Whilst clicking on some saved links to blogs that I used to follow a long time ago in a twenty-year old laptop folder, I noticed that some, indeed most of them, had been inactive for over fifteen years and hadn't had any new content posted. It suddenly got me thinking, how can this eerie phenomena be described? Likewise with content on pages that are long out of fashion, such as Tumblr, and Myspace. These webpages were a treasure chest of material, where people shared their music, art, photography, reviews, and interacted with each other. Whither have they flown? It also got me wondering about this page, my very own Nocturnal Butterfly blog, where so much of my heart, soul, intellect and thoughts have found a resting place. For some reason, the idea of Ghost Ships came into my mind, those ancient vessels, with no crew members, sailing the seas across an ocean of water and time. Is that what my blog will eventually become when I am no longer here, or if I am unable to continue adding to it? Perhaps, it will one day in the future find a reader desperately seeking for the words and pictures it contains, and prove to be a life raft for them? A Lost soul seeking harbour, glamorous escape or inspiration, and literary comradeship. In a way, it is not that dissimilar from how I imagine authors may have felt about their published books. For there are so many that are hardly, if ever, read by anyone any longer. It would please me greatly, when my psyche/soul resides somewhere in The Great Beyond, to know that somebody had stumbled upon what was now my very own Nocturnal Butterfly Ghost Ship Blog and found solace, or, even better, a love of life and inspiration contained within it. Maybe my words would encourage them to write, sing, or whatever their skill and passion is, to a greater height and achievement than they would have reached otherwise. Maybe it will inspire them to embrace their own style, and learn to ignore the naysayers deriding them, and put their doubter's ideas where they should belong, in the shadows. Maybe mine and Lydia's romance, so often and lovingly documented here, will encourage them to throw caution to the wind, and dare them to experience the deepest connection (for it is scary), with their own paramour? I imagine it would be similar to me when I found an old edition of Stendhal's On Love, first published in 1822, tucked away in a book shop on The Rows in Chester, and which reminded me how precious life is and how it must be grasped at every second, and that cowardice is no response to life's challenges or its opportunities, exactly at the very moment that I needed its precious words the most. But dear old, cranky Stendhal himself, become dust many moons ago, will have had no idea that his book would find me almost two hundred years later, and be aware that in his words I would find exactly what I was seeking at that moment. It would give me incredible pleasure to consider that my blog may be stumbled across by someone in similar need, in two hundred years' time, and find it was of similar importance to them as Stendhal's book was to me, which in itself was almost like a Ghost Book in the shop where I found it, hidden away at the back, unloved and practically invisible, struggling to make its existence known against a barrage of much younger, brasher and shinier distant cousins.
https://k-punk.org/
I also noticed that The Incredible Kulk blog, by one of my favourite music critics, Neil Kulkarni, who tragically passed away suddenly in 2023, is now empty of content, and this has saddened me greatly.
Here are a couple of the links to olde Ghost Ship webpages that used to be a hive of life and creativity, but now appear to be simply floating around web-space, perhaps hoping that one day they will once again be appreciated by eyes and minds seeking the treasures they contain:
https://bowiesongs.tumblr.com/
https://chloevanparis.blogspot.com/
And a fascinating article on Ghost Ships...
https://www.abandonedspaces.com/wrecks/ghost-ships.html
Happy Summer Hauntings, my darlings.
Stay Haunted.
xx
