By Eric Le Roy
They say it’s the ‘soul’ that matters. Well, these days a lot of people don’t think we have them; they figure that what goes on inside our skulls is not much more than an electronic car crash or an endless lightning storm – and maybe they are right. Indeed, before ‘souls’ were sent packing, not to an ‘afterlife’ but to the slagheap of everlasting death, people used to think that the soul lived in the human heart. Anatomy Labs put an end to this chicanery. So if we have them, they would be found lurking around somewhere amid the stiff sponge of our brains, presumably like a bunch of Roman Christians hiding in the catacombs.
Ok, for the sake of argument, if we do have souls, what would one look like? A microchip with all our DNA encoded? Maybe a poltergeist of some sort? (Uncle Fred gave up the ghost last night) Some marvelous phantom spilling from our eyes or rising from our pores and flying out the window like Batman in a cape, or a rabbit out of a magician’s hat? Would it assume a physical shape? If so, what would it look like if you could pull it out of you and plonk it down on a surgeon’s table like a kidney or a chunk of intestine?
Forgive these morbid considerations. But I would go so far as to say this: some people at least act like they just might have a ‘soul’ lodged in there somewhere. Others, I struggle to imagine a way in. For example, have you ever met a person who was old in years but ‘young at heart’ – to the degree that nothing in them seemed like a door slammed shut or a walled-up passageway? People who remained vivid in your memory because of their unquenchable curiosity? Such persons are not safe from being ‘destroyed’, but they die undefeated.
These triumphant spirits are easy to imagine as once having been children (even after they are gone) because they carry the natural buoyancy and thirst for discovery that children are – rightlessly or wrongly – famous for. (There are some real dumbasses among children.) You can look in their aged faces and see the best qualities of youth; it’s that simple. There is something that dazzles in their eyes, springs to life in their expressions, and reverberates in the music of their voices. I have known people 90 years old who were like that. And when they died, it was easy – or at least possible – to imagine their essence reconfiguring in the spring wind and becoming the seeds of further life. You could feel their sprinkled ashes budding in the fields. Some people have such power, even if you have never heard of them, because they have better things to do than become dictators, preachers, or salesmen.
On the other hand, have you met people whose ways made it seem impossible that they were ever young at all, much less a cooing baby? I am sure you have, just as you can walk down the street and see couples passing, and try, in futility, to imagine some of them – usually the elephantine obese – ever having sex. (Here, I don’t mean to play the cheeky cavalier because I know that love ‘comes from the most unexpected places’ – but, c’mon, it’s often true, and if you do try to conjure up a mental ‘reel’ of a commotion like that unfolding, it’s enough to put you off sex for life; you can forgive the church for deploring such animalism. Sorry.)
What I am really referring to are those people who seem to register no recognition at all of the beautiful mysteries that life offers – if you are lucky or just look hard enough. It is difficult for me to think that ‘souls’ are roaming the brains of such folk, like prisoners in solitary confinement down in the ‘hole’, just dreaming of the day the warden will let them out. In fact, I find such people vaguely frightening, because when I see their cold, pinched expressions, I can’t help envisioning the sort who have been stormtroopers and secret police down through the ages – ordinary monsters validated by uniforms. And, sad to say, I have always found it useless to appeal to such people to search themselves for their ‘inner child’ (as the self-help books go on about). The child was stillborn.
But this essay is not an attempt at elucidation of what philosophers, scientists, and theologians, far more clever than I, have been searching for all these years, amid the intense vibrations and scattered strewings of the human mind. If I had to label myself, I would say I am a spiritual existentialist. In cold water English, I guess that means that I don’t believe in God, but I wish I did, so once in a while, I act as if I do. Confusing? To express it differently, it means that, as I acknowledge I live in a world ruled by surfaces, I try to peek between the cracks.
I look up at the brassy stillness of empty windows and try to pretend that drama has been unleashed behind them – and that even if I knew the room was empty, understood absolutely that just above my vantage point from the street below, I was gazing up at the glass frontispiece to a dead room, I would conjure an adventure of ghosts, and men and women in their secrecy.
Maybe, therefore, the human soul and the human imagination are the same? The equation: a mundane, finite person + a sullen window to a lifeless room + a view from a basic street = provocation of the Imagination’s ability to perceive something beyond understanding, maybe infinitely tantalizing. And can we not surmise that this extension, this conduit, this flow of mind from the street into the Infinite, is Soul? A Great Exhalation of all pent-up loneliness and desire?
Socrates is supposed to have said (he never wrote anything down), “The unexamined life is not worth living.” This man was also known for asking questions rather than supplying ready-made answers. Questions, by their very nature, probe beneath the surfaces. Nonetheless, in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
Yeats himself, in his poem “The Mask,” writes:
“Put off that mask of burning gold
With emerald eyes.”
“O no, my dear, you make so bold
To find if hearts be wild and wise,
And yet not cold.”
“I would but find what’s there to find,
Love or deceit.”
“It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what’s behind.”
“But lest you are my enemy,
I must enquire.”
“O no, my dear, let all that be;
What matter, so there is but fire
In you, in me?”
Is that it then? Is that it, after all – that ‘what you see, is what you get’? How disappointing then to learn that there never was anything beyond the street, the window, and the empty room, and that all one’s mental groping was never anything more than someone desperately rummaging through a drawer, looking for his car keys…only to remember that he doesn’t own a car.
Sometimes, sitting with folded hands, I have thought about this possibility with a gnawing fear that maybe the surfaces are all there is. Naturally, I am not suggesting that we are only veils of flesh attached to almost visible bone and that there are no colonies of bacteria, no bouncing cells, jostling molecules, and riotous atoms thrashing about in us down in the corpuscular crannies. I mean, what we really are after the final package lands on the street. All of that combustion and water and oozing muck sealing itself up in a cabin and announcing itself as ‘Eric Le Roy’, then crying to the world, “Where’s the love, baby?” Casting an appeal to robots from my own robotic mouth in a robotic voice? Suppose that’s all there is?
I ask my students to go deeper when we discuss a piece of literature. They are young, in many cases too young for me to expect some kind of professorial analysis of Joyce’s “Araby” or Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-lighted Place.” I ask them only to try. Sad to say, what I am lucky to get is a coherent summary of the plot – and, as we know, in the best stories and novels, mere plot is not always everything. “THAT’S ALL IT WAS ABOUT???? SHEEEIT!” – they yelp or growl, as if offended to have been pulled from their math problems or computer games to be ‘baptized’ in such a river of turds.
Boring.
That’s what they say. I remember that one of the most disillusioning experiences I have had in teaching was back at Florida State when I was running a literature class, and I decided to read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to my students. Mind you, these were university kids, not high school dropouts, so I held what I still think are reasonable expectations. They also had the text in front of them, but I felt that if they heard it read aloud (properly, without a lot of glitches and snot-snorts on the one hand and frantic darting through lines and garbling of words on the other), they would really find it interesting. I liked to read poetry to people, so maybe I was showing off a bit, but goddamn it, poetry needs to be vocalized sometimes, not just stared at silently. So I did.
When I finished and looked up with bright eyes, anticipating eager expressions and hands raised to start the discussion, I was stunned. It was like I was staring at a fucking morgue. I have never seen so many bored motherfuckers in my life. It’s a wonder I didn’t start sobbing. Instead, I just got pissed off with the whole thing. “OK, let’s move on.” Spoken with an iron jaw and an assassin’s eyes.
(Well, no, actually, I did my job and tried to open the poem up to them. But somehow the idea of a shy middle-aged man (Prufrock) trying to muster the intestinal fortitude to ask a woman for some nookie didn’t really turn them on. I tried to go further, speaking of profound loneliness and a sense of futility, or the horror of being confronted finally by one’s mediocrity and insignificance – themes of alienation and anxiety, of helplessness in the modern, marginalizing world.)
YAWN.
This is not pedantic snobbery. I, for one, prefer barstools to academic retreats. (Or so I think, never having been invited to one.) My point is that I meet, daily, a silicon world where people traverse the horizontal surfaces with breathtaking speed and skill. And, no doubt, in their professional specialities, they understand the nuts and bolts. In fact, they can speak in jargon that is impossible for the unwashed and unblessed to understand. But, they don’t think vertically in matters of life and ultimate concerns – or, if they do, they struggle to articulate them. After stumbling for an answer, they spit out a sentence or two and change the subject.
It’s not that they’re stupid; it’s that they haven’t mastered two kinds of craft which, I believe, were staples of the past: (1) deep reflection, and (2) lucid communication. Thinking requires effort, and in our time, people seem inclined to let gadgets, memes, and emojis do the job for them. Then, when called out, asked to reveal their innermost feelings to a waiting ear or a sharp eye…they can’t. They are not skilled, or should I say that depth of thought and articulate expression are not part of their ‘skillset’?
My argument is that, without learning to express what you feel, you compromise those feelings. It’s like a child needs language to develop a memory. The student and the adult need language as a vehicle not only for communication with the world but also for self-revelation. Otherwise, one’s mental state, one’s intellectual and emotional life, is just an abstraction. Failing, I argue, to give character and identity to these abstractions renders one homeless in the universe, so to speak, without an address, without a door to beat on, nor a knob to twist.
Yeats writes “Now shall I make my soul” (as a statement, not a question)… Notice that he says make my soul. However Yeats meant this, I interpret it as positing that a human soul is not something just lying there like a tyre by the side of the road or a tarpaulin across a ball field. It is that which must be built like a tower and allowed to grow like a beanstalk. I believe that we can look to Gestalt Theory here, which suggests that something can be greater than the mere sum of its parts. I like to believe that this could prove true of humans, that our five senses conspire to create a 6th (and perhaps more), and that these extra ways of perceiving together qualify as a human soul.
Whether I am right or wrong, I encourage people to take some time and think vertically instead of horizontally. I wish my students would. I know that some of them skim the story, flip through the novel, and wipe their ass with the poem. Then they turn on the computer and ask the search engine for the plot. Once they know ‘what happens’, they are ready to write a summary and analysis. That’s where ChatGPT comes in. Or else they probe the teacher, “So what was she trying to say? What symbol is he using here?”
The academics eat it up. But I just tell the kids, “He meant what he said. Otherwise, she’d have said it differently (trying to be liberal with my pronouns)”.
They give me that You’re bullshitting expression. I just smile. And say, “Dig deeper.” Then I send them away and wait for them to come back. Some of them listen and follow through. After all, many mysteries unravel when technique and discipline are applied. But I have often asked myself if any real poets have ever finished a verse and said, “I wonder how many poetasters out there will catch all the anapests and dactyls I threw in? And what about the assonance and emjambments? I reckon that’ll fuck their minds. Silly buggers.”
Some students, like some poets, just know what to do. Sometimes other people are like that as well, even the old ones; they march out from the midst of other people. They run through the windfields and the cornfields. They are like wild horses, even if elderly, though often you might not know it at first. There is radiance in their eyes that tells you they are the ones who are making their souls. All things considered, they smile a lot.
Now and then, you come across them, and it makes you glad. It’s because they understand. If you are in the same business, that of making yourself a soul, well, it’s worth a flagon of ale in the shop of their craftsmanship, then a walk in a grey drizzle that by and by becomes a silvery rain.
