STATELY SORROW & THE SPIRIT OF DELIGHT

"Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight! Wherefore hast thou left me now Many a day and night? Many a weary night and day 'Tis since thou are fled away.“ - Percy Bysshe Shelley

As a ghost of London he'd seen it all, from world wars to peacetime, depressions and golden ages as well as royal weddings and the state funerals of prime ministers, kings and queens.

But the one constant through it all for the phantom Gabriel was his eternal quest for beauty wherever he could find it, whether it be marvelling at the stratocumulus surrounding the silver moon above the Thames or the sight of Big Ben's familar golden clock face striking midnight. All he knew was - without all this he would be utterly lost.

That and the memory of his wife, Alice.

Having become a ghost of the city since 1910, around the same time of King Edward VII's death, Gabriel felt perfectly preserved in his own time in history and yet everything else around him had now changed beyond all recognition.

It was currently the year 2022 and nearly all semblance of Gabriel's living past had all but vanished. In his own living era the acceleration of the second industrial revolution had brought about considerable angst for both him personally and the British people, but nothing in comparison to the computer age which seemed to balkanise entire populations into hostile factions. Gabriel barely understood it, partly because he chose not to and partly because it absolutely terrified him. All he could increasingly see were individuals talking less and less to one another as they remained transfixed to their black, coffin-shaped phones.

In some ways he wondered if they weren't ghosts themselves, so disengaged from their present reality did they appear. In contrast, even in his state of relative non being he felt considerably more alive with his brooding melancholy and perptual thirst for beauty than many of the living he observed around him, weighed down by the angst of modernity.

And yet wandering through people and buildings without any regard, Gabriel felt less useful than a breeze and it was the sheer futility of his immortality that now depressed him beyond measure.

"I am life without living. I am deathly without being dead," he lamented whilst wandering one of the city's many graveyards.  

Before he'd died Gabriel had often speculated why ghosts had such a supposed prediliction for haunting cemeteries. "If I was a ghost, the last place I would want to spend my time would be a cemetery," he'd once said to Alice one moonlit night as they cut through St John's Wood Church Grounds after returning from a dinner party at a friend's house.

Now, over one hundred years later, he knew only too well why they did, learning that cemeteries are one of the few places where time appears to stand still and the chaos of progress is amost completely forgotten. They were locations that relieved the existential torment of watching everything around you change while you remained locked in the same consciousness of the age you died in.

At least now he had found ways to find some form of solace in his spectral state and would often spend entire weeks in churchyards, watching over Alice's grave and occasionally observing others grieve so he could feel alive again.

But he still needed occasional moments of joy, no matter how rarely found, to revive his spirit although those fleeting moments had become more seldom than was usual lately and it disturbed Gabriel who was particularly prone to melancholy.

"Your desire to remain forever locked in the past will be your undoing," Gabriel was sternly warned by his old Latin teacher at the University he once attended. "Don't you know that ghosts are born from such a state of terminal melancholy?"

He now wondered on reflection if his old teacher wasn't absolutely correct. He was now learning the painful lesson he should have heeded back then it seemed.

One more tormenting aspect to this perpetual non-existing state for Gabriel was the inability to talk to other ghosts who he would occasionally see but not be able to touch or communicate with. It was as if they were all frozen beneath the ice, unable to break through the un-lives they now inhabited.

One time Gabriel was convinced he even saw his old friend King Edward VII standing opposite The Clifton Hotel where the monarch had once had secret trysts with his mistress Lillie Langtry. He tried to alert him with a wave of his bony hand but the dead king remained oblivious to his gesticulating.

Later, after both their passing, Gabriel held on to the memory of those fleeting occasions when he would share a drink or two with the King (or Prince of Wales as he first knew him back then) in St John's Wood. Gabriel found their conversations most stimulating and incorporated many of the themes they'd discussed over those long summer nights into his key works, works that sadly like him history had now forgotten.  

As a ghost, most of these memories of being human had now slowly faded and as the city became more and more degraded by modernity, the less things Gabriel had to hold onto as reminders of that triumphant glory the city of London once possessed.

"The queen's dead!" a young foppish looking man (who could have almost been from Gabriel's own time) said reading from his phone screen, appearing to break the news and his girlfriend's heart at the same time.

Crying, the young woman fell into her boyfriend's arms as the ghostly Gabriel watched the youthful couple and felt his own acute pangs of melancholy once again.

Learning of the passing of the 70 year reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, filled Gabriel with great sadness. He had always admired her for representing the faded glory of a lost age and upholding the values of civility and kindness which he felt had become increasingly rejected in the modern world he'd observed as a phantsmagorical on-looker.

The days leading up to the sovereign's funeral had Gabriel feeling heavy, as heavy as someone who contained no earthly weight could feel.

Sitting on the hammer beams of Westminster Hall, secretly occupying the space while the British public paid their last farewell to the queen of their age as she lay-in-state, Gabriel protected the coffin like an invisible sentry as if he felt a paternal responsibility to watch over her. A guardian fallen angel of sorts, he supposed.

Ghosts often feel protective of the newly deceased and as someone who knew Queen Elizabeth II's great grandfather, he felt a bond closer to his heart than usual. He wondered if he might see the dead king in this same space and that somehow some divine intervention might finally allow them to connect again.

But his hope in the hall was never realised. Nevertheless, he remained faithful to her majesty until the day of her state funeral.  

A combination of beauty and sorrow mingled on the day of the queen's funeral pageant across the nation's capital and it filled Gabriel's no longer beating heart as he cried ghostly tears and saw a glimpse of that long forgotten past re-born before him.

Sat beside the queen's coffin cataflauqe in Westminster Abbey, invisible to all the dignitaries and family members taking their places, the ghost listened to the heavenly music performed in her honour and felt almost human again. The sense of emotion was palpable even in his deathly state and he dreamt of the long arc of history which he imagined as a vast ocean with great waves like centuries crashing through time.

That spirit of delight in stately sorrow was a study in contrasts but one he understood better than anyone.

He followed the Queen's coffin secured by gun carriage through central London all the way to her final resting place at Windsor Castle. The persistent heart beat march of the funeral procession played by the various regiments was almost as if his own human heart had been revived and he might almost believe he was alive once more.

But later that evening, as Gabriel walked the grounds of Windsor Castle, he felt the familar ghostly chill return to him as he thought of Elizabeth II now being laid to rest in St George's Chapel close to where his old friend King Edward VII's tomb resided.

The cyclical continuity of life and death marked by pageant had offered comfort to Gabriel in some measure but then he remembered that he would never see his beloved Alice again. Why some were laid to rest while others were consigned to eternity was a mystery to him. All he knew was the world of ghosts was the loneliest one of all.

But yet again, on this solemn day, he'd found as pure an expression of beauty as he'd ever witnessed and it reminded him that all was not completely lost.

The warm, soft light of the chapel up ahead in the distance felt like a beacon of hope to Gabriel who would head back to the capital soon enough.

After all, he had all the time in the world.