You live between two ghosts — a world of words that was never here and a world of images that will never arrive — while the Real, which is terminally beyond both, remains all that is
Watch your inner life for a single minute, and take an honest inventory of what you find there. You find words, first — a ceaseless narration that names, judges, compares, explains, apologises and plans. And you find images, second — the faces you rehearse, the scenes you replay, the futures you screen in advance, above all the picture of the person you are supposed to become. Words and images, images and words: your entire inner world runs on these two currencies, from the moment you wake until sleep switches them off.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan — among the deepest and most difficult minds of the last century — sorted this inner commerce into registers, and his sorting, once you see it, refuses to be unseen. Two of his three registers, this piece will call ghosts: one haunts you from behind, one beckons from ahead. And beneath their double haunting stands the third — the Real — which no word reaches and no image resembles, and which remains, terminally beyond both, all that there is.
First, the "Ghost of Christmas Past": Jacques Lacan calls it the Symbolic — the vast net of names, roles and stories into which you were born, and which tells you daily who you are
Begin with the first visitor, the Ghost of Christmas Past. Lacan names it the Symbolic: the immense net of language thrown over you at birth, before you could consent to a single knot of it. Your name came from others. Your nationality, your religion or its absence, your family myths, your grammar, the very categories in which you now think — all of it was handed down, word by word, from people who received it, in their turn, from the dead. You did not weave the net. You woke up inside it.
And the net does not merely describe your world — it staffs it. The Symbolic tells you daily who you are: employee, spouse, success, failure, the responsible one, the difficult one. Every role arrives with its script, and every script with its judges. Yet you were never the roles you played — nothing can erase you, precisely because no role ever contained you — and the deeper trouble with the word-net is stranger still: it was never actually here.
But the Symbolic was never here — no word has ever touched the present moment, just as you were never the roles you played
Take that strangeness slowly, because it sounds like philosophy and is in fact your moment-by-moment situation. Say the word "water" — the word does not get you wet. Say the word "now" — by the time you finish saying it, the moment it named has already left. Language points, labels, files and forecasts, but the present instant passes through its net entirely, every time. What the word touches is never the moment, and what the moment is, no word has ever touched.
Nor is this a mystical claim — it is a mechanical one. A word is a general-purpose tool: "tree" has to fit every tree that ever grew, so it can never contain the one outside your window at this hour, in this light. The Symbolic is stitched out of yesterday's categories — the Ghost of the Past in the strictest sense — while the present, which is all that ever actually exists, is exactly what slips its mesh. So the first ghost haunts a house it has never entered. The second ghost promises a house that will never be built.
Second, the "Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come": Lacan's Imaginary — the gallery of self-images that keeps promising a (in actuality, forever out of your reach) completed "you"
The second visitor, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, works on your other flank. Lacan names this register the Imaginary: not imagination in the playful sense, but the hall of images in which your ego lives — above all the finished portrait of yourself that hangs, gleaming, a little further down the road. Slimmer, calmer, richer, healed, complete at last: you know your version of the portrait by heart, because you painted it yourself, with decades of longing.
And the gallery does not merely display the portrait — it keeps promising it. One more year, one more course, one more push, and the completed "you" will climb out of the frame and take over your life. But read the fine print your own history keeps showing you: every time you reached a milestone, the portrait had already moved further along the wall. Distance is the gallery's entire trade. It sells the always-next "you", and it stays in business by never delivering.
And the Imaginary will never arrive — no image can ever become alive, and yet you keep scheduling your life around the day when the completed "you" finally arrives
So say the verdict outright: the Imaginary will never arrive. This is not pessimism — it is the nature of the merchandise. No image can ever become alive: a photograph of bread feeds no one, and the portrait of the completed "you" cannot draw a single breath. Becoming lies outside an image's powers altogether. The finished self you wait for belongs to the same family as the horizon — visible, orienting even, and structurally unreachable, because it moves when you move.
And yet look at your calendar, because the joke is written into it. The image cannot become alive — and you keep scheduling your life around the day when it does: the diet that starts Monday, the real living that begins after this project, the person you will finally be once the current storm passes. You live like the advance team of a dignitary who is never coming. Meanwhile, the only life you have runs on, unattended, in the present that the first ghost cannot even name.
Third comes the Real — whatever remains when all words fail and all images dissolve — and this, Lacan insists, you can never encounter
By Dickens's arithmetic, a third ghost is now due — the Ghost of Christmas Present. And exactly here the story turns over, because the Present is the one visitor that is no ghost at all. Lacan names it the Real: whatever remains when all words fail and all images dissolve. Be careful with his term, though, because it does not mean what you casually call reality. Your everyday "reality" — the named world, the planned world, the world with you cast in your roles — is the two ghosts' joint production. The Real is what that production is built over, and built against: the raw, unnameable presence of this, before any description reaches it and after every image has failed it.
Lacan circled this register all his life, and his conclusion did not soften — the encounter with the Real, he taught, is precisely the encounter that is always missed. You cannot encounter it head-on: approach with language, and you have already replaced it with a description — approach with expectation, and you have already replaced it with a picture. Whatever you manage to grasp is, by that very grasping, no longer the Real. He even gave the missed meeting a name, tuché: the appointment your psyche never manages to keep.
Lacan is right on both counts — you cannot encounter the Real, and there is no point in even trying
Now, here I must be more careful than anywhere else in this piece, because the temptation at this point is obvious: to play the mystic who corrects the analyst, and to announce that what Lacan proved impossible, some special path quietly achieves. I will do no such thing, for the simple reason that he is right. You cannot encounter the Real — every attempt sets out carrying words and images, and so every attempt delivers you straight back to the ghosts. On this, I do not argue with him at all.
And he is right the second time too: there is no point in even trying. Ask what a "point" is made of, and this stops being a concession and becomes self-evident — a point is a justification, which is words, attached to an expected gain, which is an image. Both belong to the ghosts. The Real funds no self-improvement, awards no progress, issues no certificate — whoever approaches it hunting a return has already converted it into merchandise, and merchandise is the Imaginary's department. Lacan is not an obstacle on this path. He is its most rigorous gatekeeper.
And still I choose the impossible encounter — with nothing to gain by it, and with more trust than I have ever given anything else
And still, knowing all of this and agreeing with all of it, I choose the impossible encounter. I cannot defend the choice, and I have stopped trying to: any defence would be a point, and, as just agreed, there is none. Nothing stands to be gained — no state to reach, no certificate to collect, no completed "me" waiting on the far side. I choose it anyway, with more trust than I have ever given anything else — a trust that grew, strangely, in exact proportion to the absence of reasons.
This is familiar country for me — what makes no sense to the calculating mind is, time and again, exactly what works — and the senselessness here is not a flaw in the choice but its credential. Any pursuit that promised a return would be one more transaction with the ghosts, one more word chasing one more picture. Only a choice with nothing in it for the chooser can even face in the Real's direction. So I do not claim the facing succeeds. I claim only that I keep facing that way — and that everything true in my life has come from this useless fidelity.
I show up daily for an appointment that cannot be kept — the Real stands me up every time, and this exact lack has become my life
So this is my daily situation, and I would not trade it for any arrival on offer. I show up — in silence, in inquiry, in the middle of the most ordinary hours — for an appointment that cannot be kept, and the Real, with perfect consistency, stands me up. There is no breakthrough I could narrate to you, no vision I could frame and hang. Lacan would nod: the encounter misses, exactly as he said it must.
But the lack itself — and lack, manque, is his own word for the foundation of every psyche — has stopped being a disappointment and become the shape of my days. I grow poorer in words each year, own fewer portraits of myself, stand a little nearer to the unnameable this that no sentence of mine will ever reach — this piece included, and knowingly so. Keeping that impossible appointment, in company, is my one and only work — and the invitation carries no promise beyond the company itself. The Symbolic was never here. The Imaginary will never arrive. The Real is all that is — and the appointment stands.