It’s okay to believe in ghosts

There’s a pigeon pecking away at what appears to be a spattering of puke. With two fingers I pinch the screen of my phone and snap a photo of the winged rat. A less disquieting version of Morrissey croons delicately in the background, an immortal plea for satisfaction. The timestamp on the liquid-crystal display slowly ticks away. Snaking out of the headphone jack is a dirt-cheap pair of earbuds, coiling and tangling as they slither into my ears. 

The portable CD player, a CD-Walkman D-E220, cost me 25 dollars and 15 minutes of browsing Kijiji. It has a thick, yellowing label on the bottom with faded letters spelling out ‘REFURBISHED.’ I bought it off an old man named Eddy, who still uses Hotmail, at a subway station, where he sat in his green Honda Civic just off the curb at the side of the half-empty parking lot. Of course, there are liabilities to purchasing items from strangers, and even more so to meeting up with them in public, but I wasn’t particularly concerned about either risk. I just needed to feel that glossy plastic shell and the weight of its mechanical organs nestled within my palms.

In that psychical lull situated between the puke-eating pigeon and 1984 Morrissey, I began to ponder the circumstances which brought upon the insatiable hunger in which I desired more than anything the distorted notes stored within the pits and lands of a compact disc. Consumerism, nostalgia, individualism, I considered all of these possibilities. They all made sense, perfectly plausible realities, no matter how shameful. Admittedly, in my shame, I was desperate for an explanation that didn’t sound so plaintive. 

Perhaps a compact disc can be seen as some paltry idol for the nebbish and disaffected to worship as a relic from ‘better days.’

One typically does not choose to listen to CDs in this day and age for their sound quality. Instead, one chooses to listen to CDs in this day and age due to their sound inferiority. Though the merits of a CD have been rendered obsolete, its shortcomings resurrect it. The very idea—the existence—of sound quality has moved on, reborn. 

Distortion, skips, scratches, all these concerns have been deleted from the realm of auricular entertainment. Now files are uploaded to the cloud; Spotify is nearly ubiquitous for ‘listening to music.’ This evolution is what makes the CD so valuable; its being is now far more precious than its utility.

How ridiculous it is! An object with a clearly defined function is now loved for what it is over what it does; what it is bolstered by what was. What was, not what the CD was: the CD is a symbol that supersedes physicality. The body of a disc, shiny reflective aluminium laid over a slice of polycarbonate, is only a host that is temporarily home to something far greater. In it lies the past, and with it, the haunting wail of a future yet to come.

We consider the existence of the past to be just that: left behind as we trudge forward, one present to the next. Every existence produces a remainder, however, and the 16-bit sound of Johnny Marr’s guitar is exactly that. Only within the whirring machinations of a CD player can one come close to recreating an experience of the 1980s, those limitations of the technology adding a sheen of authenticity. Inevitably, then, the conditions for idealisation arise—the birth of a ghost. Overshadowed by its successors, it is forgotten, unable to tip the scales in the direction of the present.

The ghost of our past, one we collectively reminisce upon, begins to say things like things were better back then and our generation is so doomed—childish yearnings for irreplicable times. It trails behind us and we try to cling to it, but our arms do not reach. Mirrored in the shadow of these lamentations is the ghost that has imagined a future for us. Now with a name, the future is bestowed existence. At once it becomes both finite and infinite. Infinite in its scope looming across the periphery of human thought, finite once it is pencilled out into our future-present, demarcating the end of our current history as we know it.

Yet this future-present has failed to occur. Where is the better world we have hoped to conjure? Every day is another nail in the coffin of the present-present hellscape, not a far cry from that of the past-present. We feel a little abandoned, left to ripen and rot under the red-hot sun of now. We can’t help but think, is this it? Are we stuck here, in the amber of the moment, forever doomed to shift our understanding of the present to adjust for its metamorphic nature, no future in sight? Is this really it?

Oh, how we long to leap into the cool embrace of the future, glimmering with cyborgs and teleportation and knowledge surpassing the limits of our imagination. And it is with this longing that we turn to the past, haunted by what was to come but never did. We are at the end of the history that we’ve come to know, and we seek solace within the ghosts of the past.

Those merely a decade or two before us would scoff at our eschatology—the end of history has already occurred! The millennium bug, hell, even December 21, 2012, everything we are dreading was supposed to happen long ago. “We are late to being late,” and this phrase would have been what our predecessors heard, delayed in their realisation of an undeniable transformation of the world during the twentieth century. But now is not the time to mull over historicity.

It is a time to believe in the ghost, that hatchling of a future struggling to crack the shell with the milky egg tooth. Or is it really the ghost of the past, a resurgence of what was once thought long gone? It is impossible to distinguish. Regardless, so long as the timestamp on the liquid-crystal display continues to tick away, the CD deep within its stomach spinning out a tune, whatever you chalk up to being a true end has not arrived yet. Conjecture what you will about being and time, but the bird is there, and so is the wind slicing your face, the ache in your feet, the sting of the sun. And for now, that’s all you need to move on to the next.