Joseph’s Ghost

Or

The Dead Are Not Lost

Tribute to Han Kang.

 

Joseph’s Ghost passed by that ugly little hill beside the Jaffe Gate,

               and thought I have been here before with that woman and her child.

               Then he saw the man and thought he’d cry, but ghosts don’t cry.

That he would scream, but ghosts don’t scream except in dreams,

So, he flagged, whipped and snapped, as in a gale.

And then he saw ghosts rising out of that place,

sighing, “We live again,” and flying to the corners of the earth.

 

After that, Joseph’s ghost passed down the road that ran south,

and saw that rock on Har Homa where that woman had sat with child,

and where he had wondered if he had been right

to have taken her to be birthed in Bethlehem.

Then he saw the boy playing in the threshold of the kitchen door,

Sighed and thought how short that stay had been.

 

Then he came upon to the tomb on the edge of Bethlehem

 of which is said, it marks the grave of Rachel

in which she cries for her children, who are no more.

On seeing her ghost rise, he said, “No need, mother,

still to cry for your children are no more.

Oh no, the ghost shuddered, there are yet more,

all the way to the Gaza’s shore.

 

 

The poem above came as dream which was a result of reading Han Kang’s We Do Not Part. It is the most painful book I have ever read, and yet I am glad to have done so. This is because I do not think “salvation” is an escape from pain and that the pain of the world somehow belongs to us all.  That is how I hear “We do not part.”  In the poem I imagine Joseph, the Virgin Mary’s spouse, visiting the pain of the world, purgatorially.  How you may ask could Joeph be a ghost, as he is surly he is in heaven. I would reply to that by sharing the fact that I cannot think of “heaven” as a place and time not here and now.  My understand of death is that begins a journey into eternity, a time that is both then and now, and tomorrow as well.  It is etched on the other face of a single reality that all, the living and the dead, share, each as were on opposite faces. 

Traditions vary, but in most cases, they hint at a process. So, in Eastern Christianity it is said the soul of one who has passed lingers in their home for seven days and then it walks the earth for forty.  In Western Christianity, there is the doctrine of purgatory with a complicated calculus. Let us simply say that this process (be it purgation or growth) is a process of being progressively graphed into the risen Christ. That Christ left no ghost in the world, because of the completeness and immediacy of His resurrection. As a result, he was everywhere at all times.  As each will in him become after a time.  One so close to the Christ, as his mother, would share quickly in the completeness of the resurrection.  That would explain the significance of her intercession and the possibility of her assumption, not by means another resurrection, but by an inclusion in the one resurrection.  Joseph would also be close, but not so much as that a lingering part of him might yet find itself on a journey through this world. His ghost was called out by some exceptional degree of pain and relevance to him. The grave circumstance of his homeland might, I imagine, even now call him back.  At least I would say without doubt that this land is presently filled with ghosts and will be for some time.

               There is a kind of curious affirmation of these thoughts in modern fiction.  Along with Han Kung, We Do Not Part, I would note Shehan Karunatilaka”s The Seven Moons of Maali Almedia. Neither are easy reads and one must accept that part of the experience has do with feeling pain. I think of them as preparations for the walk that I will take on my leave of the world as they have made some preparation for a passage through the veil of pain through which all must past to be with everyone everywhere.