The Body Haunted from "This Fragile Fortress"

This is an essay excerpted from my book, "This Fragile Fortress." All written material is copywrighted to Page McBee and may not be reprinted without my permission. 

The near constant recycling of cells in the body ensures that we are never who we were a few years before.  The skeleton, skin, liver, and stomach are all replaced in their entirety every ten years. The same fingertips that touched the sparkling texture of two weeks ago are gone, the moment has passed and so has everything that’s felt it. We begin again and again. 

Except we don’t. 

Because many of the cells that do not get replaced are in our cerebral cortex, integral to memory and consciousness. Paradoxically, we are both newly created beings and imprinted carriers of ghost moments. We are haunted. 

Haunting, in its usage, implies a lack of resolution as well as a need to return. The prefix re means “back” or “again.” To visit old haunts is to reappear within them. To be haunted by the past is to continually engage with it; to question. To not allow it to “rest.” When we refer to someone as “haunted,“ we imply regret, and what are ghosts but regret manifested? 

Ghosts, like the neurons that compose our memories, carry in their wispy glow our refusal to forget. Ghosts are trapped in a conscious world, unable to transcend. They are energy without use, disconnected from life and without death. They exist until something is made “right.” Ghosts remind us of our failings, hold us accountable, haunt us, set us free.

Matter is reabsorbed. Like air, my ghosts are of me 

and then in me and then 

of me again.

We are imprinted with our slippery sense of past. Through the cellular structure that composes us we are constantly reintroduced to what’s existed before. The eyes and the brain are full of cells that have witnessed our history and so the gut and skin and bones cells are ingratiated into their perspective. Ghosts in the bloodstream, ghosts in the muscles, ghosts in the nervous system’s echo whispering warnings down the spine. 

And what of time? 

Moments that matter can stretch across the horizon or crush abruptly into wisps of themselves. A car accident can last forever, each moment smeared slowly open; or it can look like whiplash, a violent overwhelm of imperceptible shapes blended together in a swollen flash. 

The cerebral cortex and its witnessing neurons allow us to orient ourselves in relationship to our perceptions. The cerebral cortex constructs sense. Since the interpretations we construct are our own, discrepancies can haunt us. Ghosts can look a lot like leaks in the floorboards: they occupy the tension between what we wish to be true, and what exists anyway. 

Memory is time travel. Autobiographical (or episodic) memories are thought to eventually translate into “facts” in our minds. We need truth like we need structure. The bones that hold us together only know a slice of what our brains know. Cognitive dissonance blooms ghosts. 

To be haunted is to return, remember, regret: a stolen cigarette out of an attic window the summer before college, the glass bottle with a half inch of yellowed ash water balanced on the sill. A quiet night but for the nagging fear that nothing ever really changes, that this moment would define me no matter where I went next: the creaky ballet of my family living below and me, in the dark, with my head stretched out the window. 

The cerebral cortex constructs sense. The ghosts will leave when the wrong is righted. That night, I flicked the cigarette onto the roof below. I watched the smoke curl, curl, curl until the cherry burned away. Truth is what you know. 

It was all on my fingertips, caught in the grooves of my skin.