ghosts on ghosts

Imagine if you will a reading of letters, written by those now long dead, who had themselves seen ghosts and wished to leave some trace of their experiences that defied the grave.

Camille Flammarion (1842-1925), an astronomer of international renown, bore to occurrences of the spirit the same attention he bore to the stars above - both phenomena of the beyond, it must be said. He made a call for those who had experienced ghosts to come forth and tell their story In response he received over sacks upon postal sacks, over 5000 letters, and of these letters he composed a series of books, the final of these volumes only seeing the light of day now (Fantômes et Sciences d'Observation).

Flammarion's photo with dedication to his favorite medium 

And so it is now, the 1st night of December 2021, over a year now, nearly two, since a plague has left a world bereaved of tens of millions of lives, that France Culture, premiere cultural radio channel of the Hexagon, sponsored this evening devoted to letters that Flammarion could not answer before he himself came under the compass of the bending sickle.

The purpose of the evening, lit by candles (or as close to candles as a wooden heritage site can accomodate), was to answer these letters in the present, answers written by scholars and philosophers a century, or nearly, after their writing and the hands that wrote them have long become dust. Vinciane Despret, Sylvain Piron, Grégory Delaplace, among others, lent their voices to the letters and then their words, in answering them (not without a lightness of touch: Grégory Delaplace regrets the possibility of "mansplaining" the phantom seen by a woman in the early 1900s). These missives reach out across the decades, a century even, to take these witnesses by the hand in warm gratitude for their depositions into the unknown, these moments that disturbed or on the contrary reassured. Ten decades have done little or nothing to illuminate the mystery. We can only hope that, somehow, these souls heard the words addressed to them across generations.

Whoever chose the setting for the evening had a rich sense of irony, for it was held in a chapel, the last remaining on this earth, of Postivist Auguste Comte's Religion of Humanity, which holds no truck with things unknown and unseen. A small photo for the curious 

Chapelle de L'Humanité, 5 rue Payenne, Paris IIIe 

That this street (the cobbles of which I walked in a pair of eighteenth century shoes) translates to "Pagan Street" is that much more delicious. And that I passed by a school of young Jewish men dancing and singing in celebration of the Hannoukiah lights as I looked to find my way to my destination of speaking phantoms.