Aghast
a vocab word for the season, or at least the season that just passed.
A ghast and a ghost walk into a bar…
…and they order a Sprite and spirits. The bartender says, “I see through you,” and the ghost says,”This tastes ghastly.” The ghast admonishes, “Don’t be a ghoul.”
Have you ever heard of ghasts? I know I’ve seen that term before, but that might just be because I’m an old school scholar and fangirl of ancient folk & fairytales. You definitely got yer ghasts in old Irish and also the oldest of swampy Southern US folktales. But maybe that’s the only zeitgeist wherein we find a ghast?
One of my favorites is one about a spunky and smart little bayou girl called Flossie. One of the best illustrated versions of this old Trickster tale is rollickingly retold by Patricia McKissack, and gorgeously painted by Rachel Isadora. It’s a pretty simple Trickster tale: clever little Flossie is galumphing along the trail to deliver a basket of eggs to a local farmer, Red Riding Hood-like, when the Big Bad, er, Fox pounces and threatens her, demanding her eggs. Though afraid, she’s a smart cookie and pretends to not believe Mr. Fox is who he says he is. She demands he prove it. Which of course turns into him following her along the trail, saying, “I’ve got orange fur!” “Nope, my cat has orange fur—you’re a cat!” “But I have this long snout with good sense of smell!” “Not good enough—that sounds like a dog to me,” and so on until she’s within safe distance of the farmer, and, more importantly, his fox-hounds. “I knew it was you all along!” And the Fox, aghast, must slink away, outsmarted, ashamed, and hungrily eggless.
There’s another tale of Flossie outsmarting a Trickster that I’ve heard around, though when I look up official book versions I only see her up against haints, not ghasts. But I know I’ve heard stories of ghasts being banished back to the underworld by clever Flossie. And of course, she has outwitted even Old Scratch himself, the devil.
A ghast in the zeitgeist
It’s a tradition to get a tattoo done on Friday the 13th and it’s also a tradition to do so on Halloween. I haven’t often had enough extra money to do so on these days normally, with one notable exception, in 2017:
Halloween high noon, 2017, I underwent a primitive pain ritual: a stick-and-poke tattoo.*
It’s a pair of interlocking hearts, almost pentagram-like, from Leonard Cohen’s emblem he named The Order of the Unified Heart. The symbol was important in my life for many reasons, some of which had to do with my relationships, along with the life milestone of living alone, so I won’t go into it here (a wee bit too private, sorry), but suffice to say the symbol was exactly correct for the place and time, and I happened to be able to afford it. So. There ya go. Magic. Was it manifesting? I don’t believe in manifesting, really, but. When the veil is that thin in the world, you never really know, do you.
*I still mess up and call them ‘slow-poke’ tattoos, and I’m so delighted by the cuteness of this misnomer that I’m not even going to correct myself anymore. But you know the kind I mean: one jab at a time, with one needle, by hand.
I was nervous about how much this type of tattoo was going to hurt—after all, it’s one stab at a time, twice over. But it wasn’t bad. It felt primal, a way to honor the thinning of the veil of the world, and the connection of hearts, and the resonance of inspiration. There was hardly any blood, actually, if indeed any. Red wine, though, to soothe my nerves and also nerve endings. The very beautiful, very young artist (a fellow burlesque dancer of mine at the time) put herself through a meditative ritual and smudged herself and us together in concentric circles of smoke before she began. I breathed it in (in-spired, remember?), and my breath out felt like a slow outgassing that took the whole three hours.
I would have loved for this to be a Halloween tradition from then on, but. Art costs. Pain and money. Both well spent, but.
After the pricking of my chest, my ability to do makeup superseded a costume. Night of the living dead. That night, I incorporated the ink splatter from the fresh tattoo into the squicky undead look I made for myself with the remnants of my ancient stage makeup kit. See, the ink got all over me, like a goth Pollock piece. Each time the needle was jerked out of my skin, it spattered.
Inspiration Date, Expiration Date
Halloween. All Hallow’s Eve. Day of the Dead. Samhain, out bestriding the land, wielding his sickle, and the veil between worlds is thin.
Those of us who dwell in darkness normally, those of us who are regularly lunatic, are susceptible to this thinning of the veils between life and death and madness. O, and the full moon being mere days before it this year, making us all into lunatic werewolves. I wax along with the moon, too, usually, so in years past the radiant lunacy and the habitual blood have been nearly in tandem. This year is the first year I’m really beginning to get hit with peri/menopause symptoms in full force, though, so it’s a very different experience. The expiration date of my organs is nigh, and the sensation feels akin to how a very old car sounds, when it’s revved and revved and almost turns over…and then no. Maybe next month. Maybe not.
Doesn't "poltergeist" mean noisy ghost or something like that in German?
I'm going to check out those Flossie stories...I love those kind of tales!