GHOST/HOME: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted
by Dennis James Sweeney
Ricochet Editions, 2020
Review by Joe Sacksteder
At the community-wide meeting where the president of my school announced that we had to send our boarding high schoolers home within the next five days due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he ended with, “We didn’t choose this thing; this thing chose us.” That was the one part of the speech that I felt the need to reframe for the Creative Writing Division at our departmental debriefing. I, at the very least, wanted the students to be able to choose their tradeoff: an evil that you can hate, that is making you pay for some sin, or a virus, the ills of which can be exacerbated or mitigated by social equity and informed judgment.
The former is an understandable stance to try out for someone suffering the absurdity of an autoimmune disorder, like Dennis James Sweeney who writes about his experience with Crohn’s disease in his chapbook essay, GHOST/HOME: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted. Sweeney presents the disorder as a temperamental specter whose inscrutable mood swings he ever strives to satisfy. After one incident of a healthy bowel movement, the speaker remarks, “That is the surprise of health: Sometimes, for reasons I cannot understand, my ghost allows me. Maybe it was the admiration I felt for the passing faces [of marathon runners].” The speaker then falls to researching things like the potential link between Crohn’s and living at high altitudes, scientific inquiries alongside more ritualistic one. Beneath every metaphor and instance of figurative language, Sweeney again and again helps us understand, is a real body in baffling pain.
As the title might suggest, the ambivalences expressed by the speaker toward his body parallel unsure feelings about home. After Sweeney experiences a rough year of symptoms while living in Denver, one of the desperate charms that he hopes might alleviate his symptoms is a return to his childhood home in Cincinnati—but his parents are in the process of selling it and moving into a condo, and it’s to this instability that he attributes the trip’s mixed effect on his symptoms. He returns again under tough circumstances, to visit his grandmother before her death, and finds this surreality echoed in the uncanny setting of the new condominium filled with old things, things that held important places in his memory.
Sweeney and I are both in theory-heavy PhD programs, the type that like to teach Modernism and Postmodernism as a sort of collective exploration of our new knowledge that home is a myth, our new knowledge that Darwinism and Marxism and psychoanalysis and two world wars have turned us all into our own Odysseuses adrift on stormy seas trying to get back to our precious metanarratives. And, look, I believe nostalgia is always a longing for something that never existed as much as the next guy, but what reading this book made me think about is how that destruction of Home and Truth is so often assumed to be on an ideological level, as if by cracking a smile we’ve pledged ourselves to monosemic interpretations of texts and basically laid down and died. But home is also physiological, embodied, and the concept of home in Sweeney’s text gradually takes the form of a resignation to the body’s limits and its mysteries. A resignation that is itself healthy, since to be adrift on physiological seas is to risk psychosomatics. “What if, the more I am haunted,” his analysis of Clarice Lispector’s The Chandelier leads him to question, “the better I understand that I must live alongside what I cannot contain of myself?” Some critics like Jean Baudrillard view our various postmodern crises as a result of our attempts to know everything, to erase the white spots on the map, but folks with autoimmune disorders need to look no further than their own hands or feet or guts for mystery, the riddle of why our bodies are attacking themselves. “If you don’t believe in ghosts,” Sweeney—like Hamlet coming back with Horatio’s lab results—describes this sense of the physiological sublime, “you don’t believe in your own interstices. More lives in us than we can know.”
Quarantine has also suddenly foregrounded immunosuppressed folks in a weird and terrifying conversation. Important public safety information that doubles as what I try to forget every day: that the fragility of our economic and institutional systems are, for some of us, replicated on a bodily level. That, for me, if I lose my job I lose my hands. Public safety information that doubles as the tacit or explicit willingness of politicians and spring breakers to sacrifice the more vulnerable among us to preserve life as normal for them. The societal ghost, then, is the inconvenience of the elderly, the cancer patients, those folks with diabetes or heart conditions, and the immunosuppressed—as they always have been for currently healthy individuals reaping the benefits of Darwinian capitalism.
During quarantine, many of us are home with a vengeance, stuck in places that feel less and less familiar the longer we stay there. Suddenly our houses and apartments are being referred to as what they were all along—shelters. Our bodies as numbers to prove points both good and evil. We do grand tours of our limited floorplans, haunting our own spaces while still alive, trying to convince ourselves that we’re the lucky ones. Or, as Sweeney puts it, “Home is a place where you live inside as if you yourself are a ghost.”
Susan Sontag’s 1978 critical text, Illness as Metaphor, might have us avoid all this ghost talk with regard to auto-immune disorders or COVID-19 or quarantine. She follows up her own metaphor of the “kingdom of the well” and the “kingdom of the sick” thus: “My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.” The thing about auto-immune disorders, among other diseases, are that they prove that binary notion of well and unwell, of bodily wholeness, as misrepresentations. It might have been there all along; it is one’s own self. We don’t move from kingdom to kingdom but rather live in both simultaneously. They are not kingdoms, of course, but economic shutdowns make them feel so. They are also not ghosts, and this thing did not choose us, and home is a metaphor too. But metaphors are also homes, ones that need to be as rigorously interrogated as national responses to pandemics.
“The ghost’s exact ghostliness is its resistance to stable narration,” Sweeney writes, bringing the text’s myriad ghosts down to the level of the writer’s daily task. To diagnose the undiagnosable, to render clearly those things that can’t be caught on camera, and, at the same time, to grow again the white spaces on our maps. We often call a text symptomatic en route to criticizing it; texts like GHOST/HOME reorient that diagnosis through experimental practice and the breakdown of traditional notions of economy and cohesion, showing how societal ills are registered on both the physical and textual body.