By Bruce Owens Grimm
You remember an 80’s cartoon about a natural disaster that renders a planet uninhabitable. An AI system transfers the consciousness of the planets’ population to giant robots. Survival. One of the main storylines is about the bad guys creating a double agent by swapping a good guy’s consciousness out for one of theirs. Pre-swap, the good guy, unlike the others, seems very sad. It made you sad as a kid because they don’t show his consciousness being returned to his original body. His organic body lives, it seems, while his consciousness disappears.
Throughout your twenties, you asked your similar-aged friends if they remembered it. None of them did. The early 2000s internet was no help either. Eventually, you did remember it only to forget it again — a ghost of a ghost.
We can want something and not be able to summon it. Example: I can’t wish a ghost pansy into existence — a flower that would encompass my love of both ghosts and pansies. I adore pansies, identify as one. Pansy as in queer. But for all the pansies on the internet, my flower remains elusive.
The cross-pollination possibilities of the spectral and the organic is not my specialty. But I know that pansies can grow through the cracks in concrete. Pansies are tough and delicate. Pansies, it seems, want to be seen, they want us to know they’re there.
Ghosts, like pansies, want us to know they’re there. Why else would they walk around in sheets? Sheet wearing ghosts have been around since the 1400s. Created by the dead wandering streets and gardens, haunting houses, in their death shrouds. This is what happens in the 2017 movie, A Ghost Story, when the character known only as C, is killed in a car accident. His wife, only known as M, stands over his sheeted body after she has identified him off camera at the hospital. Once his sheeted body is alone, the camera lingers until C’s ghost sits up and walks out of the hospital, death shroud and all. He wears the classic white sheet. We see another ghost who wears a gray sheet with a floral pattern on it. Ghosts, like pansies, come in a variety of colors and patterns.
I’m a ghost nerd. I’ve embraced the ghost. I carry a ceramic sheet ghost with me so I can take pictures of it at graveyards and coffeeshops. You’re afraid of ghosts. I am not. Ghosts, as a concept, are fun. The ghost, not the ghost. The ghost scares us both.
Neither of us has seen the ghost — our father’s ghost — because he doesn’t wear his death shroud except in the dreams we have of his dead body under our bed. Our waking self knows he’s behind us because his hand hovers above our shoulder, always on our left side, ever since the memories of him molesting us emerged from a shrouded spot in our memory in 2018. We avoided that room in our brain because we sensed something scary waiting there.
You and me — a dissociation — ghosts of each other. Suppression. Repression. Survival.
I’ve created this separation between us so I have enough distance to write about what happened without disappearing.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why those memories came back when they did. I came out of the closet after being married for nine years. That same year, 2009, dad was diagnosed with rectal cancer. He died nine months after his diagnosis. His ghost showed up on the ninth anniversary of the exploratory surgery that led to him going into a coma, respiratory arrest, and then dying. According to Cosmopolitan, in numerology “the number nine is powerful. It represents completion, although not a final ending — more like the fulfillment of one cycle so that you can prepare to initiate the next one.” 2019, the year I changed my name, created a boundary between you and me.
Maybe that’s too neat an explanation for a reality that has not been neat or easy. But I’m okay with that. I can always ask more questions with unknowable answers. It’s like trying to predict which cracks in the concrete will sprout pansies. Ghosts, pansies, memory – they’re all unpredictable. Not talking about them won’t make them or their impact any less real. This has helped me to understand that joy is not the absence of sadness or vice-versa. They co-exist.
The sad robot cartoon pops into my head again and, luckily, 2022’s internet is better equipped to help me. Robotix. It did exist. Does exist on the ghostly plane where the internet and memory meet. Kontor is the sad robot who has haunted me since childhood. He is only in his robot body for a few minutes, still disoriented by the transfer, when the antagonists, The Terrakors, create a diversion outside to get Kontor’s fellow Protectons to leave him on his own inside their base. Two Terrakors break-in, grab Kontor, hold him in place, as they command the AI system to swap Kontor’s essence, as the show calls it, for one of their own. Creating a double agent is key to their strategy for victory. Kontor struggles against their grip as he shouts, “I don’t want to go back. Please don’t send me back” before his consciousness disappears.
Despite being mere seconds, this scene has occupied a prominent place in our memory since it first aired in 1985, when we were nine years old. Our emotional reaction, our sense of loss over this character that spoke to us, our own sadness, mapped onto our brain, our body – even before we had the language for it, even after the details went hazy – grew into a ghost we hoped to find.
Victorians had more language for ghosts and flowers than they had for queerness. They associated pansies with forbidden love. Suppression. Repression. Pansy became an insult for queer men in the 1920s. Queer joy means taking that word back. Pansies are vivacious. Surround us with pansies.
Surround us with ghosts. With ghost pansies — may our most tenacious hauntings be by something that brings us joy.
Our anxiety asks: is this essay queer enough? Is it joyful enough? But queerness, joy, and even hauntings, are defined in a multitude of ways. The point of queering something is to make it your own. I make the ghost and the pansy my own, queer them, by bringing them together in my imagination because to do so makes me happy.
Two years ago, one month before lockdown, a participant in one of my haunted memoir workshops asked if the nonfiction ghost story can end happily. I’d never considered it until that moment. Happy and haunted — two concepts I’d never put into conversation. I’d always thought it could only be one or the other, never both. How unqueer of me. I’ve revised my thinking to cherish joy because of its occasional ghostliness. I cultivate it, tend to it, as if it were the ghost pansy brought to life.
BIO:
Bruce Owens Grimm is a queer ghost nerd based in Chicago. He’s the co-editor of Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives (2021, Jessica Kingsley Publishers). He attended the 2021 Tin House Winter Workshop. PEN America awarded him an emergency grant for writers whose income was impacted by COVID-19. He is a Pushcart nominee for his essay, “Inventory of a Haunted House, No.4” originally published by Sweet Lit and republished by Creative Nonfiction’s Sunday Short Reads. His work has appeared, among others, in The Rumpus, Brevity, and in the forthcoming anthology, It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror. You can follow him on Twitter: @bruceowensgrimm.
Other essays in this series:
Joy as Protection by Alice Harding
Who I Am by Jun Ogata