CHAPTER I

Take #1
I wrote Ghost Lineage kind of later on in the project. I came across the phrase through some of Carl Sagan’s work and some of it, like I was reading some quotes of his and I had loved him when I was much younger. And he had talked about Ghost Lineage and I’ve been reading about it in the Science Times, the New York Times section on Tuesdays and it captured my imagination. And I thought that it could really sum up parts of the project that I was kind of always attempting to talk about, which is the ghosts that live inside us philosophically. 

And in the case of the new work they’re doing in terms of ancient peoples and being able to discover them inside of our blood, that’s kind of what led to this. Like the missing peoples, the peoples whose fossils we don’t have, but we can now see that they live inside us. I felt like it all kind of came together and that’s what I was trying to do with Ghost Lineage.

Take #2
I wrote Ghost Lineage to describe and kind of try to communicate one of the core pieces of the Old Bones project, which is the ghosts that live in our blood metaphorically and in terms of recent genetic discoveries, the ghost lineages that actually live in our blood, in our dna. I’m trying to capture both of those ideas at once and get myself, and I guess all of us, to think more about where we come from, because Old Bones is about a philosophical timeline. So yeah, it’s about the ghosts.

I think one of the things I was really feeling myself as I was writing about Ghost Lineage is mystery. The mystery of the past, the mystery in your own lifetime, the mystery about the people that raised you, the people all around you.ﾠI definitely want people to feel a sense of mystery and at the same time a feeling of recognition, something they’ve always known. It’s a combination. I’m looking for both of those feelings. Hopefully I’m getting close to that.ﾠ

I guess it’s the bridge. Though I have to say there’s a lot of different lyrics in the song that I really love, but “Running through our blood, coursing through our veins, setting all our little worlds on fire. The past is never passed, all that was still exists, from orange dust to ancient ashes, from Achilles to see anemones.” I just like all of the different allusions in there. I hope that I’m capturing a word that I keep using today. That feeling of ancient running, being hunted and at the same time, this kind of continuum through all of our different cultures. 

I’ve always been completely fascinated with the ancient past and because there’s constantly new discoveries. I just am just never tired of reading about new bones that are being found and new fossils and it doesn’t matter if it’s amphibious or if it’s homosapien or a lost kind of branch, especially the lost branches that connect to the human tree. 
But yeah, I’d have to say science. I’d say science is really what inspires me and a splash of Ray Bradbury Childhood’s End particularly and a whole heap of Carl Sagan from Dragons of Eden when I was in my teens and just continue to think he was, you know, just had a really fine mind.