Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer

by Matthew Gavin Frank

THE CURTAINS WERE PINK. HE WAS HAVING THE dream again.

Originally, I began the book with what is now the second section: “One Tuesday, in 1874, Reverend Moses Harvey woke up cold…” I grew to feel that it felt too easy to begin that way, with the simple and expected revealing of day, time, and main character. It felt, I suppose, too “grounding” from the get-go (and the book, as it progresses, I think, plays with an oscillation between feeling grounded and up-in-the-air, grounded and up-in-the air—a stylistic choice that kind of mimics the ways in which we’ve regarded the giant squid over time—as myth, as real, as myth, as real, as both at once…). I wrote what is now the opening section well after I had finished the first draft. I wanted Moses Harvey not just to wake up on a Tuesday in 1874, but to wake up from something. Likewise, I wanted the reader to feel grounded in the second section only after first feeling a bit untethered, unanchored in specific time or place, floating in a dreamscape. Do you have recurring dreams that somehow relate to your waking obsessions? Has a dream ever impacted your life (as it did Harvey’s)? If so, how so?

NO ONE CAN TELL ME WHERE TO FIND IT. NOT the young policeman chatting up the pretty jogger in yellow butt-hugger shorts on Water Street (Devon Row? Moses Harvey? Squid? Are you sure you’re talkin’ about St. John’s, Newfoundland?). Not the docent at The Rooms, the “new” Newfoundland Museum, built with some misappropriated stainless-steel-and-glass ultramodern dedication to some anorexic hip-bone angularism, which looks like the offspring of the phoenix and crapola.

All of these on-the-ground scenes wherein I basically stalk the current resident of Moses Harvey’s house were written last, after the rest of the book was already written. I had hit a wall in the writing process and had to light out for Newfoundland in order to conduct on-site research, and walk the same morning walk that Harvey ritualistically walked (the one that led him on that fateful morning, to the giant squid), and get drunk with Harvey’s descendants, and immerse myself in what the filmmaker Werner Herzog sometimes controversially refers to as “the voodoo of place.” Traveling seems to intensify one’s penchant for self-reflection and self-pity, for loneliness, for the shoehorning of one’s own life into some larger socio-cultural context. And all of these actions and desires— while traveling, especially, and snapped out of one’s comfort zone— are again likely misguided and obsessed with all the wrong beautiful things, and thereby terribly, heartbreakingly human. And, in my case, worth shuffling through on the page, via multiple drafts of course. How has the act of traveling inspired you in your life? How has it changed you?

I FIND NO ICE-CREAM PARLOR. I TRY TO TAKE comfort in history, or at least, in brochures: The first ice-cream parlor in North America was opened by colonist and confectioner Philip Lenzi in New York City in 1776.

I’m often asked: what’s the deal with this ice cream thread? What does ice cream have to do with the guy who took the first photo of the giant squid? Let’s fast-forward to Part Three of the book, which engages various experiences and expressions of pain across time, culture and species. Historically, one of the reasons that humans have considered the giant squid to be a monster, to be evil (it was known as the “Devil-fish” before it was known as the giant squid) had to do not only with its size and shape, but also its silence; especially how it would remain silent, even after a fisherman cuts one of its tentacles off, for instance (which occurs in a scene in the book). Since the squid didn’t express pain as we’d expect it to (silently, rather than screaming), we told ourselves that it didn’t feel pain, and was therefore the Other, the Monster… We still do this with animals, in fact (fish, perhaps, most especially). In researching cultural expressions of pain, and the ways in which we greet the pain of another, I became interested in the ways in which we try to assuage the pain of others. We write heartfelt cards. We tie balloons to their bedframes. We girdle the tones of our voices toward sounds we associate with sympathy… We bring gifts. In my research, I found that two of the most popular “gifts” the world over are flowers and ice cream. These two things kept coming up, over and over again. I began to think harder about this, to search for my own connections with ice cream, for instance, and how they may serve—however implicitly—to communicate with my obsession over the giant squid. So, I decided to commit. To see if I could pull this off. Even though I realize the connection is tenuous, I had to trust that the repeated appearance of ice cream in my squid research process needed to mean something. So, I decided to walk that tightrope, give credence to digression and associative logic. I wanted the reader to be as surprised and delightfully disoriented as I was when continually uncovering these ancillary bits subject matter and mustering the imaginative alchemy necessary to associate them with the main thread. Our brains are often restless. How is yours restless? What else, for instance, does ice cream make you think of? What particular memories? Who else was there? What else was going on in the world then? Where do those memories lead you? Use ice cream here as a portal into your past…

ONE TUESDAY IN 1916, MY POPPA DAVE WAS BORN.

I have a huge picture of Poppa Dave as a baby on my living room wall. The frame is egg-shaped, brass and leafy, evoking some repurposed royal bedframe, some garland, someone else’s crown of thorns. He looks surprised in the picture—big and surprised. Surely some unusual and unusually bright lights had invaded his space, rendered it unfamiliar. He is caught in their brightness. With a well-combed head of hair, he is sitting caught, life-sized and blue-eyed on a furry blanket on a couch, or on the pelt of a wolverine on the floor of that decrepit Brooklyn tenement where his mother, Dorothy—my great-grandmother— barely kept him alive with breast milk, and then later, those orange blobs of chicken fat. I didn’t initially intend to write about Poppa Dave in this book, but he kept asserting himself on the text—in memory, of course— when I went in search of personal narrative—my personal connections to my own obsession with the squid. He, too, was larger than life, and still is—as a giant baby hanging on my wall. Do you have particular memories of a departed loved one that occur to you often, and in the most seemingly random of moments? How do these memories, do you think, affect your own interests and obsessions?

See: the mythical giant squid, which isn’t mythical at all—it’s been photographed and captured (dead), it’s been encased in Plexiglas in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (in a room bordering that which houses the profoundly boring Hope Diamond), stretched out to its maximum length in its thermoplastic coffin—unimpressive, dead, anorexic, a behemoth snot hanging horizontally, its poor legs limp, spaghettical.

Preparing the Ghost began after I saw the first-ever photograph taken of the giant squid hanging in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. I scribbled the three-line caption beneath it on a piece of scrap paper. When I got home, I turned to Google, and then tumbled down the proverbial rabbit hole. I discovered that, in 1874, when Newfoundland Reverend Moses Harvey secured and photographed, for the first time, an intact specimen of the giant squid, he finally rescued the beast from the realm of mythology and proved its existence, forever altering the ways in which we engaged the construct of the sea monster (via the lenses of literature, art, science, religion, et. al.). To take the photo, Harvey transported the squid from one bay to another, and then to his home where he proceeded to drape it over his bathtub's curtain rod so its full size could be displayed. I became obsessed with tracing the logistics of Harvey’s undertaking and connecting said logistics to the peculiarities of Harvey’s personal life. I expected to get a 2,500-word essay out of it, and then 500 pages later, I found that I had about 300 pages to cut. What are some of your latest Google-fueled “rabbit-holes?” Where have they lead you?

MEMORY IS A TANTRUM.

Many readers have asked me about this line. Folks often seem to be bewildered by it—not unpleasantly, I hope. I, too, am pleasantly bewildered by it. When traveling on airplanes, I often write on barf bags. This particular line was rescued from one such barf bag. I don’t remember where I was coming from, or where I was going (memory is a tantrum, you see—often insisting on itself, even when it’s incorrect, incomplete, and faulty—its loudness often obscuring clarity and accuracy). I began to wonder about the innate tenuousness of memory, but also about how the stories of our lives often depend on deluding ourselves into thinking that our memories are structurally-sound. I began to wonder how the faulty nature of memory—collectively and individually, across history and culture—has also affected the content and impact of many of the myths, histories, and “truths” we hold sacrosanct. Being 30,000 feet above the earth sometimes has this effect on me. In any case, I started making a list on the barf bag: Memory is a blue whale, memory is a firefly, memory is an asteroid, memory is a dying star, memory is a prayer, memory is a tantrum, memory is a bell, memory is a ghost, memory is Pluto, memory is a tentacle… (FYI: Many of the “lists” in the book were originally written in this way, on airplanes). The tantrum variation stuck with me, bewildered me (deliciously so), and compelled me to interrogate it until I began to make sense of it. Yes, I thought: memory is often petulant, cheeks flushed and stamping its feet. Before I had to put my tray table back up on the descent, I circled this one. Here’s a fun writing exercise: Try making a list like this. What is memory to you? Get associative and weird. Have fun. Post your examples here, if you like.

CALAMARI, THE ITALIAN WORD FOR SQUIDS, HAS long been a staple food source in the Mediterranean, but took a bit longer to catch on in North America where now, along with the buffalo wing, the potato skin, the jalapeño popper, and the mozzarella stick, it dominates the appetizer sections of menus at establishments both gourmet and shitty, served alongside dipping sauces that range from lavender aioli to balsamic vinaigrette to tartar to marinara sauce.

I’m a food obsessive and a squid obsessive, and I therefore began to think a lot about what it meant to eat—to take into our bodies—something that once featured in our myths. I started working in restaurants when I was eleven, washing dishes in a fast-food chicken on the outskirts of Chicago. I started keeping a journal, which persisted throughout my restaurant work years—just a quotidian record of my life and its silly ornaments. As such, I thought a lot about food over the years, touched a lot of food, caressed it, manipulated it, changed its chemistry, physically massaged a lot of food, extracted—with a series of very sharp knives—parts of food from a whole, ever chronicling, however inadvertently, how my relationship to food evolved. I left home at age seventeen, and bummed around the world picking up restaurant work along the way, apprenticing in a series of kitchens. I think that at the center of PtG is a question of appetite. Why do we feel the need to make myth of some narratives (or facts—like the giant squid), and not others? And: why, eventually, are we compelled to kill our myths and invent others? And why are certain things—again, like the giant squid—the recipients of our desire to keep them in the middle zone, between myth and reality, ever-fluctuating between the two—its role as myth and monster killed then resurrected, killed then resurrected, one tentacle here, another there, spread-legged and immodest? And why does monstrosity permeate so many of our myths; the need to see our myths as Other, and thereby, perhaps, as our possessions? We use them until we use them up. What sort of hunger drives us to do this, and what sort of appetite are we trying to satisfy? What sorts of hungers (actual and metaphorical) do you have, and how do you go about trying to satisfy them?

WE MYTHOLOGIZE AND WE EROTICIZE. THERE’S money in both . . . Giant-Squid Erotica (to be read aloud to a lover):

It was almost unbearably delightful to cobble this section together (which was originally about five times as long, before my editor and her keen eye reined me in). In my research I kept bumping up against these sensual—downright erotic—descriptions of the giant squid. Seriously: read this short section aloud and tell me that the nape of your neck doesn’t get at least a little sweaty, a little flushed. Do you have a favorite line from Owen’s 1880 descriptions here? If so, how come? I have my favorite, but I’ll keep that to myself for the time being…

GIANT-SQUID VULGARITY (TO BE FORGOTTEN AS soon as it’s read), by Ern Maunder, writer for the Atlantic Guardian in 1952:

As you might imagine, I indulged this notion much further in an earlier draft. In fact, in a previous draft, this section had embedded within it a 14-page meditation on puppets. Yes. Taking inspiration from the poet/playwright/puppeteer Dennis Silk’s excellent essay, “The Marionette Theater,” (which, in part, examines the “meaning” and functioning of the marionette—and our perception thereof—by breaking the puppet down into its subsequent parts), I broke the squid down into its parts—tentacles, eyes, suction cups, beak, heart, etc.—and tried to find a larger meaning in its “whole” by adding up the micro-examinations of its minutiae. And, of course, as someone who adores puppetry, I wrote quite a bit about that as well. Can you imagine? Ice cream and puppets? Yikes.

LLOYD HOLLETT BELIEVES BUTTERFLIES CAN ease our pain. In addition to ice cream and insects, Hollett is also fascinated with Near Death Experiences. “I am not sure where the interest came from,” he says.

Hollett, in fact, wrote an entire book on the subject called “Butterfly Messengers.” I bought my copy in the gift shop of the Newfoundland Insectarium after having interviewed Hollett. He gave me a free scoop of mint chocolate chip, and, if my memory serves me correctly, he scooped himself a nice big ball of bubblegum ice cream. We both chose sugar cones. He asked me to hold his cone while he inscribed the book to me and my partner, Louisa. (“Hope you enjoy the ‘message.’ Best Wishes!” he wrote). Around us, so many species of butterflies flew, sometimes landing on our sleeves, in our hair, on our faces...

Later, after disseminating the photograph of his fateful squid, Harvey mused, apparently second-guessing his drive to bring the beast to the world, “Am I a dog that I should do this thing?”

Once again: Thank goodness for my editor, and for her sense of restraint (as restraint, for me, during the writing process, is almost always overwhelmed by excitability). In between this particular Moses Harvey quote, and the next short segment beginning “Says Tepoztetecatl,” were, in a previous draft, about another 40 pages (which rightfully ended up on the cutting room floor). What was in those 40 pages? Oh, my. Well: an ultra-long meditation on myth-making as filtered through a childhood memory wherein my parents, during the first couple years of home ownership and strapped for cash, took in a boarder named Susan. I was only four years-old then, but I clearly remember Susan: She was beautiful, in an elfish sort of way—large mahogany eyes, large ears, short brown hair. I remember hanging out with her in her room, on a tall bed with orange and blue sheets, talking and talking. She always wore large hoop earrings through which I would snake my four-year-old fingers, pulling just gently enough to watch her lobes droop, then snap back into place. How I would marvel at the elasticity! She stayed with us for about six months, I think, and then was gone. I don’t remember saying goodbye to her. One day she was there, and the next, she was not, the bed empty, soon to be sold for ten bucks at some garage sale. Much later, when I was in my early 30s, I asked my parents if they knew what became of Susan. They laughed and wrinkled their foreheads, confused. They told me they never took in a boarder at all. That I had imagined the whole thing. It’s since became a joke at the holidays, my parents and sister asking me: Have you talked to the boarder lately? Do you have any memories that you can swear were actual, but others have told you were merely imaginary; invented? If so, how did this make you feel? Do you believe them? What role do such memories still play in your life and what do they mean to you?