words by J.A.G Mabbutt
Places present difficulties and challenges. In their symbolism, they might offer us sanctuary, being locations that lend themselves to profound memories. Alternatively, in our observation of places, or at least the idea of them, we might find ourselves tricked into manufacturing a mythology that constructs a spectacle from nothing more than brick and mortar. To all individuals, places operate as intimate, immovable artifacts, seizing us in their shadow, or instead gifting us the ability to move on and look back.
Patricia Lockwood’s poem, The Arch, circuits this complication with tenderness and patience. At first, reading this poem might sabotage your intentions of digging up its message. With its loose structure and clustering of ideas, the poem is the literary equivalent of a nostalgia shop, where our eyes fondle and feel through souvenirs that are distinctly different from one another, and broadly capable of achieving different reactions. However, unlike this static interpretation, the poem moves, both through time and space, adventuring via a stream of consciousness perspective into an incredibly complex feeling of detachment.
Lockwood, in her poem, masters the ability to spin her reader’s vantage point and disorient their perception. Whereas in simple terms the poem might be a knotted attempt to revisit the past through locations, it is, in reality, a burrowing attempt to unravel the meaning of spaces via their mythology and historical context to the speaker. Like the poem, David Lowery’s 2017 film, A Ghost Story, is a near-cosmic odyssey into the history of a location and its relationship to a whole multitude of individuals. The film might invite suspicion of it being moored in horror or gothic tropes, but it is instead a philosophical narrative that nosedives into a deeply profound story.
Through the eyes of ‘C’ (Casey Affleck), the audience witnesses the trials and tribulations of his experience as a ghost who aimlessly haunts what once was the home he and his wife shared. Navigating both the past and the future, C’s journey is primed with his intentions of uncovering a message left behind by his wife, hidden beneath paint on a door frame. Like Lockwood’s speaker, C is driven into the deepest mantle of a location to liberate its meaning and character from its mythology.
Unlike Lowery’s film, Lockwood’s poem isn’t inclusive of a ghost. However, the titular Arch itself is a location haunted by its own history, and the context applied to it by the speaker. Monuments tend to withstand time, and in doing so, are defined and shaped not only by their physical dimensions, but by the world that exists beside them, and the people that populate this world. In the poem’s opening stanza, Lockwood bestows a bountiful weight of personification upon the structure. Using the adjective “living” to describe it, and in doing so, suggesting a lack of interest in design, but more so, its character, the speaker compares the Arch against other so-called “living monuments,” like the Lincoln Memorial or various horseback statues that populate the nation.
Unlike these other monuments, the speaker laments that this Arch has a much more limited mythology and history, and initiates the poem with an intention to resource meaning from both their own personal, intimate history and whatever else they can piece together. With a passive and somewhat dextrous tone, the speaker relays how the monument was a “gift” from another city, poking fun at the implausibility of a city being able to journey to another and physically offer up such a present. This child-like, juvenile process of thinking prompts the reader to see the speaker as a child, who is perhaps confronted with trying to understand the value of a monument.
Later in the poem, this suggestion of the speaker being a child is repeated by the speaker's references to her hair being brushed by her mother, and her mother’s comments that warn the speaker from touching the Arch due to a fear of being burned by its surface. In noticing this pattern, we can begin to identify how the poem is an attempt to reach towards comprehension, a child coming to terms with the world through a learned conception that is handed on by her mother. Here, the monument is transformed into a metaphor for memory, a solidification of ideas that are made easier and transmuted into something immovable and eternal. The speaker uses this metaphorical language to translate her perception of her mother, referring to her as a “gift” from Ireland and as “metal.” In bonding together personification and metaphor, the speaker becomes an alchemist of language, re-shaping her mother and the monument as icons that represent movement and stiffness simultaneously.
Through these repeated observations on such colossal, solid ideas being transitional between two locations, the speaker recognises how places and people are influenced by changes, whether spatial or temporal. But in diagnosing the Arch as a “door that reminds you you can leave it,” the speaker reminds us that these symbols, these monuments, cannot truly move, and instead act as landmarks that help us imagine our own movement. Like the armpit of her mother’s statue,’ the Arch is championed as an intimate, delicate location of comfort. In referring to the Arch being “lovelier” than the armpit, the poem is magnified by the speaker to be a vocalisation of solace, whereupon monuments and locations are formed by their own personal mythology as caretakers and souvenirs of times in the past, present, and perhaps the encroaching future.
David Lowery’s film A Ghost Story orbits a similar philosophy, yet through a more grief-stricken lens. Like the poem, the film acknowledges the significance of a location to a reflective individual. The film’s protagonist ‘C’s’ death happens casually in the film's earliest stages, with his life only really valuable to the viewer for the sake of offering us context about his personality and relationship with his soon-to-be widowed wife. C is forced by Lowery to be clad in the comical attire of a white-sheet, a stereotypical ghost that, like the antagonists in the video game ‘Pac-Man,’ is muted in its expression and gesturing by two eye-holes. C watches his wife mourn, move on with another man, and then leave their home without any way of communicating. However, in her exodus from their home, his wife leaves behind a note, secured in the woodwork of a door frame, which is then painted over. C tries to scratch at the paint to reveal the note, but is halted in his mission by numerous distractions. Whether it be a newly-moved-in family, a house party, or the demolition of the house itself, C is unable to reach the note. His inability to leave the house offers us some insight into Lowery’s intentions.
Like the poem, the film forces us to excavate the significance of a location. For C, his home is a prison that limits his ability to move on, freezing him in a domestic snow globe that forces him to digest what is valuable to him. Before his death, his wife and he had argued, seemingly dragged into a rift where his artistic goals became paramount, and he was unwilling to move home. As a metaphor, his purgatorial existence is dealt as a punishment that, like Scrooge’s own supernatural penance in A Christmas Carol, offers C a chance to understand his shortcomings. However, the metaphor offers us something else, a vantage point to investigate the human inability to find comfort in change or moving on. C is forced to be fixed to the house, yes, as a punishment, but also a didactic lesson that forces him to recognise that time moves on without mercy.
In the centre of the film, the audience and C witness a house party taking place in C’s old home. A drunk prognosticator (played by the musical talent that is Will Oldham) waxes lyrical to his friends across a dining table about the conflict between time and humanity throughout this scene, reflecting on his belief that despite humanity’s attempts to place significance on art, events and each other, it matters little, for time will undoubtedly erase all evidence of anything that has or will be. Whilst this moment is incredibly pessimistic, it is in truth, the remedy that begins to medicate C. Without any dialogue, C is clearly shaken by this philosophy, as he looks on and meditates on its gravitas. It is later, at the close of the film, where after witnessing the future, and the end of time, C is forced to exist as a ghost that haunts himself and his wife in the past. Here in this stage of the movie, Lowery allows C another chance to move on. After eventually excavating the note, and reading it, C disappears, fading into oblivion. As though he had finally become worthy of reading the note, Lowery relays that C’s trial was to understand the nature of time, and in some senses, the insignificance of himself, his art and the house itself. Lowery’s message muses, like the poem, on the significance of a location to an individual. C wishes to remain in the house, and is forced to remain there for an eternity. In seeing the house be inhabited by strangers, and then simply erode and become demolished and replaced, he learns more about insignificance than significance.
The speaker in Lockwood’s poem radiates about places being symbolic of a more personal mythology that is able to represent the past and its comforts, Lowery’s film is a devastating narrative that attempts to disrobe such sentiment through a sad, lonely odyssey into the heart of time. Both texts worship the same idol, and identify and isolate the role of places in a person’s personal life and journey. However, through assessing both sides of the very same coin, Lowery and Lockwood diagnose the harshness and softness of a location’s mythology, seeing how it can be a comfort and a tool that sabotages one’s ability to move forward from the entrapments of sentimentality. Lowery’s film is a brooding cinematic poem itself, and like Lockwood’s own poem, it is an important and necessary artistic text, an observational gateway into our own mortality.
Places might last longer than ourselves, and in this, they are capable of being significant for those in the past, present and the future. But even places have their end, and it is in this truth, we can dislodge sentimentality and mythology, and let them giveaway to something new; acceptance.
