Dreamt in our philosophy

My time at Beauport this year was significantly less than the past five summers. I still got to roam the labyrinth of rooms and poke my nose in neglected corners. I don’t rightly remember if I actually made it up to the creepiest of those rooms… but, really, all told, I didn’t have any creepy moments.

Beauport has made me a believer of things supernatural. What’s that? Didn’t I just write a blog about being a secularist? It doesn’t mean I don’t think there are things I can’t define. If anything, I am more confident in the fact I don’t know anything at all. I accept that. And as much as I seek to understand more, I realize I shall never know until I go there.

Sure, everything I’ve experienced at Beauport can be rationalized with logic. It’s a lot less fun, especially when I discuss the incidents at parties or over a bottle of wine. The house is old. It creaks. It sinks. It’s on the ocean… well Gloucester Harbor, which has its own anomaly of weather patterns. The light moves shadows. There are organic little critters between the walls. There are rooms where the air doesn’t move at all. But… even with all these facts, there are things that can’t fit entirely within their margins.

I’ve written about my encounters before and tried to process the coincidence versus the creep factor. As each summer accumulated more fleeting moments, I became convinced that there are more things in heaven and earth than I can ever explain. It isn’t like the movies. It isn’t like the stories we told around campfires to test our nerves. It’s just… a something. Something I tried to use in my novel, though it took on a life of its own and directed me away from ghosts to an entirely different device.

Well, here we are approaching the day when life and death supposedly unmask their bridge. So the philosophy is a little more on the brain. But also, because I am about to embark on another novel and have decided I like the subject of what is just outside the frame of our reality. I like the ever so slight creep factor. I like trying to spin a yarn around a subject no one can concretely argue because no one… really knows.

I’m actually borrowing a ghost story. A story that isn’t always thought of in that terminology. But I remember its discussion in my 12th grade Brit Lit class beginning with the question, do you believe in ghosts? Then I did not. Now, after spending my summers with them, I have to say I do. Do you?