Notes made in preparation for the installations at “Ghosts of Belltown,” sited in the former Bergman Luggage store in downtown Seattle. As with most my work that deals with time or place, this was built on the bones of Bachelard and daydreams, the premise of haunting of memories, fragments and recollections, re-weaving and summoning memory and dreams as they live in space perpetually. - December, 2023

Nothing lasts forever. Nothing forever goes away.

I believe in ghosts, because memory lives in a space, energy clings to matter, energy is material sped up, time is energy is material all bent together in funny shapes that are hard to read with the rods and cones of human eyes.

We are all ghosts, just some of us are haunting the present.

Others haunt the past, some split their time between or beyond. For some the veil is a bit thinner than others.

Some walls are more porous, some stone and soil and bog and holy mud capture the incessant transference of energy like a sticky web, and to those things ghosts cling. Have you, a ghost, not felt that your soul is held more closely by certain objects of affection, by certain places, by a certain thing. Scientists say when we sit across the table from a person even just for a matter of minutes or hours our atoms and electrons leap across the thin distance and mingle and swap and we become each other just a little bit forever. It’s no wonder that after a matter of years two hearts can beat as one (science), or that we bleed together or dream in unison, and that divorce feels like spirit rent from our bones.

We are already ghosts.

Haunting the now, haunting together in a tangle, even more now sending energy through the airwaves to each other. Some used to fear one world, but isn’t it a gift? We howl together and we ache together as we never had before. We see with each other’s eyes, our hearts beat to the same music and create exquisite iterations of the same memories. It was always this way, but now more so.

I suspect we as a species have always known we were one, we were a psychic species, and we ache towards the deep invisible through-line.

And along with the destructive playthings things we make, we create tools to let us become more psychic everyday. We have wrought a ghost world for the ghosts we are, these ghosts in the machine.

But back to the soil, the holy bog and holy mud thick with ghosts from the beginning. And the holy ocean that laps at our silly but beautiful cities here today gone tomorrow. Silly humans that think they are made of flesh and blood, but really bodies made of saltwater, bodies more ocean that bones, blood made by intricate webs of osmosis, drawing water from the air, making blood from the water from the air that we, each other, breathe in and out of one another. Your ghostly breath one minute in my blood the next.

It’s such hubris to think we are not ghosts.

The clattering, heavy mahogany bones, scattered like matchsticks in one hollowed-out ribcage of the city, caught between the ghost of a hill, the regrade’s raze, and the lip of the bay where bittersweet water, river mixed with sea, meets to lap and lick the land’s end. Here lies the damp, unlit pyres heaped with the ghosts of trees carved into bones of a building one century ago, washed in the ashes of memory and pigeon shit and 1000 touch of fingers and hands that have turned handles to enter and leave and enter and leave and left their traces of trysts and sighs and secrets and calamity and stolen naps, stolen kisses, fury, love, deceit, all the ghosts of a feeling that flickered along the seams of a room, rooms like cradles, built of trees that breathed our air with their great lungs, which we mixed with seawater to make blood.