Okay. I wrote a book about ghosts. Or rather about the ability to see ghosts, as Hamlet does in the famous play. In the play, there is the moral element, the knowing-right-from-wrong, the ghost of Hamlet's father letting Hamlet know something in a way uncommon for beings bound to three-dimensional space/time reality and its limited perspective.

Ghosts. Maybe it sounds like crazy talk. But a metaphor, at least. How do we come into the world, to the family we have? Why do some relationships happen, why do some stick? Why are we where we are? Why do we know the people we know? What is behind it all?

Is this juvenile thinking? ("Yes," I can hear some people say.)

On Hamlet's side, we have the possibility that we know who and what we do for a reason, out of something the Universe(s) deem appropriate. In our lives we come across people and meaningful thoughts and objects, and if we are sensitive and perceptive, we see meaning. As I see meaning in having a lovely old Polish lady with a message for the world as a neighbor of infinite kindness now having passed away from her time on Earth, her spirit with us most definitely. As the Lamas see meaning when a certain child picks out the objects of the previous, piece of cake. As Lincoln saw meaning in certain words he was charged with shepherding.

On Hamlet's side, we have a readiness, a 'readiness for all.' Meaning that when something is meaningful, we take to it, we see its beauty, we see its friendship.

How the world sorts out our connections, the personality of the relationships we have with each other, is not always directly controllable. Your father is your father. Your mother is your mother. Your teacher is your teacher. Your favorite books are your favorite books. Is that too passive for some, for those who want to 'rule their own destiny?' I would think it a matter of letting something organically growing to flourish as it would. I would think it a matter of letting something develop in partly unspoken ways.

Our ghosts oblige us to do certain things, the things that feel right for us. A composer will be a composer. A heroine of Poland's independence and status as a nation will be who she is. A writer will be a writer. And one on a path can only hope that other sort of ghostly presences--we can never be sure exactly of their presence, location and identities, except by sensing them somehow in our hearts, or in the places where we decide what's right and appropriate--will be there for aid and support and direction, inspiration, courage, will and fortitude. We may be left in darkness, but still find a light that shines continuously. It all speaks to what a wonderful thing the brain (and all the nervous connections that tie it to our bodies) is.

Being haunted. Maybe it sounds strange. Maybe it sounds like a bad thing. Maybe it sounds like something best left to old bygone folklore from the West of Ireland and other forgotten places modernity hasn't quite uniformed. Tales told for free. Maybe it sounds like chicken blood superstition.

And yet, has anyone ever came up with a better answer? Has anyone ever come up with a better definition of what it means to be 'a classy guy,' a better mensch, a decent thoughtful person, a friend? Is there a better means of prayer?

Literature: the long and quietly triumphant strain of realizing the ghostly appropriateness of all things. A great beautiful theory of relativity, advanced by the likes of Cervantes and Kundera, by poets, Keats, Ted Hughes, Fellini, and thousands of others known and obscure, by Twain and Hemingway and Kerouac and too many to the point of it being the waterfall itself.



But let me finish where I started. Hamlet, in the course of a play, comes of age. He becomes a man, a just one, shaped and marked by life's events, by birth, growth, love, and events tragic. (Youthful and distracted, he's not a man in the beginning of it, which makes the story interesting. As with any male, it takes a lot of steps, something Shakespeare is quite candid about, not pulling any punches on us, quite mercilessly.) He becomes Hamlet, with dignity, and then, the play ends in a death that preserves him, a man now, for eternity. He becomes, it seems, a kind of ghost himself. Perhaps more serious than he would have ever wanted to be, behind his good-natured manner, able, after all, to see ghosts.