The concept of soul, until the European Enlightenment, has never been disputed in world culture. “Animism,” the oldest mythological stratum according to classical Anthropology, and found on every continent, holds that the entire world is filled with spirit. The idea is glimpsed in the Paleolithic images of dancing shamans, in ceremonial burials in Egypt, in Socrates’ speculations, in Vedic texts, and in fact, in most world mythologies, which envision a soul which “incarnates” in this world, and when the body dies, moves on to a world of spirits, rejoins the ancestors, dissolves into multiple souls, or comes back for another go-round (re-incarnation). In ancient China the soul was seen as compound, some parts falling back into Earth at death while others transmigrated into ethereal heavens. In Christianity, the soul was not only believed to transcend death, but then to stand before God and receive judgment for deeds done while alive in the world (which was the theologians’ answer to how God could allow a world so filled with unfairness as this one, to exist).
In the seventeenth century, Descartes, like many of his contemporaries, was seeking to reconcile the older mythic-theological idea with the new revelations of the physical sciences. He would find the “seat” of the soul in the anatomy. His conclusion was that it dwelt, somehow, in the pineal gland, like a squirrel in its nest. An eighteenth-century scientist turned visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, made a more plausible guess—that it lay in the cerebral cortex (now recognized as the seat of the “higher faculties”).
Through the nineteenth century, science was discovering the enormous complexities of physiology, and particularly the human nervous system. We were now to be seen as the bi-products of chemistry and biology, with a veneer of social learning. “Nature vs. Nurture” was the controversy of the day. (But the argument left the soul out entirely.) After the discovery of the “bilateral functioning of the cerebral hemispheres” (attributed to Hughlings Jackson in 1864), and the revelations of the psychologies of the unconscious, with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, it began to be suspected that there was a split at the root of our natures—between the left hemisphere (words and reason) and the right hemisphere (images and myths). [Note that because of a crossover in our anatomy, symbolically, the left hemisphere controls and relates to the right hand, and all symbolism of the “right.” While the right hemisphere relates to the left hand, and the symbolism of the “left” including that which is sinister (Latin-Italian) and gauche (French), but which also includes intuition and mental imagery.]
And guess what? Most of the very thinking and communicating about this problematical split has been in words. The left hemisphere, historically, has been in the ascendancy! (Though in Julian Jaynes “Bicameral Mind” theory, the rational ego side equated with the sense of “I” is subject to encounters with the non-dominant hemisphere, which produces hallucination-like experiences interpreted by a person who has them as the voice of a god. Thus the revenge of the non-dominant hemisphere; it pronounces like an oracle or a hidden god, deus absconditus. The non-dominant hemisphere is not only the “underdog,” but a crafty one, who manages to get his way through something other than “reason.”)
To be sure, the soul waited in the wings. (See, our metaphor turns visual.) Exiled from the social sciences, soul lurked in the humanities, literature, music, the arts. Joyce, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Picasso, Debussy. (The soul announces itself even when movements, such as Surrealism, Dada, or Existentialism pronounce its annihilation, because at least it is treated as a worthy antagonist.) And we know how Picasso was unable to keep “primitive art” out of his paintings (more on this in the book) and an unbelievable sense of the daemonic seems to follow his very line.
But what is soul? Is it a “divine fire,” a fragment of God embodied in ourselves? The capacity to dream and to create? An hallucination? An epiphenomenona, a mere by-product of a brain that contains ten billion neurons (and so it has to entertain itself with the fantasy of immortality, as well as trying to figure out the universe—a task at which it keeps perpetually failing)? Or is it language, the godlike ability to create realities through words, explored years ago by Ernst Cassirer, and currently debated by Leonard Schlain in The Goddess and the Alphabet? (Where words are seen associated with patriarchy, and images and symbols with the antique cult of the Great Goddess are associated with matriarchy). Or is the soul consciousness itself, that flickers out when the brain perishes? Clearly it has to do with the way our brains and bodies are organized, so let us pursue this track just a little.
All of the best arts span the human hemispheres, our two kinds of mentality, and thus represent what makes us wholly and completely human: When we try to describe the emotional meaning of an experience, paint an idea, critically analyze a symphony or a painting, introduce a pastel, romantic atmosphere into a novel, or write a poem that puts images into structured language. We rely on soundtracks in movies to tell us what the emotional “take” on the scene is to be. (And we think of the small boy who said to his parents after seeing a movie of a mugging ambush on a street, “I wouldn’t have gone around that corner if I’d heard that music playing!”) The soul seems to arise as our experience arises; it is alive, and lives where we live; it is neither this nor that, but both and . . .
The soul is there, as the poet Novalis declared, in the “overlap” between the worlds, where “the inner world meets the outer world.” It is also there where the left meets the right, where the swirling waveforms from each hemisphere intersect and create moiré patterns, where images appear out of the smoke, where we are truly haunted.
This, then, leads us to the subject of this book, and to some stories. [Developmental Psychologist Jerome Bruner says that not until we have “narratized” our experience (that is, made it into a story) can we understand it. Word and image, causal inferences, are associated with the left hemisphere. It tells us of the denotative, dictionary meanings of the words and action. But the right hemisphere makes it all make sense in an emotional way. We look at the characters, the situation, and make feeling inference: “If he did this and this, he must have meant that . . .” Story brings words to life.]
Sometimes stories can even nest within stories, and poems as well, as you will see.
The manuscript of SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul arrived just a little before Woodstock’s first International Poetry Festival (August 2001). I carried it with me in my briefcase as I went from the theater to the library, to the cafés in town. I heard many dozens of poets recite or read works that varied from the exquisite to the excruciating. But great poets were there: Robert Bly, Billy Collins, Edwin Sanders, Janine Vega, Mikhail Horowitz, intoning and incanting in the bosky vale beneath the late-summer Catskill mountains. And soul in a large sense was present. The readings were passionate, piquant, hilarious, and the hip audience as one organism often laughed at subtle lines in long poems. There was no lack of attention to the poetic experience; in fact, the group’s attention hovered like an invisible entity above the rustic Bearsville theater, discerning, humorous, palpable. The ghosts of Utopian experiments and failed artists’ colonies, Beat poets and psychedelic hipsters gathered around. The air was thick, actinic, volatile.
Between the events, my wife Robin and I went out to a little park behind the theater, with the Aesopus Creek babbling softly nearby. Late afternoon sunlight slanted through the pine and hemlock, tinting pink the exposed granite boulders in the creek bottom.
Robin (pretty and brunette, my wife of thirty-seven years) was lulled by a glass of wine at our creekside brunch, and an overrich diet of mental imagery. She lay curled and sleepy on the soft moss. I sat on a little stone bench and read the instructions for how to “SOULSPEAK.” We used the seed words: “mountain, love, green, arms, mother, cold, window.” I don’t think Robin understood the instructions exactly, so sleepy she was, and that she was allowed to take each seed word and make a separate sentence of it, pausing in between to let images form. So she spoke almost all of them at once. “In the warm darkness, under the mountain, my mother sits in her green dress. The arms of her love cradle all our cold shadows.”
Rich imagery flooded my mind and I felt an unexpected rush of emotion at what Robin had just said. I was glimpsing the power of the oral tradition, and the authority of the voice that came with it: the authentic poetic voice that Justin Spring would teach us to evoke, in this book.
There were definitely bad poets at the festival too, so comparison was easy. When they read, shouted, droned, or kvetched, I would find myself distracted, or bored, if not just pissed off. But when the poet touched that subterranean power that Spring talks about, my attention was rapt, breathless, respectful. I thought of the archetypal Bard, Taliesin, who rebuked the false poets, praise singers of the cruel King Maelgwyn. Taliesin said that poetry was a “divine fire” and not to be used carelessly, or for the vain praise of men.
As I sat in the warm darkness under the mountain, the scale and implications of what my friend Justin Spring was trying to do broke through. He was trying to teach the art of touching divine fire, and not just for poets in a rarified atmosphere, but for youth at-risk in a ghetto—for the elemental human soul. My mind felt joyous for the path Spring had chosen, not only a path with heart, but one with soul. It was an authentic spiritual experience, without the trappings of religion, to learn the elemental voice, the soul’s voice, that depends, beautifies, and ennobles all our experience.
My mind went back to Columbia University in 1960, when Justin and I were students there. Columbia was a galaxy of talent in those days: Mark van Doren (and his famous son Charles), F.W. Dupee, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun. While the “pre-meds” lurked in the back of our brownstone fraternity house, poring over their books, the “humanities” guys gathered around the front room, the “triple,” where Justin and his friend Joe dwelt—which also became a salon for profound ideas and amazing metaphysical discussions, going on far into the night: Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Yeats were our main menus.
One semester, finals were fast approaching. At these fey and unstable times Columbia students would respond to the tension either by cramming desperately on the one hand, or escaping to the nearby West End bar on the others. Sometimes the tension exploded into an orgy of water balloon fights up and down the halls. (I think we were all ADD, as well as fairly bright.) Back in at the “triple” Justin Spring and his friend Joe suddenly decided to draw a full, wall-size copy of Michelangelo’s Damned Sinner. They worked for days on the masterpiece. When they were finished, all the bleary-eyed “brothers” came to marvel at this final triumph of the right hemisphere—even during the great apotheosis of the left (the final exams). And sure enough, after the “imagery buffers” had emptied themselves out in this peculiar and wonderful way, Justin and Joe finished their term papers in good style, and passed their finals.
A year or two after Justin graduated (he was ahead of me), I had an opportunity to study with the poet Kenneth Koch. Koch not only made poetry come alive for Columbia students, he did the same for high school students in Harlem, just below Morningside Heights on the East side, at a public school where he would teach once a week. He would greet the sea of African and Hispanic faces with “Good morning, poets!” He made poetry come alive for them, and them for us. Koch read us their poems, and them ours, closing a circuit between both populations of his students.
This summer, one of our own projects at the not-forprofit center my wife and I administrate was to teach Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” to inner-city high school students. Among other projects, one of the most powerful was to make a mask. The masks empowered the students to find their voices in much the same way as Koch and Spring did. In a recent weekend public event in an inner-city park, the young people presented their poems—some with masks and/or music. They also showed personal movies they had made. Their families stood around proudly witnessing all the soul talk—right there in the inner city. The atmosphere was magical and unmistakable: “Hablamos Alma aqui.” (Soul is spoken here.) We make SOULSPEAK!
In an age in which so much of what people say is social gambit, political rhetoric, make-talk cliché, I applaud Justin Spring’s powerful technique for returning us to what is truly important, a language that means something, and that echoes vertically as well as sending out ripples horizontally; that is to say, it combines communication with a reference to the soul and the realm of the invisibles. It is language that you could never be ashamed of having spoken, because you would like these words to echo around the eaves of the universe. They are beautiful, incantatory, descriptive, and wise. They are the glittering mantle in which soul best likes to wrap itself.
The best poets know this. They know that if their words are not charged with emotion, painted with color, weighed and balanced (internal structure), and graced with spirit, they will break up like small inconsequential clouds and drift into the realm of unbecoming. The poem should evoke something not graspable in any other way. SOULSPEAK hovers between the realms of the shaman’s magic and the priest’s incantation, the artist’s stroke and the philosopher’s insight. Poetry is a calculus of the emotions, and if the poem is destined for immortality, also a calculus of the spirit. It describes a curve, an acceleration of realization, an epiphany—in short, the movements of soul.
I advise you to work with this book experientially; try the exercises, sense the vast imponderable soul-animal Spring invokes for us, lying beneath us. Think that God is hovering nearby, just waiting to borrow your voice.
As one of my exercises, going through the manuscript of SOULSPEAK, I did a written poem. Though I do not consider myself a poet (I have a few prose books in print, and my last one, The Fashioning of Angels, has just one poem of mine in it, and one from my wife, Robin), I offer a piece of it to you the reader, nascent poet that you are. (Good morning poets!) and potential student of SOULSPEAK. (To help contextualize the poem, I will share with you that I had just come back from Africa, where I had seen many animals in a marvelous game park in an antediluvian volcano crater [The Pilansberg, it is called], and that a figure I had seen in a filmstrip there, of a little bushman imitating an antelope, lurked in my mind. Also, as I told you, I had just heard some bad poets. In the poem I found myself comparing the “capturing” of the metaphors, images, and words of live poetry to how we relate to animals. I saw all the word-creatures in my mind standing there in their furry coats, the elegant eland, the lordly lion, the disreputable warthog.)
Be like the Bushman
Don’t frighten the children of your imagination, friend,
try not to come in like a Boer beating the bush for beasts,
but a little bushman, who mostly wants to learn their story.
So that, puckish, in front of the communal fire,
your fingers in a cone, with little pinky horns
to the side, eyes bright as the antelope,
you unmistakably mimic the creature’s routine.
Everyone watches (everyone listens) and everyone understands.
Stephen Larsen, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus SUNY, and the author/editor of seven books currently in print, among them The Shaman’s Doorway, and the Mythic Imagination. With his wife, Robin, he co-authored, A Fire in the Mind, The Life of Joseph Campbell, and The Fashioning of Angels: Partnership as a Spiritual Practice. Stephen and his wife Robin co-direct The Center for Symbolic Studies in New Paltz, New York (mythmind.com).