Who was it that said human
beings never conceptualized
the notion of ghosts
until the first house with two
rooms was built? Freud?
Jung? I no longer remember.
And I'm skeptical of the theory
in general since all manner
of quasi-spooky threats
must have stalked, if not
the twilit bosks of Eden, with
its glib serpents and winged
shadows, then the savannahs
and caves of early Homo diasporus—
especially at night. All it took
was imagination to flesh them
out and then collectively,
at the root-meme level, store them
for easy retrieval in some sulcus
of the tribal id.
Hormonally, I bet, it's this
constellation of neurons
that fires up in the crepuscular
murk of the back brain
whenever a strange noise
or glimmer manifests,
transmogrifying vague or inchoate
menace into a universal
Who goes there?
But no one goes there: it's just
neural chatter, the ghost meme,
ancestral shadows or footfalls
in the hallways of the brain.
Ergo, my rejection of the second
room theory—not that I've any plans
soon of giving up my single-room
apartment.