I had never thought seriously about haunting before things ended with Jacob, my first love. He was always collecting small souvenirs from places we went - polished river rocks, bits of glass, figurines of birds. Often he’d press flowers in between the pages of whatever book he was reading. Later they’d appear on my bookshelf, flat, unannounced. “Where was that from?” I asked, knowing already. I remembered chastising him for plucking the bunch of raw violets from the crumbling cliff that said, DANGER, EROSION. It was early June. “Page 180,” he said. All of that didn’t matter to him, but the vibrancy of violet mattered. 

 

A daisy for me, a daisy for Jacob. That’s how I ended up with all these things, now that he is gone. At first I thought I could separate his memory from the utility and being of objects. I was foolish. In time I find that every object is a symbol, is a mirror, is an urn. And still, I don’t have the heart to give them away.

 

This quarter the work of Tuan Andrew Nguyen resonated with me most fervently. Nguyen’s family fled Vietnam in 1979 to live as refugees in California. Although Nguyen spent his childhood physically removed from the war, he was greatly affected by the intergenerational trauma inherited from his family. Now in his career as an artist, Nguyen explores mysticism, memory and trauma, largely surrounding the Vietnam war. His sculptures made from unexploded ordinances (UXOs) found in Quảng Trị and across Vietnam ask audiences what it means for objects to hold memories? And if objects hold ghosts that haunt, or if material itself is haunting?

 

In the evenings I sit at my desk to write. Lately I think that the bookcase has become a shrine, decorated with small offerings. The red Cresta Blanca sardine can, filled with shells that Sydney collected in Monterey. The little silver gelatin photograph of my father. The soy wax candle with lavender from Sarah. The olivine fossils from Janina. Many objects are from Jacob. And in keeping after he is gone, many offerings are to Jacob. Lately when I sit to write it feels like worship to the shrine of people I have loved. 

 

I think it is very odd how Jacob’s ghost remains in some things, and fades out of others. The Japanese incense, strangely, has no effect on me. Even though it is potent and he gave it to me for Christmas, I can enjoy it dissociated from his memory. Other things, his copy of The Brothers Karamazov, I have to turn away from. When I do hold it close, I hear his voice reading, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." Isn’t a faceless voice just as much a ghost as a voiceless apparition? A haunting cadence no one ever speaks of haunts me. “What would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?” Objectless. 

 

In his essay Dogma, Byron Kim questions the notion that form is content. “I often wonder to what extent these phenomena [of emotional transcendence] are prompted by purely visual, neurological stimulation and to what extent they are governed by convention, what we have learned,” Kim muses (Kim, Dogma).

 

The poignancy of some objects over others: is hauntingness dependent on a threshold of perfected form, beyond which content becomes obsolete? Do some objects shine so self-assuredly that their beauty can exist in itself without stories? Or despite stories - for some objects harbor hateful histories and are still, in themselves, admirable. I’m not sure about this. These ghosts are fickle, and dwell where I will never know until confronted. 

 

Sometimes, in my room in the warm dark, I feel invisible hands at my neck choking the life out of me, and I know that they are Jacob’s hands, they are so cold. Even when we strolled along the seashore on a summer afternoon, his hands were as cold as ice. They bind me now by jealousy and lies and secrets as monstrous as any nightmare. Other nights I feel the heels of soft hands, compressing my sternum, and I know it is a benevolent ghost breathing me to life. And when a draft blows through the curtains I am not lonely. Doesn’t Neel’s Madrileño postcard flutter against its tack above the bed? Isn’t that the smell of Salamanca sweetgrass, in a dreamcatcher that Eli hung above the pane? 

 

And aren’t I a mosaic of all the people who have come and gone into my life? The first day that it rains I drink cinnamon tea because Alex drank cinnamon tea. And smoke curls in the teacup that Elle got me from Colorado, with the Ebi fish painted on the side that I liked so much. I think if I’ve done one original thing in my life it's the creation of a unique sociology that I gather around myself like a cape. The arrangement of these people in time. And then there’s the element of chance. Sometimes they cross my path unannounced, and that is part of it, too. So I am always picking up the bits and pieces, the scales and loose feathers that others leave behind, and sewing myself a patchwork skin. 

 

Echoes, Prisms, Vestiges is a series of photographs of objects in my dorm room that are vessels for ghosts. All of these objects were gifted by people I love and have loved, or otherwise hold strong memory associations. Many have accompanying vignettes, which are snippets of memories that these objects hold. Just as memories have the power to transport us to another place and time, each vignette is written in the present tense to convey the potency and immediacy of past experience.