Post by phantasm on Mar 29, 2022 13:59:43 GMT -6
Ghosts are everywhere.
They were drawn on pulpy paper.
They're on 16 mm film.
They're in the words of printed pages.
They're in the voices recorded on cassette tapes.
Ghosts are everywhere, haunting the world.
It's easy to see them. Just pick up a book or watch an old movie.
There are haunted houses. They're called movie theaters.
They can even possess human bodies. We call their hosts 'actors.'
Ghosts exist. They exist in paper and ink and image and voice.
We not only seek them out, we create them. We construct them.
And then we call them fictional characters playing out stories.
Through math and the printed word, they take on form and substance.
They stalk and haunt the human race. They've been doing it for thousands of years.
We even breathe new life into them when we translate tablets of ancient languages into modern English.
We speak them into existence.
We calculate them into existence.
You can buy a manual and a bunch of differently shaped dice.
Through them you can summon dragons, mind--flayers, orcs, halflings and dwarves.
Or, you can make something up out of whole cloth in a word processor document.
We call those things short stories, novellas and novels, among other things.
Fantasy can be almost real. It can seem so real, you can almost taste it.
Sometimes, I wish I could make the products of imagination physically real.
Then the ghosts would take on flesh and live amongst us.
