Itsumade

http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Itsumaden

According to the Taihei chronicles, in the autumn of the year 1334, this ominous bird spirit began appearing in the night sky above the capital's ceremonial hall. It would breathe fire and cry in a wretched and eerie voice, Itsumademo! Itsumademo!, "How much longer?! How much longer?!". The court nobles were all quite disturbed, and chose an expert archer to shoot the creature down. When the huge bird fell from the sky, it was found to be a chimeric beast with the body of a snake, a human-like face, claws like daggers, and a wingspan of around five meters. Apparently it had appeared around the time of a plague, when the bodies of the innumerable deceased were being dumped on the capital's (sic.; ha ha) outskirts. The monstrous itsumaden, it is said, was born from the bitter spirits of all those abandoned dead, and flew about shrieking in sympathy for them. It is also said that a person allowed to starve to death becomes an itsumaden, which haunts whoever refused to feed it in life, crying Itsumademo! Itsumademo!; "How long, how long?", how long will I be neglected?" Itsumade: a material manifestation, representing and consisting of many anonymous ghosts; the returned dead, uninterested in revanchism, do the work of anticipation. If there is mourning to be found here, it is the dead who mourn for us. http://obake.wikispaces.com/Itsumaden

on Ghostbusters

Though incomplete in its treatment of the subject, the real innovation of Ghostbusters (apart from its gleeful, unabashed geekiness - something it pulled off, quite precisely, before it was cool) is its treatment of ghosts not as discrete and singular hauntings to be the crux of a story, but as a sort of indestructible spectral effluent. These waste-ghosts are given neither history nor context; whereas the classically Gothic ghost is (more or less) an undead story needing to be told and/or resolved, these ghosts are more like a cross between city vermin and toxic waste - although, of course, we know that ghosts (and waste, and vermin) must have some story to explain them. That each ghost - each tragedy - is a component of a larger catastrophe, one that will grow, and grow, and grow, is the essence of the ectological crisis. A fuller understanding is one that incorporates the idea that each ghost, while a part of this greater phenomenon, is and has also and simultaneously its own story. Many unresolved tragedies seeking resolution; at the same time and in the same way - crucially - a single worldwide tragedy also seeking resolution.

brief introduction, clarification, and incoherent rambling about the immanent dead

This blog originates from a desire to do something useful and/or interesting with the no-longer-quite-so-fashionable concept of hauntology. It may at times break with that notion (and the dualism it may or may not require) in favor of a new speculative goal: to discover from and/or to impose upon the ghost-concept a more rigorous sort of systematicity, if not actually totality. Hence the simultaneous tribute and thematic break in the worldplay: from ont-/haunt- to eco-/ecto-. If a ghost can be understood as an externality, not only in the ontological and moral sense, but also as an economic externality, then it can be located within the world as part of a set of contradictions - and, more importantly, as a non-external component of a framework that is better capable of comprehending and explaining the ghost than that which externalizes and ignores it. This necessitates a view of ghosts predicated not on the dualist-vitalist view of the ghost as something that both exists and doesn't, but on expanding the category of what is in-the-world to include that which is spectral; in that sense, it may eventually aim for a new materialism that includes the 'immaterial.'