Open Secrets / Inward Prospects: Reflections on World and Soul

Author:Brann, Eva [Brann, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Published: 2012-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

2

INWARD PROSPECTS

18 SOUL: SHAPES

An incurable deformity of soul in someone we actually know is next to impossible to contemplate. It keeps looking like a character defect correctable at will.

The soul’s water table rises and falls: We are awash with the flood of feeling or arid with the drought of indifference. Await the season.

The body is the soul’s publisher—a truer metaphor even than Donne’s: “Love’s mysteries in soules doe grow / But yet the body is his booke.” But it’s the converse figure that is the real enigma: The soul’s uncircumventable bodiliness: It can be bruised, benumbed, flooded, desiccated, deformed. It can dance, cringe, expand; for Yeats “Soul” can even “clap its hands and sing.” And it can certainly be wounded and certainly healed.

I can think of some reasons that we figure our soul to ourselves as a body: It seems to be within the body; at least the body is its means of locomotion, so by an absurd but natural leap we think of it as fitting itself into our physique. We seem to have a duplicate set of pleasures and pains, somatic and psychic. (Think of the time when in the throbbing vise of a migraine headache your soul soared free with the joy of a letter received.) So we attribute to the soul a sensitive psychic body. But the curious thing is that, though we have a figure for our soul, it only appears in speech; I doubt that people see their own souls in their imaginations very often. In fact, when philosophers and psychologists figure the soul they do it as a territory—a spatial topography—though when painters do it, it’s a lady in a nightgown.

More evidence of the body-likeness of the soul: It is elastic, very elastic, to a point—and then it’s overstretched and doesn’t snap back or it simply snaps: We cease caring or just lose it.

People talk of “being out of touch with their feelings” as if those feelings were in attendance waiting for the psychic phone to ring. But there’s something in it: the debris of past destructions, the accretions of daily business, can clog the springs that irrigate our psychic soil, and then we go dry. We are obsessed rather than devoted; we rationalize rather than think; we are objectlessly anxious rather than focusedly fearful; we fuss rather than care, are rigid rather than strong, pessimistic rather than realistic—and so through all the substitutions of the desiccated soul. Is that what the silly cliché means?

Observation and reflection can’t well be simultaneous. Thus the soul, delightedly feeding on what it finds delicious, needs distance and time to digest its feast. Otherwise put: The sheer thereness of an object that draws our intense observation is overwhelming, distracting, numbing; we have to stop looking and get away, so that we may reflect and so properly appropriate the object of such an acute interest.

We may wish to be above it, but our soul rebels at receiving a shabbily meager return for a noble offering.

The soul’s like a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.