SIDEBROW: GHOSTS AS A SOCIAL THEORY

At first, I wasn’t sure that Sidebrow was something I wanted to read and write a reflective paper on. I thought that it was one of those internet sites where weird random poets would go to submit their works. The reason why I say this is because there is a lot of crap in the internet. Crap that is boring, that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Crap that only inside groups, private members, and college students can digest. Stuff that I would never go online to read. Then again, the challenge of “what is considered crap” kicks in and what is sense-making challenges me to attempt the reading of the unusual. After a couple of poems from the Ghost project I thought a little bit more open minded and wanted to learn to appreciate the rest of the site. However, I decided to focus on the intriguing project of Ghost. I thought it was pretty awesome. This whole idea of seeking to “investigate the otherworldly, the disembodied, the envoiced got me thinking of something else.

When I was in grade school, all the way through high school, my source of what is considered history has always been linear and state-ordered. As I read some of these history books something in the back of my head made me think of why certain aspects of history weren’t present in history. For example, when I read about Christopher Columbus, I thought of WHY would a whole nation of people CHOOSE to nicely give up their land to a crew of Spanish settlers that believed in God? How is it that America was able to win WWII and the Cold War? Who built the bombs? Who was cleaning the nuclear reactors after the bomb was finished? Where are all the women that were involved in the Chicano Movement? Who were the unheard people that were erased from history in order to create a “stable and safe” nation?

When I think of a ghost or the otherworldly, or the disembodied, I think of those people in history that were part of something, but when the time came to “record” what happened disappeared or ceased to exist. The ghosts that people carry with them from past to present, that haunt their present existence. That haunting feeling that affects our lives, the way we see each other and how we interact with others and how they make a living breathing reality. The ones who were disembodied by a time or event that cannot be seen but can be felt through time….

I don’t know. I’m thinking of ghosts as a social theory to explain the things, people and ideas that fell through the cracks of time.

Jorge N