would otherwise be stinking, rotting biohazards into soil and humus, reinvigorating the earth to which it’s returned. When the cycle works, life pulls nutrients from the soil (through plants, animals, and fungi, which are eaten by other others), then returns those nutrients to the soil via pooping, peeing, dying, and rotting. What we’re used to seeing as disgusting poison, when treated properly, becomes part of a land’s healthy nutrient cycle.
It’s the same with trauma and heartbreak. If you’ll pardon the metaphor, those rotting, thrown-away feelings and information are being kept out of our spiritual nutrient cycle, giving us less to work with. We were throwing our ghosts into mental landfills and wondering why our mental soil seemed so depleted!
How did this depletion manifest? As a deep inner sadness and emptiness we couldn’t explain, never mind remedy. As children, we considered it totally normal to cry ourselves to sleep every night, even if nothing seemed wrong. There were wide swathes of emotion and experience we couldn’t handle, which never seemed to get better, despite therapy and medication. None of that poison was getting neutralized and reclaimed, nor the useful stuff from those experiences! In other words:
We could not learn from what we couldn’t remember.
We could not move on from what we hadn’t dealt with.
The process of composting a ghost (or similar heartbreaking memories) involves a lot of acting as our own spiritual earthworms: eating poisonous pain and digesting it, reclaiming what was disavowed, rendering it harmless, even beneficial. Much like real composting, it takes time and patience, and involves a lot of shit, but it is rarely dangerous, these days. Just painful.
Most ghosts rest once their burden is lifted. Our original girl has splintered into many ghosts, and every single one, if asked, has expressed the desire to stay forever at rest. However, this isn’t the only way things can go.
Eyes
Eyes, for instance, was most concerned not with its heartbreaking death, but with telling us some very important things about our headspace and its cosmology that we didn’t know (and didn’t fit our psychological view at the time). After three months of siphoning, any time Rogan tried to steer the conversation to Eyes’s death, it would insist on grabbing a pen and writing about the black ocean, a thing we knew nothing about and were baffled by at the time.
![Eyes: It is her corpse it is all that remains of her all the death and you. She made us you all and what was left could not withstand the black sea. Eyes: It is bound to this body her body. Rogan: How do you know this? Eyes: I was there. Rogan: That's not possible. She didn't die till spring 2005. Winter. Eyes: It took time to build. Rogan: Is there a faster, more efficient way to do this? Eyes: I don't know. Rogan: Am I doing this wrong? (No response.) Rogan: Why is this being such a torturous long process? Eyes: There is a lot. Rogan: Look, I don't want to spend the rest of my fucking life trying to do the undoable. (pg. 3) Eyes: It is doable. Rogan: Will it ever get easier? Eyes: I don't know. Rogan: Will it ever get FASTER? Eyes: I don't know. Rogan: Sigh. Okay. Was Sneak sixteen or twelve during your time? (No answer.) Rogan (giving up): What would you like to tell me? Eyes: It is doable. The black sea can be cleansed. It can be a living sea. Rogan: Wait, you mean we're living inside an ocean? Eyes: Yes. It can be beautiful and alive. The further you go, the (some weird kludge image of better/cleaner/healed/living) it will be. Miranda: is the ocean our subconscious? Eyes: I don't know. But it is there? Miranda: What became of Mother? [our first Edenic headspace, created by Erin and lost sometime in late 2003] Eyes: I don't know. I was never there. Eyes: Things come from the ocean. All life](https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/file/65530.png "Black Ocean pg. 7 and 8")
![Eyes: comes from water. All creation. It is not meant to be dead. Sneak: You said ritual can help you. Are there ways we can heal the black sea through methods other than memory work, or in conjunction with it? Eyes: Maybe. It's worth trying. Sneak: I got you the cards. They'll be here soon. Eyes: Thank you. Sneak: I want to maybe try to use... headspace magic to help clean the black sea, without just hiding the problem somewhere else. Eyes: Be careful. But I think maybe it could help. Rogan: all of us have contributed to the black sea, not just Erin. Eyes: Yes. But her most. Eyes: I want the sea better. It will get better if you help the sea. You are asking the wrong questions we are emisarries [sic] of the sea. It is our source. Rogan: I thought you were... buried there. Submerged. Whatever. Eyes: Complicated. Note from Rogan: (And then the black sea rose and tried to drown us. Yipee. We dealth [sic] with it, and now we have a basement swimming pool.)](https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/file/65092.png "Black Ocean pg. 9 and 10")
Indeed, Eyes endured just long enough to get us through the black ocean’s rise, saving us from disaster before being laid to rest. That, more than its individual heartbreak, seemed most important to it. And six years of composting later, so much of what it said has proved true: the ocean has indeed become more healthy and alive, we have indeed started unearthing memories of good times, and our creativity has indeed been coming back to life.
Eyes, it seems, was equally responsible and concerned for us in death as it had been in life. Only once it achieved its goal could it rest.
Mori
Mori died under unusual circumstances, which seems to have given her unusual freedom. Though she did initially appear in raging ghost form, once relieved of her burdens, she revived, returned to her original form, and began relieving ghosts in her own right. She’s long since become a crew member in good standing, and much like Mac, you wouldn’t know she was dead unless she told you. (Or unless you saw her in a rage, which sometimes returns her to a ghostly appearance.)
Then again, if anyone were to decide not to rest, it’d be Mori. She always was a contrarian.
Rawlin
Mori just happened to die strangely, putting her in a weird category. Rawlin, on the other hand, tried to intentionally cheat death, with disastrous results. After rendering himself undying (and possibly imaginarily unkillable), he is now the worst combination of traits of the living and the dead: mostly lucid, coherent, oriented to the present… and utterly unwilling to deal with his shit. He is just as explosive as a ghost, just as unable to deal with life, but he has a living person’s ability to plan and manipulate. He never learns, never grows, and he’s a giant powerhouse.
At first, we tried to treat him the way we would a ghost, giving him our undivided attention, forgiving him his transgressions, trying to relieve him. This was a dismal failure: he didn’t want to be relieved! In his mind, there was nothing to relieve! Attention, negative or positive, only rewarded and encouraged his behavior. Forgiveness only taught him what he could get away with. He just wanted what he wanted, exploded when he didn’t get it, and then disavowed it, starting the cycle again.
Once we figured this out, we realized we couldn’t safely be around him. We no longer saw eternal solitary confinement as ethical and we couldn’t make him deal with his baggage or deal with it for him, so we kicked him out of the house and gave him a chunk of headspace away from us to run free in. We neither disavow him nor pretend he’s not there. We work to uncover his history and records, note his presence occasionally, and keep track of his behavior as best we can, aware all the while that we’ll need to deal with him more permanently eventually.
At first, Rawlin tried to smash his way back into our presence. He’d attempt to break into our imaginary house, hack into our dreams, or just pound on the door and demand we pay attention to him. Maybe because none of it got him what he wanted, he seemed to calm down after a year or two. We haven’t had a Rawlin flare-up in a couple years now, and the few looks we’ve gotten of him since then have showed him looking haggard, tired, and regretful. It’s possible that, with nothing else to do, he’s finally started dealing with his shit. Maybe, after twenty years, he’s finally learning to grow and change.
Ten Years of Soul Composting
People often try to avoid pain and pursue pleasure, not realizing how inseparable the two are. We call things “grimdark” when they’re so unrelentingly bleak that we become numb to it. Without bright spots, the darkness has no meaning, no contrast, and indeed, some of the hardest memories to stomach have been the ones with sweetness and kindness in them—it throws the pain into sharper relief, making it harder to take for granted.
Our childhood, despite its horrors, had its share of happiness… but much of it, we couldn’t remember until we remembered the pain, because the two were inextricably intertwined. How could Rogan remember the happiness he felt with Bob and Grey without recalling the assaults that brought him to them? How could Mori remember Biff’s kindness in bandaging her wounds without remembering the wounds themselves? How could Eyes help us if we refused to acknowledge its existence? How could any of us understand Rawlin, if we weren’t willing to look at his history, if we didn’t work at finding out how he got to be the way he is?
Excising our worst memories also gutted us of our best. No wonder we felt empty inside! But now, putting those nutrients back into the soil of our soul has been reviving us. We’re often in pain, but we’re often happy too. Old hang-ups have been gradually quieting as the mines get swept out of the old battleground of our heart. Conflict and anger have become easier to deal with. We may “hurt” more… but it’s the dull ache of muscle knots loosening, not the agonizing twang of a fresh spasm.
It is a slow process… but nobody gets fertilizer the second they throw things in a compost bin. It takes time. There’s a learning curve, and our society rarely rewards slow, long-term things. Who knows if we’ll ever find all of our ghosts? How would we tell?
But we must try, for their sake and ours. It’s only fair. Ignorance is bliss only to those who don’t have to deal with the consequences.
Summary: “In many cultures, both ancient and modern, three types of dead are almost always presumed to be dangerously restless: those who have no received funeral rites (ataphoi), the untimely or prematurely dead (aōroi), and those who have died violently (biaiothanatoi). The reason that ataphoi are restless seems fairly obvious: no longer among the living, they are not yet in their proper place within the realm of the dead either; they linger at the border in between or move back and forth without peace. The remedy for problems caused by this sort of dead seems obvious as well: performance of proper funeral rites usually does the trick. Both the problems and the remedies connected with the violently dead and the untimely dead are more complex, however..." --Johnston's Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece, pg. 127
Series: Essay
Word Count: 3000 words
Notes: This personal essay won the LiberaPay/Patreon poll this month! It’s about our personal inner workings, death-cycle, and religious practice, and it is written in spiritual terms more than psychological. (If you prefer a psychological discussion of similar territory, see our Memory Work Essays.) It is not intended to be a guide or of general use, though if you do find it helpful, that’s great. Please do not make this into a Star-Bellied Sneetches thing, for the love of all that is dead and holy. Be aware, this essay is about death and heartbreak, and includes some of the writing/art our ghosts have made, which you may find intense! This essay also owes a debt to Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, by Viktor Frankl.
In LB land, being dead and being a ghost aren’t the same. All ghosts are dead, but not all dead people become ghosts.
Mac, for instance, died violently at work at the age of twenty-seven… but he also died in the company of a friend and two trustworthy superiors who insured he died with a minimum of pain and terror. He was properly grieved and mourned by his loved ones. He also died with very little unfinished business. As a result, his deceased state doesn’t impair him much. He can’t return to the world he died in, and his heart beats at roughly half speed, but he otherwise behaves and ages like any living LB person, leading to his joke that he’s “well-preserved.” For convenience, we’ll refer to him as a “well-rested dead.”
Our ghosts did not die under such circumstances. They too died from violence—but younger, in extreme anguish, and rarely with anyone to comfort or acknowledge them, never mind mourn. Memories of their deaths were buried, leaving them full of unresolved conflict, unable to move on.
As a result, our restless ghosts, when they manifest, look and behave very differently from the living or the well-rested dead. They appear in limited color palettes, overwhelmingly black and white, and while some wear their living faces, others are silhouettes with white eyes or take a form that symbolically reflects their demise. (For instance, Spiral Eyes had cartoonish white whorls for eyes, a manic smile, and no limbs, reflecting how she died hysterically laughing, unable to defend herself.)
Some ghosts are violent and screaming, others silent and tense, but none are well-grounded in what the average American considers the “real” world. Few are able to speak coherently (most ramble in horror movie word sludge), and even fewer are able to understand that years, sometimes decades, have passed since their deaths. They’re forever trapped in their death throes, radiating raw psychological agony that cannot be reasoned with or pacified with tricks like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or breathing exercises. (In fact, those often make it worse!)
Ignoring ghosts only makes them act out more and more to get our attention. They are not to be blamed, dismissed, or mistreated. So how are they to be dealt with? Well, first, we have to discuss what made them.
The Making of a Ghost
We have never had a ghost come from a lost memory that is neutral or nice, only awful. (Which makes sense: nobody dies terribly in a good memory!) Also, ghosts thus far have only spawned from a specific LB demographic: people who were born to this body/vessel, rather than coming from somewhere else, and who see themselves as part of a lineage from our now-deceased original girl. This group includes her, Mori, Gigi, Rogan, Sneak, Miranda, and probably Rawlin. (We haven’t seen a ghost of his yet, but he’s from the lineage. More on him later.)
Under certain circumstances, pieces of these people can break off to form new ones—indeed, that is how all of them came to be.
However, not all of these busted-off bits survive. Most ghosts exist only long enough to endure something(s) awful and then drop dead. They become hazardous waste containers of the soul, both prison cell and inmate, buried lest their pain leak out.
Eventually, though, we either stumble upon the ghosts or they find us. Some chase us down and hurl themselves at us; others are so deeply buried that only a weird combo of feelings, events, or imaginary landscape spelunking get to them. None thus far have tried to run or hide from us; they all seem to understand that we can give them rest.
We consider it our moral duty to care for these dead and relieve them of their burdens. This care and attention is a core part of our religious practice, even if it is neither acknowledged nor encouraged by the society around us.
Why Religious Terms, Not Psychological?
We understand that talking about “ghosts” instead of “dissociated trauma” or “religious practice” instead of “self-care” might make some people uncomfortable. It seems so unscientific, so irrational. But the fact remains that we are a lunatic: if reason worked on us, we’d have been cured long ago. We have to work with our craziness on its own terms, and its terms are dead people.
We can see our inner workings in psychological terms—and we often still do. But eventually, we needed more. Mainstream psychology cannot give us a reason to stop disavowing our dead, because it can’t acknowledge that’s what we’re doing. If it does, it has trouble arguing that doing so is wrong. At best, it can manage a mealy-mouthed appeal to being happier, healthier, or more “normal,” which can backfire. (There’s a reason one of our original girl’s ghosts was determined to murder us all and destroy our entire imaginary landscape: that would make us normal and healthy!)
Our argument isn’t that helping our dead makes us happier or healthier. It’s that it’s the right thing to do. That’s our core motivation, what gets us through all the, “why am I still doing this awful never-ending shit?” Life has given us this duty, and only we can do it. Nobody can do it for us.
As children in a psychological slaughterhouse, we knew and had no better than throwing our ghosts away, but we are adults now, safe, and we no longer find this ethically acceptable. We have to find our way through this world our own way, and this is how we’ve found it.
Helping a Ghost
Once a ghost appears, it’s best for us to acknowledge it and deal with it as soon as possible. It can be dangerous to lollygag, lest the ghost take matters into its own hands.
Some ghosts are more dangerous than others. That omnicidal ghost of the original girl, for instance, was a force of nature that required an all-hands dogpile to slow her. Other ghosts contain infestations of soul parasites that are hazardous to the living. Even a minor ghost, if violent enough, can cause a lot of pain and disarray.
We don’t always succeed, but we do our best not to take such violence personally. The ghosts are only lashing out from overwhelming distress, the way a frightened dog will bite or an upset infant will scream. As a result, banishing, attacking, or shoving the ghost into deeper containment doesn’t solve the problem. At best, such measures only buy time… and increasingly less of it.
The omnicidal ghost of our original girl did require a mass pile-on to stop her from trying to obliterate everything, but that made her more and more upset. She was fighting, screaming, clawing at the landscape trying to drag her back under, and it was Rogan who paused her with, “This is not how we conduct business! You have no idea how our life works; you’re seventeen! What are you hoping to achieve?”
Though it doesn’t always work (nothing does), we’ve found far more success with asking, “What do you want?” Even if they can’t answer us, it at least gives a start, an acknowledgment that they need something. And often, the things they want are reasonable and easy to obtain! Some examples of ghosts’ desires:
• A stuffed animal from childhood
• “Safe passage”
• A grave
• To be listened to
• To tell us something
• A hug
• Relief
None of these have required more than $20, just time, effort, and respectful attention. (Which can arguably be harder to procure.) Rarely, a ghost will be laid to rest just by fulfilling this want, but usually it’s just the start of the job.
All ghosts require “siphoning” or “draining,” which is what we call embracing the agony they radiate. By taking it back from them, they are relieved of its burden. All that pain needs to express itself, though how takes many forms: writing, drawing, talking, laughing, crying, shaking, screaming, dancing, smacking our futon with a paddle… however it’s expressed, the pain requires respectful listening and undivided attention from the person/s it came from. (A ghost and its pain may be cobbled together from multiple people and require siphoning from all of them, but it has to be those people specifically. Rogan can’t do much for a Gigi ghost. The sole exception to this rule is ghosts of our now-gone original girl; anyone can drain them.)
The person/s who spawned the ghost must embrace and digest its pain, no matter how much it hurts or how stupid/unbearable it feels. The ghost must be relieved before it can do anything else.
(Starvesorry, January 2018)
Once relieved of the bulk of its agony, a ghost may disappear, instantly laid to rest, or it might calm enough to have a real conversation. Only now can it be reasoned with.
(more Starvesorry, January 2018)
Sometimes, after all this, the ghost has a brief period of calm and lucidity, even quiet happiness. The omnicidal ghost of our original girl calmed enough that she was able to walk down the evening streets with a lantern parade and a marching band. One of her most beloved memories was of high school marching band, so this made her happy. In her steadier state, she was able to apologize for threatening to murder us all, and we were able to forgive her. She’d been dead and in agony. She hadn’t been in control of herself. We’d been angry at her, and now we weren’t, and it was okay.
These things happen.
Composting
This process of soothing the dead is part of what we call “composting.”
In its usual sense, composting is taking “garbage” (food scraps, dead plants, feces and urine) and through a combo of heat, microbial activity, fungi, insects, and earthworms, turning what would otherwise be stinking, rotting biohazards into soil and humus, reinvigorating the earth to which it’s returned. When the cycle works, life pulls nutrients from the soil (through plants, animals, and fungi, which are eaten by other others), then returns those nutrients to the soil via pooping, peeing, dying, and rotting. What we’re used to seeing as disgusting poison, when treated properly, becomes part of a land’s healthy nutrient cycle.
It’s the same with trauma and heartbreak. If you’ll pardon the metaphor, those rotting, thrown-away feelings and information are being kept out of our spiritual nutrient cycle, giving us less to work with. We were throwing our ghosts into mental landfills and wondering why our mental soil seemed so depleted!
How did this depletion manifest? As a deep inner sadness and emptiness we couldn’t explain, never mind remedy. As children, we considered it totally normal to cry ourselves to sleep every night, even if nothing seemed wrong. There were wide swathes of emotion and experience we couldn’t handle, which never seemed to get better, despite therapy and medication. None of that poison was getting neutralized and reclaimed, nor the useful stuff from those experiences! In other words:
We could not learn from what we couldn’t remember.
We could not move on from what we hadn’t dealt with.
The process of composting a ghost (or similar heartbreaking memories) involves a lot of acting as our own spiritual earthworms: eating poisonous pain and digesting it, reclaiming what was disavowed, rendering it harmless, even beneficial. Much like real composting, it takes time and patience, and involves a lot of shit, but it is rarely dangerous, these days. Just painful.
Most ghosts rest once their burden is lifted. Our original girl has splintered into many ghosts, and every single one, if asked, has expressed the desire to stay forever at rest. However, this isn’t the only way things can go.
Eyes
Eyes, for instance, was most concerned not with its heartbreaking death, but with telling us some very important things about our headspace and its cosmology that we didn’t know (and didn’t fit our psychological view at the time). After three months of siphoning, any time Rogan tried to steer the conversation to Eyes’s death, it would insist on grabbing a pen and writing about the black ocean, a thing we knew nothing about and were baffled by at the time.
Indeed, Eyes endured just long enough to get us through the black ocean’s rise, saving us from disaster before being laid to rest. That, more than its individual heartbreak, seemed most important to it. And six years of composting later, so much of what it said has proved true: the ocean has indeed become more healthy and alive, we have indeed started unearthing memories of good times, and our creativity has indeed been coming back to life.
Eyes, it seems, was equally responsible and concerned for us in death as it had been in life. Only once it achieved its goal could it rest.
Mori
Mori died under unusual circumstances, which seems to have given her unusual freedom. Though she did initially appear in raging ghost form, once relieved of her burdens, she revived, returned to her original form, and began relieving ghosts in her own right. She’s long since become a crew member in good standing, and much like Mac, you wouldn’t know she was dead unless she told you. (Or unless you saw her in a rage, which sometimes returns her to a ghostly appearance.)
Then again, if anyone were to decide not to rest, it’d be Mori. She always was a contrarian.
Rawlin
Mori just happened to die strangely, putting her in a weird category. Rawlin, on the other hand, tried to intentionally cheat death, with disastrous results. After rendering himself undying (and possibly imaginarily unkillable), he is now the worst combination of traits of the living and the dead: mostly lucid, coherent, oriented to the present… and utterly unwilling to deal with his shit. He is just as explosive as a ghost, just as unable to deal with life, but he has a living person’s ability to plan and manipulate. He never learns, never grows, and he’s a giant powerhouse.
At first, we tried to treat him the way we would a ghost, giving him our undivided attention, forgiving him his transgressions, trying to relieve him. This was a dismal failure: he didn’t want to be relieved! In his mind, there was nothing to relieve! Attention, negative or positive, only rewarded and encouraged his behavior. Forgiveness only taught him what he could get away with. He just wanted what he wanted, exploded when he didn’t get it, and then disavowed it, starting the cycle again.
Once we figured this out, we realized we couldn’t safely be around him. We no longer saw eternal solitary confinement as ethical and we couldn’t make him deal with his baggage or deal with it for him, so we kicked him out of the house and gave him a chunk of headspace away from us to run free in. We neither disavow him nor pretend he’s not there. We work to uncover his history and records, note his presence occasionally, and keep track of his behavior as best we can, aware all the while that we’ll need to deal with him more permanently eventually.
At first, Rawlin tried to smash his way back into our presence. He’d attempt to break into our imaginary house, hack into our dreams, or just pound on the door and demand we pay attention to him. Maybe because none of it got him what he wanted, he seemed to calm down after a year or two. We haven’t had a Rawlin flare-up in a couple years now, and the few looks we’ve gotten of him since then have showed him looking haggard, tired, and regretful. It’s possible that, with nothing else to do, he’s finally started dealing with his shit. Maybe, after twenty years, he’s finally learning to grow and change.
Ten Years of Soul Composting
People often try to avoid pain and pursue pleasure, not realizing how inseparable the two are. We call things “grimdark” when they’re so unrelentingly bleak that we become numb to it. Without bright spots, the darkness has no meaning, no contrast, and indeed, some of the hardest memories to stomach have been the ones with sweetness and kindness in them—it throws the pain into sharper relief, making it harder to take for granted.
Our childhood, despite its horrors, had its share of happiness… but much of it, we couldn’t remember until we remembered the pain, because the two were inextricably intertwined. How could Rogan remember the happiness he felt with Bob and Grey without recalling the assaults that brought him to them? How could Mori remember Biff’s kindness in bandaging her wounds without remembering the wounds themselves? How could Eyes help us if we refused to acknowledge its existence? How could any of us understand Rawlin, if we weren’t willing to look at his history, if we didn’t work at finding out how he got to be the way he is?
Excising our worst memories also gutted us of our best. No wonder we felt empty inside! But now, putting those nutrients back into the soil of our soul has been reviving us. We’re often in pain, but we’re often happy too. Old hang-ups have been gradually quieting as the mines get swept out of the old battleground of our heart. Conflict and anger have become easier to deal with. We may “hurt” more… but it’s the dull ache of muscle knots loosening, not the agonizing twang of a fresh spasm.
It is a slow process… but nobody gets fertilizer the second they throw things in a compost bin. It takes time. There’s a learning curve, and our society rarely rewards slow, long-term things. Who knows if we’ll ever find all of our ghosts? How would we tell?
But we must try, for their sake and ours. It’s only fair. Ignorance is bliss only to those who don’t have to deal with the consequences.
