Ghost Writing
In the red desert lived a monk named Philotheos. For most of his life he wandered, he prayed, he watched for light. He lived sometime between the ninth and tenth centuries. The only reason we know he lived is because he wrote. What is left of Philotheos is one work, less than 7000 words long, titled, ‘Forty Texts on Watchfulness.’ The central tenet of these texts is this: those who desire God must ceaselessly watch his light until they become light itself. Until light is all there is. To demonstrate the effects of divine light, Philotheos conceived the term, phôteinographesithai, the first prototype of the word we know today as ‘photograph.’ Light writing.
The Greek root ‘photo-’ evolved from another Greek word, ‘phōs,’ which evolved from the proto-Indo-European root “bha-,” which means “to shine.” For thousands of years humans linked the concept of light to that of the spirit, holy ghosts. It should come as no surprise, then, that the inventor of the word ‘photograph’ was a light-obsessed, god-loving monk who lived and died nearly a thousand years before the chemical process of photography was invented.
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In the memory, my mother cries in my grandmother’s bedroom. The door is closed, and I am on the other side. I am in the hallway, listening. Because my mother is crying, I know she is looking at pictures of her father. He died when I was four. I don’t remember what he looks like. I only remember his hands, long and wrinkled, wrapped around my stomach as I sat in his lap. I think of those hands as I listen to my mother sniff and sigh with a wet voice. Once in a while a low sob escapes, or a shuddering moan, and I have to fight the urge to open the door, to hold her close to me. I have never felt grief before but I know it is something that makes you alone, makes you want to be alone. That is how my mother described it to me.
In another memory, an earlier one, I open the door and she is sitting on the floor next to my grandmother’s bed. By her knees are three photo albums, scattered around the floor. Her fingers are trembling, clutching a photograph of my grandfather. At the sound of the door she whirls around, pressing the photograph to her chest so I cannot see.
She says, “What is it, baby.” Not a question, a warning.
I want to comfort her. Instead I say, “Can I see the photo?” My mother’s eyes well with fresh tears; she shakes her head as if someone is trying to force-feed her a strange vegetable.
“It wouldn’t mean anything to you,” she says and asks me to close the door.
Later that day, or maybe the next, I creep into my grandmother’s bedroom. My mother is out with a friend from high school. My grandmother is in the living room watching daytime television. I tip-toe into her bedroom and close the door very slowly, silencing the usual click. I reach up, flipping on the light switch. I open her bottom dresser drawer. Inside are five photo albums and two shoeboxes. I lift up the cover to one of the shoeboxes; it is filled to the brim with photographs. Each photo has a little orange date pressed onto the bottom right corner. 89 11 04, 92 07 29… Most of the photos are of my grandmother, back when her hair was still black, not orange-brown dye. Near the bottom of the box are a few photos of my grandpa. He is standing on the right side of a road with green mountains in the background. He is tall and thin and unsmiling. The photo is taken from far away, and my grandpa’s eyes are black pins, shiny and dense. I do not know the man in this photo, and I feel nothing from looking at it. Still, I stare. I wish I knew which photo my mother held to her chest, which photo makes her cry the most. Perhaps if I knew I would feel something, too.