Julie Marie Wade

Cliff Notes for Ghosting

The name-gods have surely gotten this one wrong. Consider how ghosting implies a ghost, and how a ghost implies a haunting. What do ghosts do after all but haunt? They hang around a certain place while giving signs of occupation. They’re tenacious. It’s vocational. Early on, we learn not to confuse invisibility with absence. We learn what makes a haunting pop is presence. The beloved dies, say, but is not gone. Demi Moore wasn’t ghosted as Molly in Ghost. She was haunted by the spirit of her lover, Sam. Contrary to disappearing, Sam stays. And stays. Hones his skills at poltergeisting, a specialized way to haunt. Later, Whoopi Goldberg as Oda Mae is even possessed by Sam—Olympic level haunting there, worthy of a gold. But maybe you don’t know your ghost at all. Maybe it’s a classic kind of manifestation: anonymous, archetypal. The ghost comes with the house. In the parlance of our times, you would like the ghost to ghost you, but she can’t. Have some compassion for this ghost, who has no choice but to bring her work home with her. The home you share is her home, too, and haunting is her job. Any number of people plus a ghost is called a crowd. This is common knowledge. The presence of a ghost implies a leave-taking that didn’t take. Ditto. In a different time, we’d find you at the library wearing giant glasses and scrolling through the microfiche. Questions on your mind: Who died in my house, and why do they remain? But today you’re searching public records on a laptop in your den, contacts most likely in your eyes. The ghost is literally looking over your shoulder, moving your coffee mug, touching your computer keys with an unseen hand. What may appear at first as water damage on the ceiling is actually evidence of ghost. Hauntings often leave traces. It’s not faulty wiring that flickers the lights. No curtains flutter naturally beneath that dormant vent. And no mice tap Morse code messages from deep inside the recently inspected walls. Ask the haunted, and they’ll tell you what they know, phrases like too close for comfort and dreams too lucid to be dreams. Not confined to attics and basements, some ghosts are social, and some ghosts are shy. They’re former people, so like us, they run the gamut, personality-wise. Not all ghosts are sinister, of course, and some must savor the thrill of the haunt. Wouldn’t you, at least a little? Some ghosts have a sense of humor, too, moving eyes in old paintings and shaking chandeliers—parodies of our collective expectations. We seem to know very little about ghosts beyond the tropes we’ve seen in movies, the stories we’ve heard around campfires, told at slumber parties. Can you even ghost a ghost without a priest, a séance, a proper resting place, or when all else fails, burning the whole house down? But these are canonical ghosts we’re talking about, specters on the spectrum from spooky to uncanny. Most everyday ghosts are metaphorical, conjured by grief or desire, though that doesn’t make them any less real—just harder to depict in a Halloween flick. Don’t throw the ghost out with the ghost water, no one ever said until now. Have we considered that the one who grows distant, stops taking our calls, then vanishes like the three dots before the unsent text isn’t a ghost at all? Think back: have we been crowding them, lurking and lingering (cyber-stalking counts!), our shadow ever cast across their wall? Ghost work is 90% ubiquity and only 10% havoc. Some people haunt each other, it’s true, and not just from beyond the grave. In this scenario, the leave-taker may be a hater, a liar, a fool, but like it or not, we’re the ghost.

Cliff Notes for Pathetic Fallacy

There is, at the outset, an impulse to chase, though we know Beauty can’t be overtaken—Beauty can only overtake or escape. In some conversations, Beauty has been known to dominate completely, but never by her given name. Listen for the way we talk around her, the same way a builder talks around a wall. It’s more tenable to mention the bricks, laying them, stacking them, one by one. Assessing the project that Beauty perennially is. Thigh gap (brick). Dimples of Venus (brick). Hourglass figure (brick). Big eyes, small nose, full lips, long lashes, sculpted brows (brick, brick, brick, brick, brick). And we haven’t even gotten to the hair yet—how it should be, where it should be, and where it shouldn’t. A friend says, “Women’s shoulders don’t age like the rest of their bodies.” Is this true? Is this why there are so many shirts designed in an off-the-shoulder style? Internalized: Those domed bones should be punctuated by small points on top, full stops in an ongoing inspection. The blades at the back should be sharp and pert as fins, flesh stretched taut across them. Dorsal definition. I won’t blame magazines or television—they’re old news now and always on trial. Every college freshman can tell you about Photoshop, how women’s bodies are airbrushed to sell lotions and perfume. It’s innuendo that does the heavy lifting anyway: implicit social rankings and euphemistic praise. A woman at the dinner party has lost weight from an ongoing illness. Friends tell her she looks better now than ever. Are they conflating body weight with beauty?  Indeed. Is this how it’s typically done? ‘Fraid so. Even in the more enlightened circles, rife with grad degrees, New Yorker subscriptions, and NPR totes? Sad but true. My mother used to say, “It would take cancer or a miracle for me to be really thin.” She gets cancer, goes into remission, gets cancer again. Her talking points don’t change, and the small points on her shoulders never appear.  Is there such a thing as thin enough? Wallis Simpson said no. I worry she spoke for most of us, even if our mouths would disagree. Beauty’s bodyguards are two thugs named Size and Shame. They keep her in line. She never travels far without them. Fashion Police. Portion Control. They will answer to different sobriquets. On the live stream, a fitness guru chirps: “Ladies, don’t worry! This exercise promotes lean muscle tone.” Translation: You won’t get bigger from moving this way. Translation: Bigger is not beautiful for your kind. For the broads shall not be broad, it is written nowhere and understood everywhere. Beauty is sometimes allowed to surprise us, but there’s pre-meditation in every deviation from her norms. The Prince asked Cinderella in an old film, “Do I love you because you’re beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you?” Eye of the beholder and all that jazz. Meanwhile, Beauty is hiding in the kitchen, hungry but too afraid to eat. Meanwhile, Beauty is setting up a selfie in the hall, anticipating her average number of likes. She’s been told she looks pretty when she pouts, sultry when she sulks. Even her moods have been commodified. Maybe you try to put some distance between yourself and these ideals. You try to turn down the volume on all aesthetic noise. Beauty is a snow-capped mountain or an amber wave of grain. That’s you doing a deep dive into landscapes and the culture’s favorite naturalistic clichés. Maybe you plead the universal fifth every chance you get: “Everyone is beautiful in their own way.” You’re not wrong; you’re just bringing a checkbook to a cash-only bar. Even Beauty won’t humor such high-mindedness. She’d like to, but her henchmen have her on a tight leash. Instead, she drops in, pops up, photobombs and blindsides all day long. You can give up screens and protest pageants, but you’ll still find her name on signboards at the grocery and the pharmacy. “I’m just here for cereal,” you insist. “I’m just here to pick up some pills.” But Beauty, always in danger of fading, continually worms her way in. Even when you eschew her products, you have to pass by them, tidy and beguiling on the shelf: brick, brick, brick. The window breaks, and an alarm goes off: damage courts attention. Akin: Even when Beauty loses, Beauty wins.

Cliff Notes for Academia

You know the accusations, generally speaking. There is still talk of an Ivory Tower, though that metaphor breaks down at the battered and/or finger-smudged doors leading to most English departments. Leaks in the ceiling, buckets on the floor, one wan yellow light hissing and flashing above a desk where the professor scarfs down her lunch just in time for office hours. I’ve had the leak, the bucket, the light, the lunch. It’s not glamorous, but that doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful. We don’t have a chapel with a pretty white steeple. No red brick and no columns either, Corinthian or otherwise. I’d describe the landscaping as “Concrete with Mulch,” punctuated by shaggy palm trees and effulgent bougainvillea. Common area décor is more “late Capitalist PowerPoint” than anything else: boxy shapes, hard edges, plangent shades of non-offensive blue and beige. Kiosks everywhere, reminiscent of a mall. Chipotles plural. Chik-Fil-As plural. Bookstores that sell far more ball caps than books—that stock far more ball caps than books. Most of our students don’t actually live here. The few dorms are filing cabinets—tall, narrow, and uniform—not charming old houses with dormer windows and sleeping porches. That’s wealth and nostalgia informing your view, not a state school in Florida that runs shuttles between its two vast campuses. That sells Dunkin’ Donuts in a twelve-story parking garage so you can grab a chocolate glazed on your way to class. Of course Academia isn’t a place exactly. Like a church, it’s more people than building—the tenants and the tenets of a place. Their modus operandi if you will, which is a very academic thing to say. Do academics love little Latin phrases? I’m an academic, and I do. I use them all the time—ad infinitum. (Ad nauseam for some, I’m sure.) So is it a Bastion of Liberalism, like the critics say? More like a Bulwark of Secular Humanism. Same difference? Just a matter of semantics? But Semantics, of course, is a branch of Linguistics concerned with reference, meaning, and truth. In Academia, no difference is ever the same. Are we splitting hairs here? Maybe—but with the same precision they used to split the atom. That atom-splitting happened at a University, by the way, Academia’s…wait for it…physical instantiation as well as its symbolic home. OK. Now I’m just messing with you. Academics are often caricatured as jargonists and theoryheads, but in those words I also hear attuned to the finest nuances of language and consumed by the finest gradations of thought. Some people call this way of speaking or writing Academese. I’m fluent, though I don’t feel the need to use it all the time. More and more I come to see the value, not the coldness, in the way we learn to encapsulate and contextualize ideas. Haven’t you ever wanted a shield? Not the rawness of the wound but the armor that prevents its reopening? Haven’t you ever wanted to examine the truths of your life without collapsing under their emotional weight? That jargon, you see—those theories—do heavy lifting every day that allows you to save your strength. It’s a paradox, of course, keeping us at arm’s length through terminology in order to bring us closer to the thing itself, the phenomenon under review: patterns and anomalies of human experience. We’re studying ourselves after all, fine-tooth-combing us with methods devised to reduce the snarls. Did your mother ever brush your hair too hard at bedtime? Did she ever wind hot spiked curlers against your skull, then tell you to sit with them for an hour, two? Mine did—because her mother did. But to arrive at a place where I can tell you that story, I first traveled through language that gave me distance from luminous particulars. I needed to study matrilineal relations writ large. I needed to look at standards of beauty and the female double bind. Once, when a student was complaining about critical writing, the lack of flourish and style, an image came to me that I hoped might help elucidate a concept. (Oh, how your professors long to elucidate a concept!) “Do you ever go walking on the beach?” I asked. “It’s Miami, so yeah…kind of a given, I guess.” The light continues sputtering above our heads.  “So when you’re walking on the beach, how aware are you of the fact that sand is glass? You know this, of course, you’ve learned it, but it’s not what you’re thinking about on a sunrise stroll, I imagine?” I could almost see her mind at work, those proverbial wheels turning. “Well, no, because the sand doesn’t feel like glass. It’s not cutting my feet or making them bleed.” I nodded. “You see, I think that’s what academic discourse can do for us sometimes. It can make us forget we’re walking on glass all the time—how soft and vulnerable we are, how charged our subject matter always already is. So we learn a way of communicating about identity and politics and science and religion and history, everything complicated and mysterious and fraught—a way that feels manageable and that allows us to probe more deeply. So we’re not constantly cutting ourselves open. So every lecture and discussion and term paper doesn’t actually draw blood.” She smiled at me, and her shoulders dropped a little further from her ears like something in her body had given way. Then, she offered the highest form of academic praise. “Thank you, Professor. I’ve never thought of it quite that way before.”

Cliff Notes for Romance

Which is more practical than anyone first suspects. For instance, don’t make a fancy dinner and leave a catastrophic sink. The beloved does not wish to atone for your love with hours of scrubbing tomorrow. This is not to give the grand gesture a bad rap, only to suggest that small gestures flourish by accretion—and frequently surpass. Resist the impulse to flaunt your feelings for an audience. Romance is not a sport or a news report, contrary to every spectacle you’ve seen. Neither is romance a recruitment tool for thirst traps or trendy third wheels. (No reality TV, please.) Remember the Pharisees and Saduccees scolded for praying on street corners, for making their faith an object of display? The same message might apply to those proposing on Jumbotrons or over company-wide intercoms. I confess here and now to my own transgressions of the woo-quietly-and-thoughtfully rules. I have sent flowers to her workplace which triggered hay fever, embarrassed her during a meeting, then sent her a-chooing—and eschewing—all the way home. What was I thinking? Not much. But I was hearting everywhere, like a nightmare glitter-bomb bursting from a lovey-dovey card. (It pains me to admit, in retrospect, that perhaps all glitter-bombs are nightmares.) Turns out sweet nothings are in fact just nothings. It doesn’t matter how earnestly you whisper in her ear. Are you good at wining and dining but bad at following through on domestic matters—OK, I’ll say it—chores—like taking out the trash or emptying the dishwasher every time she asks? Better, of course, is doing without being asked, anticipating a need before it begins to press. Talk may be cheap, as in compliments won’t wash or fold or dust or sweep. Praise isn’t particularly useful, especially when unaccompanied by anything else. But I’ve learned an expensive gift is useless, too, if it says far less about her than it does about you. Maybe you didn’t give her exactly the present you want, but did you give her exactly the present you want her to want? I can’t even begin to advise the men hell-bent on giving women so-called “sexy lingerie”—though I’m sure the answer comes down to something no romantic ever wants to hear: Ask her. Does she like it? Does she want it? Would she wear it? Would she rather have/wear something else instead? And can you take it if she tells you to take it back, if she asks you for less hoopla and more help, if she doesn’t dig the whole quixotic menu you have planned and would much prefer to choose things a la carte? I’m in recovery now, I hope, but with a hopeless romantic, relapse is always a source of concern. You don’t cure romance—that’s not the goal. It’s the hopeless behaviors you’re trying to retract. A hopeful romantic can laugh at a rom-com without taking notes, won’t conflate each climactic montage with Seduction’s step-by-step guide. I return us both to Ask her. You want to skip this step—I know—but the problem is, it’s every step on the staircase. You want to reinvent the aphrodisiac the way the stubborn before you (they were hopeless, too) wanted to reinvent the wheel. Here’s the thing, though: irritation is not an aphrodisiac—and neither are oysters if your lover is allergic to shellfish. I feel you, my friend. Extreme close-up is not a good look, and it’s myself I’m looking hardest in the eyes. Sometimes I remember, when I’m fixing a cup of coffee just the way she likes, when I turn off the alarm so she can sleep a little longer, when I bring her a midday snack while the webinar inevitably drones on—this, too, is romance, the real romance of everyday life, where you don’t just see something, don’t just say something—where you, like every math teacher was quick to exhort, show your work!, then absolutely don’t complain about it.

Cliff Notes for Oceans

Nowadays everyone is quick to dismiss Freud. “Switch one vowel, and see what a fraud he was,” said the brash young scholar, assuming the room would laugh in unison—which, in fact, we did. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been known to lie on my back on a sofa the length of my body (what my grandmother would have rightly called a davenport) and speak aloud at some duration about my dreams. Granted, I am not consulting with a paid analyst on a fifty-minute hour but confiding in my partner as she putters around the kitchen or works a crossword page. Like poems, some dreams lean lyric, and some dreams lean narrative. Like poems, most reveal longings or insecurities, and these, always with a peculiar kind of panache. I savor dreams as much for their full-cloaked mysteries as for their half-dressed epiphanies. I savor especially the revelation of my partner’s dreams. Perhaps what we dream is a partially drafted letter, interrupted by the em dash of waking, then surreptitiously slipped in the mail. At first, it’s lost in transit to retelling—a trek to the bathroom, the closet, the percolator eager for water and beans—but each dream bears the implicit stamp, Return to Sender. In 1927, Nobelist Romain Rolland sent a letter to Sigmund Freud. This was a real letter, not a dream, but the contents read in a dream-like way, referencing an “oceanic feeling”—that perceived oneness we have at times with the whole external world. “A sensation of eternity,” he explained. Rolland thought this oceanic feeling was the source of all religious ecstasy. Freud thought this oceanic feeling was a vestige of all infancy, hearkening back to a time before a child learns to differentiate the self from others. Permit me here to dip in my oar. I think this oceanic feeling is a direct consequence of encountering an ocean. There are five now, one more than I was taught in school. Together they cover 70% of the earth’s surface, which is about the same percentage of water that comprises our human hearts and lungs.  Is it possible we recognize ourselves when gazing at an ocean?  My life began on the Pacific—the largest one, ironically named. I remember air thick with fish smoke, divers in wet suits whose slick bodies resembled seals. Always being cold in the water and loving that cold for its clarity. Always being battered by the waves and loving those waves for their stamina. Is it even possible to stand before an ocean without at least a quiver’s worth of awe? And when you plunge headlong into the spume, are you not entering a version of all our dreams denuded, perhaps also some of our dreams deferred? My life continues now on the Atlantic—which is immense, of course, but still a smaller ocean than my first. Everything grows smaller (paradox!) as we age. Sometimes the water here is very warm, more like a Jacuzzi than the sea. Sometimes the water here is very calm, more like a washbasin than the sea. Everything I know echoes through the language of this place: in too deep, over your head, riding the wave, cast adrift, caught in the current, a drop in the bucket. Some days all I want is to be a drop in the bucket, and by bucket I mean the vast and shining sea. Freud says that’s my “primitive ego” talking, and who am I to disagree? We call our creations bodies of work, which puts us in mind of bodies of water: Our human bodies more soaked than solid—we even have watery bones. Don’t you love the way the salt makes you lighter, lifts you up on your back, insists that you float and thus regard the sky? Out there, I’m a buoy, you’re a buoy, everyone’s a buoy-buoy, undulant and newly equalized. Looking at a pond, we can’t help but feel like big fish—fancy, ornamental koi. But looking at an ocean, watching all the little fish a-leap in the morning light, so many and so synchronized, a wish rises out of me, the tug tough as undertow: to follow them, fuse with them, one school in unison, spreading across the surf.