A Spectre is Haunting Street View

1

I am stalking our old house on Google Street View. Lawn, driveway, car. I am not sure if this view is from before, during, or after. You might still linger there behind the windows. If I could see in. These past months, you have vanished and vanished, and now I cannot follow.

Zoom out into the clouds overhead, an airplane in midair, fragmented and whole. Mom, you cannot be made to exist.

2

In Japanese, verbs can take passive and causative passive forms. Instead of “I see you,” there is mirareru, which translates as “seeing happens” (見られる), or misaserareru, “seeing can be made to happen” (見させられる). Instead of “I don’t see you,” there is mirarenai, which translates as “seeing does not happen” (見られない), or misaserarenai, “seeing cannot be made to happen” (見させられない). The act of seeing (or not) occurs, due to a reason that may (or may not) be discernible.

3

I propose that every map is haunted by a congress of ghosts, spectres. Some are residents, installed there by the force of history. Others are wanderers, but drawn to a place by some crucial scent.

Since mapmakers decide what information to reveal, and especially what to hide, a map deals in spectres. They are created through the application of power—hiding, closing, forgetting. An unseeing.

4

Under the map is another map, a different way of understanding and navigating. Spectral maps with other place names, hierarchies of importance, ways of demarcating space, of prioritizing resources. A seeing that cannot be made to happen except through collective memory or initiation.

In the enclosure of the internet, too, there are different kinds of spectres, the spectres of satellite eyes and roaming cameras—the partial, not-fully-captured people in Google Street View. Twisted wisps, awkward fragments, people who are indescribable in three dimensions and so appear to fold, unfold, implode. People who have been written into a map, but in the edges, where monsters live. (De-augmented.)

5

Using Google Street View, haunting can be made to happen. I haunt the places I have lived, because I want to catch a glimpse of them with and without me. I see traces that would eventually lead back to me—my car, the car of a loved one, a loved one taking out the trash. I exist in the network created by those objects and people, but not directly. I am implied because I was there. You are implied too. Now more than ever, you exist because of the spaces you used to exist in.

6

Dear Mom—

With you, seeing does not happen. Seeing cannot be made to happen.

7

Dad found our umbilical cord. Not my cord, but ours. A small, plain wood box containing white paper wrapped around almost-dust.

My birth hospital is located in Kyoto’s northeast. Riding my computer mouse, I travel around the hospital’s perimeter, follow a street to the delivery entrance, and peer up at a window. Zoom in. No presence in the window, but in the street there is a delivery man and the fragment of a walking woman, no shoulders and face. Google never leaves the face intact, a privacy consideration with ghostly effect.

My parents met as part of a church group in this part of Kyoto, so I hunt down nearby churches. I don’t know which one it is, so I mark them all. The present version of the tenuous, possible past.

You are always implied wherever I am. Which end of the cord is still attached to you?

8

The database Historic Aerials compiles historic aerial photographs and layers them with topographic maps, in the same way that Google Maps compiles satellite imagery. My childhood neighborhood’s topography is viewable from 1888 to 1998, and aerial photographs are available from 1931 to the present. The New Jersey geography I grew up in but never really experienced—forests and swamps and farmland—I watch it get enclosed, bulldozed, built on. It is a flip book of colonization, suburban development, available in ghostly sequence.

Like the rest of North America, in New Jersey, everything is overlaid...