Real Pneuma

(you can always recognize a place in which no one is feeling much or any grief for a lost loved one & death, dying, & everyone you love decomposing to bones is just a joke.)

The spirit is called forth in the seasonal crafts aisle. It takes pride of place, a shopping cart, with the bagged candy and wood glue.  At checkout, a discount code, valid online or in store, gives a ten percent discount on select items. The spirit has all the components necessarily to itself, not ectoplasm but real pneuma, a real substrate for real pneuma: polyester and polyethylene, cotton fiber, aluminum wiring for support. The spirit has wandered, embodied but ethereal, through the vast supply chain of being, to arrive weeks late, unboxed in the stockroom and sold the very same day, then displayed as predestined, by a lower middle to middle upper income household, suspended from the automatic floodlights, beside the leftmost garage door.

Ensoulment happens elsewhere. Various hydrocarbons are extracted, are refined and synthesized, in places that observe no fine seasonal gradations. Ensoulment happens eventually. Algae and plankton decompose, lie buried, then form petroleum seas under seas, seas under sands, summoned to life once more by recombinatory magic. Ensoulment happens. Biogenic compounds form in abiogenesis. Primordial compartments are necessary. A lipid begets a cell wall. Other chemicals die without issue. Facile polymerization occurs also with polyester, enclosing ribonucleic acid, a form of life half living not seen again, until, some billions of years later, the great supply chain of being restores it, spectral arms waving in the breeze.