If a poltergeist is a mischievous spirit, then what is a memory ghost?
Photo credit: Bianca SpenceKathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of existing?Paul Vermeersch: When I dig down very deep, I believe I can get all the way back to my first birthday. November 1974. In this memory, I am sitting in a highchair in the kitchen of my family’s house on Archer Crescent in London, Ontario. The memory is hazy and broken. Brick. Vinyl. Formica. Linoleum. Vague impressions somewhat aided by a photograph I saw many years ago.
In my memory, the wallpaper in the kitchen is patterned with yellow and brown flowers; I write about this in my poem “Suburban Hauntology: Kitchen Wallpaper” from my book Shared Universe. Last year at the Toronto Artist Project, I bought a small painting of that very wallpaper pattern from the Montreal artist Jacinthe Rivard. The painting is called “The Goonies” which was my favourite movie when I was eleven years old.
But ten years before that I was sitting in that highchair surrounded by a haze of brown and yellow flowers. I was clenching a wedge of chocolate cake in my left hand. My first birthday present was a plastic Fisher-Price Two-Tune TV that played “London Bridge Is Falling Down” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Its screen was a paper scroll with drawings and lyrics synchronized to a music-box concealed inside.
It occurs to me now that those two songs are engaged in a fateful struggle: one of them is about catastrophic decay and the other is about being happy and carefree. Perhaps that contradiction might explain something about my mindset, or more to the point, something about my poetics and thematic preoccupations. And perhaps that wallpaper is at the root of my aesthetics, or at least the root of my nostalgia. Perhaps none of this happened exactly as I remember it, but this is how I remember it. Perhaps life is but a dream.
KM: What is your first memory of being creative (writing, art making, etc.)?PV: There was never a time when I didn’t love being creative. Drawing. Painting. Playing with Lego. Gluing popsicle sticks together. As soon as I could hold a crayon, I was ready to make something. One time, when I was living in Brights Grove, Ontario—and again, maybe this was when I was around eleven years old, the summer The Goonies came out, and I was inspired by Ke Huy Quan’s character Data who was always creating outrageous gadgets—I took some scrap lumber and a black rubber bungee cable, and I built a kind of makeshift crossbow that fired little metal dinky cars.
When I was ready to test it out, I shot a red Matchbox Formula One race car at a tree, and the car actually lodged into the trunk about an inch. I didn’t expect it to be so powerful! To be honest, I was a little afraid that such a dangerous weapon might fall into the wrong hands. I must have felt a little like J. Robert Oppenheimer when they tested the first nuke: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
So, I took the crossbow home and dismantled it immediately. I never showed it to anyone else. No one ever knew about it but me. That was my first and only foray into weapons manufacturing, and I guess after that I thought it was just safer to stick to writing and drawing.
KM: What is the best or worst dream you ever had?PV: I had a lot of terrible nightmares as a kid. Sometimes they were full-blown night terrors. Those really stick in your memory, especially the early ones when you have no frame of reference, no idea that what you are experiencing isn’t real. I remember waking up one night when I was very little—or thinking that I had woken up, but I must have still been dreaming—and my bedroom walls were riddled with eyes that opened and closed, all different sizes, all different colours, with fleshly lids and willowy eyelashes, all blinking and looking at me, lurching around in their sockets. Somehow, they were all single eyes—that is, they weren’t arranged in pairs, left and right. Just these myriad, menacing cyclops eyes, all scowling.
A few years later I remember having a nightmare where Sweetums, the hulking brown monster from The Muppet Show, was chasing me over the edge of a bottomless cliff, and no matter how hard I tried to escape, I could never outrun him because he was wearing big red roller skates. As nightmares go, it was utterly ridiculous and cartoonish, but within the internal logic of the dream, it was physical and real and entirely terrifying.
As for the other half of your question, I can’t tell you the best dream I ever had. Whenever I wake up, I almost never remember having had a pleasant dream, or even a merely bland one. I only remember the nightmares. Daydreams are another matter, though. I daydream a lot. Pleasantly, even. Do daydreams even count as dreams? If they do, then perhaps they are the best dreams. Merrily, merrily, merrily….
KM: Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?PV: If by “ghosts” you mean the disembodied, numinous spirits of the dead lingering on the material plane to haunt the living, then no. Absolutely not. But what else might the word ghost refer to? Many of these questions concern memory, and I think the word ghost might be a useful term for a specific phenomenon of memory.
If a poltergeist is a mischievous spirit, then what is a memory ghost? An erinnerungsgeist? The lingering metaphysical impression of a person can “haunt” us without it being some spectral, undead presence. I think a memory ghost must be unexpected somehow. You can’t see it coming. A framed picture on a shelf has been placed there for the specific purpose of remembrance. It is a kind of shrine, but it is not a ghost; it has no connection to the ghostly aspect of memory. You know it is there, and it will never startle you.
But what about that scarcer feeling, when you are rummaging around in an old box or drawer or closet, and you come across some unexpected item, something innocuous—and old key or a coin purse or one of those tiny screwdrivers for fixing eyeglasses—that had once belonged to a departed loved one? Suddenly that innocuous item brings back a flood of vivid, unexpected memories: the way a door creaked, a car arriving home, paying for cigarettes in a particular store, or the crepelike texture of skin around someone’s eyes.
These precipitous memories, triggered by a simple connection to some stumbled-upon artefact, are unmoored from any purposeful or organized act of remembrance. One could say these memories are visitations, as they are visited upon us. They practically say boo! This is what I mean by an erinnerungsgeist, a memory ghost. I think they may be the closest thing to a momentary experience of haunting that we can truly have. Memories are metaphysical, and when they catch us unaware, unprepared, then perhaps there is something ghostly, something haunting, in that.
KM: If you could send your love to anyone, who would it be and why?PV: Creativity is radical by definition. What we call the status quo is the product of societal inertia, and it wants to remain inert, so it resists creativity which inevitably produces newness and change. There are endless forces acting against creativity in service of the status quo. Poverty acts against creativity: hunger and desperation and toil will stop genius in its tracks. War and violence and genocide act against creativity by destroying the very possibility of creation. Bigotry and racism and bullying exist to stop certain groups of people, or even certain individuals, from achieving their full creative potential. Conservatism and dogma and doctrine and tradition—powerful systems all designed to keep things the way they are—act ruthlessly against creativity. Within the cultural suffocation these systems impose, we are reminded that the words “deviation” and “deviant” share a common root.
I would send my love to those who strive to be creative and progressive and human in spite of these forces. Those who struggle in poverty, who endure war and genocide, who are harassed and assaulted by bigots and bullies, who throw off the bonds of dogma and nationalism. I send my love to all the deviants and creative weirdos out there who imagine a better world.
KM: Author's choice – come up with a question you've always wanted to answer but no one ever asked.PV: In December 2022, novelist Emily St. John Mandel orchestrated an entire interview with journalist Dan Kois in Slate just to establish the fact that she was divorced. Turns out editors for Wikipedia refused to update her marital status without a verifiable secondary source. I’m going to use my “author’s choice” question for something similar.
I’ve always wanted someone to ask me where I was born, because the website for the Canadian Encyclopedia has it wrong—HINT! It’s not Brights Grove—and no one there seems to be able to fix it. And now that single mistake is replicating itself on Wikipedia because the Canadian Encyclopedia is the only source they have for my place of birth, and again, the editors for Wikipedia won’t change it without a verifiable secondary source. So, Kathryn, here’s the scoop! I was born in Mississauga, Ontario, in 1973. Not in Brights Grove.
There, hopefully that matter is settled.
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NMLCT
by Paul VermeerschECW Press, 2025Imagine The Matrix retold by the reanimated cyborg bodies of the Brothers Grimm.
Fables and fairytales collide with virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and monstrous myths in a world where no one knows what to believe. In his eighth book of poems, Paul Vermeersch responds to the increasing difficulty of knowing what is real and what isn’t, what is our genuine experience and what is constructed for us by The Algorithm. In a “post-truth” society rife with simulations, misinformation, and computer-generated hallucinations, these poems explore the relationship between the synthetic and the authentic as they raise hope for the possibility of escape from MCHNCT (Machine City) to NMLCT (Animal City), where the promise of “real life” still exists.
These poems — all precisely 16 lines long, identically formed as though mass-produced — are themselves artificial creations, products of the imagination, sometimes disorienting but always vivid. They hold up a mirror not only to nature, but also to its unnatural distortions and facsimiles. In NMLCT, Vermeersch gives us his answer to an existence in thrall to the artificial. But it also foretells a different future, one where the air and the grass and the trees, and all the life they engender, might always be genuine and sensed and safe.
Launch detailsJoin Paul and ECW Press for the launch of NMLCT at The Piston, 937 Bloor Street West, on Wednesday, September 24 at 7pm.
Please visit paulvermeersch.ca for news and information about this book and other upcoming events.
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