Ghosts - The View from Drexel Hall

Well, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? My apologies for not posting more often in recent time, but this past month has been difficult. Just this last week, at Saint Joseph’s College, my employer, the class of 2018 would have started their last year, and the class of 2021 would have stepped onto the grounds to begin their journey. Due to the College’s suspension of operations in May, though, none of that has happened.

Academic lives have a rhythm where the feel of late July and early August conjures the premonitions of the year to come: creating syllabi, freshman moving in, imagining the first lectures, and overall feeling the energy build for the coming Fall, winter, and spring. Though the cicadas and katydids sang in the evening and the humid mists of dusk and morning came as they should this year, their advent heralded only the changing of the seasons. There were no crowds of students, no lectures, no meetings between colleagues in the halls. It’s like the melody to which my life was tuned suddenly stopped. It’s like a part of me is missing.

As many might know, not long after the May graduation, I was asked to join a small team called the “Phoenix Group” charged with rebuilding and reviving the school. We’re located in Drexel Hall, a building across the street from the main campus.

Besides a very early blog post, I haven’t really spoken about what it’s been like emotionally this summer, much less what it's like to be part of the Phoenix team, and, to be very, very clear, nothing I say here should be construed as reflecting anyone’s perspective save my own. But, to me at least, the physical and psychic location has been eerie: we are close enough to see the buildings and hear the chapel bells, but besides exceptional circumstances, we can’t go over there. This is the institution where I visited my father as a child, attended concerts and plays and games as a teenager, learned my calling in life as a student, met a beautiful, intelligent woman as the Student Association President, and then married her in the College chapel as a young man. Earning a PhD after a herculean academic struggle, it seemed like a “happy-ever-after” moment when the SJC hiring committee chose me to join the faculty in 2011. I still remember hanging up the phone, walking into the living room of our apartment, telling my wife that I’d gotten the job, and feeling her jump into my arms and cry. 

Little did we know what lay ahead.

Now, these memories sometimes drift across the road like restless ghosts, haunting me all the while as I try to help find paths ahead. On a ninety-degree day, I shiver, surrounded by the specters of what was lost. On February third, after the announcement, I went home and cried with my wife, this time for a different reason. On February sixth, ten minutes before my Core 8 lecture, I broke down again in my office. It’s been like that, even after I was invited to be part of the Phoenix Group, even after the initial rush of excitement for having the chance to forge and salvage something out of the College. Saint Joe changed my life and I want to give future generations of students the same opportunity.

What about my friends and colleagues? Survivor guilt is a real thing. Why me and not someone else? Why was I chosen to fight this battle and not someone else? And make no mistake, it has been a battle. There have been absurd rumors and conspiracy theories that would make even students of the JFK assassination blush: the College was closed to make way for a high school, Indiana University is buying the campus for five million dollars, every building will be bulldozed, dorms were refitted so that Chinese investors could buy the campus, and on and on. There have been scattershot social media posts about how evil our group is from people who would never have the courage to come see us face to face. The comments are all over the map, so it’s hard to keep them straight: we’re moving too slow, we’re moving too fast. Which is it? (Remember, it took decades for the College to decline into its ruinous financial state, so maybe it would be a good idea for us to take more than three months to carefully develop some plans to move forward?) We’ve either had secret plans all along, or we have no plans. Which is it? Then there’s been the hate mail (of all kinds) in my inbox. I won’t delve into all of it, but the most puzzling one is that, by joining this team, I am not a “true Puma.” As an academic, when someone says you are not a “true [whatever],” I can recognize this for what it is: a political/rhetorical strategy to dehumanize the one you are attacking as not really “one of us” and thereby deserving of the abuse that will follow. It is a tactic born of pain, of which there has been an abundance. And I know how it feels, because I was there. They're angry and they want someone to pay and to bleed, even if it's the very people who are doing everything they can to try to bring the school back.

That's how I can see it as an academic. How I see it as a flesh and blood person is another matter. It stings and it hurts. I wish it didn’t, but it does. When messages go unreturned or colleagues I have known since I was a student turn away or pretend not to recognize me in public, it isn’t easy.

Strangely, at those moments, the lowest moments, when it feels as though I am in a pit all alone, I know why I was picked for this task: I love the College. I know and love Core. I’m creative. I’m smart as hell. And I’m also a stubborn son of a bitch who won’t give up, even when there are people not just refusing to help, but actively rooting for our failure. They needn’t expend the energy. We won’t fail. We won’t let that happen.

Not when all these ghosts are watching us.

Since there’s so much to do, I can’t guarantee regular blog posts for a while. But I will try to be more consistent, and also return the tone to lighter fare. Until then, good luck with all the trials all of you are undoubtedly dealing with, whatever they may be, and please take care.

“Tell the Devil he can go back from where he came.

His fiery arrows drew their bead in vain.

When the hardest part is over, we’ll still be here,

And our dreams will break the boundaries of our fear.”

                                                --Brandon Flowers, “Crossfire”

The Religion of Mothman

This week is an extra special post! My brother Jon and I have joined forces to blog about different angles of the classic paranormal creature known as "Mothman." Check out his post on the topic here.

Mothman first entered my world in the spring of 1994. Rummaging through my high school library, I came across a copy of paranormal investigator John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies. (Why was this volume in the Rensselaer High School's library? That in itself is a mystery for the ages.) My friends and I had a good laugh at the chapter titles, which included "The Night of the Bleeding Ear" and "If This is Wednesday, it Must Be a Venusian." Interested in the paranormal and in need of a leisure read, I checked it out. (You also have to remember that this was the hey-day of The X-Files.)

The book chronicles the supposed appearances of a giant winged being around Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966-67. The most famous incidents involved a few couples who said they saw a large feathery creature with burning red eyes haunting an abandoned TNT factory. In another incident, a man said he lost his dog when it ran off to chase something gigantic with glowing red eyes. Some witnesses crafted the following drawing of what they claimed to see:

Keel's book recounts his investigation in Point Pleasant while the sightings were occurring. He  also covers the simultaneous spike in supposed UFO activity in the area, as well as appearances by "Men in Black," the odd and vaguely threatening apparitions who some say try to intimidate or frighten witnesses of the paranormal into remaining quiet about their experiences. The sightings of Mothman and other strange phenomena culminated (as Keel presents it) in the collapse of Point Pleasant's Silver Bridge into the Ohio River, killing dozens of people. Keel suggests that the sightings of the paranormal beings anticipated or warned of the tragedy, hence the title, The Mothman Prophecies. (There is a movie based on the book, starring Richard Gere no less, but it is, as you might imagine, only quite loosely connected to the premise of the text.)

All these years later, and especially after blogging earlier this summer about religion and the paranormal, I started to wonder about the possible religious themes of The Mothman Prophecies. Could Religious Studies theory find any connection to the events or themes of the book?

Besides merely chronicling the events in Point Pleasant, Keel creates his own hypothesis for all paranormal phenomena. Rather than being the work of extraterrestrials, Keel believes such occurrences actually come about from encounters with ultraterrestrials, which are entities existing on another dimension or plane of reality who bleed through into our psychic realm either of their own accord (to cause mischief or issue a warning, about a bridge collapse, for instance) or because human concentration or activity inadvertently summons them. These energy-beings from a parallel universe have existed throughout history, but humans experience and label them differently as our contexts and frames of reference change. In ancient times, they were deemed gods who flew about on divine power. Nowadays, they are UFOs and monstrous Mothmen. On this last point, Keel sounds remarkably similar to Carl Jung's thoughts on "flying saucers." He is also in something of the same ballpark as certain folklorists who consider the "Men in Black" tales as a reiteration of a very, very old mythic motif of visits from mysterious strangers.

In my eyes, Keel's thought is somewhat analogous to some of the ideas of one of the founding figures of my discipline: Mircea Eliade. Eliade, by all accounts, was a very interesting person. Besides studying Religion, he was a novelist, a Yoga practitioner, and, according to some, possessed rather dubious political affiliations and aspirations while a youth in his native Romania. (Read more about him here.) Eliade's central interpretation of religious phenomena is that the Sacred, whatever that happens to be, manifests in the world in occurrences known as hierophanies, literally, "appearance of the divine." Interpretations of the Sacred vary from culture to culture and time to time, but they can be understood as different versions of the universal Sacred that bursts through into human experience. To me, the concept of the otherworldly divine breaking through periodically sounds a great deal like Keel's notion of "ultraterrestrials."

There are also faint traces of Ralph Waldo Emerson's concept of the "Oversoul," which is the idea that all humans have immortal souls which are interconnected, and thus create a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. People then consider this experience of a soul greater then theirs to be "God." Deja vu, psychic phenomenon, and so forth (including Keel's "ultraterrestrials") would thus be examples of human souls coming into contact with each other, transcending time and space. (Interested in learning more about the "Oversoul?" Check out this link.)

What is one to think of all this? For one, there have been plenty of hypotheses rationalizing and explaining away Mothman, not to mention UFOs and the like. Some of the most common (and, dare I say, likely) explanations for Mothman have been owls and/or cranes, both of which can appear larger than they really are and produce "eyeshine" in the presence of bright lights, making it look as though their eyes glow supernaturally. I do know that in the spring of 1994 I spent some wonderful evenings at dusk scanning the skies, wondering if I just might see some shadowy, feathery form on the horizon. Keel's book is also replete with numerous entertaining quotes (especially when removed from context). Case in point: "Bedroom phantoms in checkered shirts are old hat to investigators of psychic phenomena."

Perhaps most startling is how this entire blog post came about. As I re-read The Mothman Prophecies, out of the blue, Jon sent me a message asking if I wanted to co-blog about...Mothman. How did he know? He couldn't have. Is this evidence of Emerson's "Oversoul," the psychic interconnection of all human minds? You just never know....What do you think?

Next time, there are a number of topics I am considering: "Religion and Animals," "Lesser Known World Epics," and maybe something else. I may post ideas on my Facebook page. Until then, take care.