Looking through the Eyes of the Departed

My favourite ghost story writer is M.R. James (1862-1936) . His stories have the ability to inject sinister significance into ordinary objects and he draws upon real magical and folkloric traditions in a masterly way. One of his stories concerns a certain historian called Mr Fanshawe who, while staying as a guest at a country house, is lent a pair of binoculars which, unknown to him, have been filled with a fluid obtained by boiling the bones of hanged convicts. Whenever he uses these binoculars, he is able to view buildings and other scenes from the past, which he is unable to see with his ordinary eyes. This is a source of insight and fascination until a series of grisly encounters make him aware of quite what he is playing with...

This story is a good metaphor for anthropology, which always aims to see the world through the eyes of the other. Like Mr Fanshawe our curiosity may lead us to try to use powerful vantage points without asking too many questions about the ethics of doing so...unless we are  forced to confront them by our subjects.

However there is another way of looking through the eyes of those who have left, which has nothing to do with appropriating their world and is about re-experiencing, through love, the world one shared with the other who is no longer here. In one of his short stories, based on a dialogue with the ghost of his dead mother, Pirandello observes that such conversations are marked by the pain of knowing that while the loved dead person will always be remembered as alive by the living, the living will never again be thought about or reflected upon by the dead. Thus participating in such conversations means confronting the fact that part of you, the part which sprang into life under the loving gaze of the other, is gone forever.

The story was made into a moving episode of the film Kaos by the Taviani brothers a few years ago and the relevant part is reproduced below.

Hi mother's contribution is worth quoting in full: "Learn to see the world through the eyes of those who are no longer here. You will surely feel pain. But this pain will make the things you see more beautiful and sacred." These words appear to have inspired the marvelous closing scene of this episode where the young Pirandello and his sisters are depicted jumping off the pumice slopes of a small island when they are on their way to join their father in exile in Malta. This scene always leaves me with goosebumps; perhaps because the children in their innocent purity and Mozart's music combine to evoke in a powerful way the life of the soul: