It is the sound of the soul speaking. SOULSPEAK. Just the word, or the sound of it, seems to strike something deep inside us. We look up expectantly, as if we somehow know what it means, but not quite. When people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them SOULSPEAK, they have that same look of expectancy and puzzlement. Then they break down and ask me what it means, really. When I say it means just that, SOULSPEAK, they accuse me of teasing them. Perhaps I am, but in a Socratic way, because I’m trying to tease them into discovering what they already know. And they do know what it means, because after a moment’s hesitation they almost always say back, Yes, the soul speaking, or, Yes, speaking from the soul, and then there’s a second moment of confusion because they don’t really know what speaking from the soul means, even if they somehow sense that it’s possible.
The reason for the confusion is that we have forgotten how to do it. But if our minds have forgotten, our bodies haven’t. It’s in our DNA—but hidden away, recessive. Recessive is a good word in this case, like the recessive genes that sometimes cause babies to be born with small tail-like appendages. A little piggy reminder of our animal heritage. The act of speaking from the soul also comes from our distant past. It is the way our tribal ancestors spoke to the gods. They knew it was a different way of speaking than their normal, everyday talk, or gossip. But they also knew it was somehow related, in that it materialized as mysteriously as their everyday speech, but from a deeper center of their beings, from their souls.
I should say precisely what I mean by the soul, as there have been centuries of religious, metaphysical, and philosophical discussions about its nature. While I dismiss none of this out of hand, I’m suspicious of most organized thought. I only know what I know, and what I know is that there is something very deep in me, almost hidden from me, that is guiding me towards some end. What that end is, I have no idea. Nor do I know why this is happening, or who is making it happen, or what is its nature. I know only that it exists. I can feel it, and I call it the soul, which is the word I use for my deepest, most mysterious self. The soul is both me and not me. In some sense, the word soul is really a metaphor for that most mysterious part of us that is utterly beyond knowing, much as God is a metaphor for that indescribable mystery that is at the heart of everything. What God actually is is beyond comprehension. The same thing applies to the soul. I can’t tell you what it is, I can only tell you stories about it. Here is one, a story of discovery:
You are in a small boat, alone. You’re anxious, but not afraid. You know where you’re going. Dover, then somewhere else, you say to yourself. You’re ready for anything. And flexible. Hell, sometimes you change directions just like that. At any rate, you have reasons for every move you make: if not before the fact, then after. You’re sure of yourself, you have maps, sextants, whatever, to guide you. You raise and lower sails; turn on, turn off the motor as the mood suits you. You make port, just as you had planned, but you’re slightly off, landing in Calais instead of Dover. You can’t really say why.
Sometime later, back at sea, you lean over the side. There is something thin, almost invisible, like a line, attached to the bottom, leading down to the cavernous depths. The line, if it is a line, seems infinitely long, almost numinous. It comes and goes, as in a dream. As you watch, you sometimes see it moving in the same direction as the boat, then sometimes in a different direction. When it goes in a different direction, it pulls you slightly off course. Or at least that’s how it feels. Calais instead of Dover, you say to yourself. All of a sudden, something dark and glittery rises up from the depths. You can almost see it. It is just beneath the surface, rippling the water. You sense something familiar yet mysterious, something that is like you and yet not you. You want to call it something, you’re not sure what. And then it disappears. The soul is the term that suddenly comes to mind.
Later on, you realize the boat shudders when it is not going in the same direction as the soul. You don’t know why, but you guess it has something to do with the strain on the line. But how do you keep in step with the soul? Something in you says, Lean with it, whatever that means, and you do. The boat stops shuddering. You’re in the groove, but absolutely in the dark as to where you’re going. But you know it’s where you’re supposed to be going. For better, or for worse.
If that little story describes a moment of awakening—the moment when you first became aware of something utterly mysterious in your deepest self, something that is you and yet not you—then the story has done its job. But I’m still no closer to telling you what the soul really is. I can only tell you its effects, much as physicists use a cloud chamber to prove the existence of atomic particles. You never see the actual particles, only their traces. And you never see the soul, only its traces, its effects. The soul can only be approached indirectly, through
stories.
Perhaps I should tell you another story about the soul, one closer to the point of this book, which is that speaking from the soul is an art we have forgotten. It is a very human art, and it is in us, waiting to be reawakened. Somehow, the body knows how to let the soul speak. We just have to hear it and we can do it. Why? Because mimesis (imitation—the urge to imitate, to replicate, to make) is an essential human urge. It is what drives the creative artist to portray the world in a particular way, a way that imitates the texture of the soul’s expressions.
None of this is news. Without the urge to imitate, the soul’s messages would pass through us like smoke through a forest. Because of our need to imitate, however, all we have to do is witness (or experience) something that appeals to us and something in us wants to replicate it—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Insofar as the spoken arts are concerned, this is how we learn to gossip, to make jokes, to speak from the soul. Here is another story. It is a story about the soul speaking:
You are in a boat, alone. Again. You keep busy, playing the radio, talking to yourself. You remember someone telling you, you forget who, that whales are always somewhere beneath you, singing their mysterious, elaborate songs. But you have no way of knowing exactly where they are. How could you? The whales, wherever they are, are in another world, one far beneath the surface of your life. You hear only the music from your favorite station, your own mutterings.
Then, for some reason, you become restless. Suddenly, the hull begins to throb so loudly you vibrate like a string. You’re trembling, but not afraid. Somehow you know what’s happening, even if you can’t quite put it into words. You don’t know why, but you sense that something absolutely huge and wondrous is just beneath the boat. You glance over the side. The water all around you is dark, rippling like a shadow. You surrender to it, let it rise up through your body. Something in you speaks. But the sound of your voice is different.
Suddenly, you realize what the sound is, why it is different. It is the sound of you and not you. It is the sound of the soul speaking.
I know you would like more precise directions on finding the whale, perhaps positioning the boat, but they’re not necessary at this stage. That comes later. All you have to do is accept the essential truth of the story: that speaking from the soul is in us, that all we have to do is bring the self and soul close enough and the body will take care of the rest. The problem for us is that unlike tribal man, our souls have been layered over with our modern consciousness, a consciousness much different from that of our tribal ancestors, a consciousness that makes it much harder for us than it was for tribal man to speak because, for us, the whale is too far beneath the boat.
Just what that distance is—the difference in consciousness between tribal and modern man—is a matter of debate, but I think it is clear that prehistoric, preliterate man operated in a different sea of consciousness than modern, literate man. Tribal man lived more in the present, in the sea of is. Modern man, who only occasionally lives in that sea, is preoccupied with the life inside his mind, where he is constantly reliving his past and previewing his future. Endlessly. Endlessly.
Everyone was an artist because there was nothing else but art.
If we want to speak from the soul, we have to somehow quell the busy nature of our modern consciousness. That is what makes speaking so difficult for us. To put it another way, we have to shorten the distance between the whale and the boat. Some may question the value of going back to that state of consciousness. After all, we are who we are: civilized, twenty-first century beings. Of what value is the primitive soul-speaking of tribal man to us? This is a pivotal question because it assumes that, unlike us, tribal man was simple, child-like, inferior. But was he? Let’s just say he had a different sphere of attention. He lived more in the sea of is. Because of that, he didn’t care about the things we hold so dear.
To understand this we will have to shake the belief of our nineteenth- (and sometimes twentieth-) century forefathers that tribal man was inferior to modern (scientific, rational) man. This conviction goes back to the early Greeks, whose highly developed sense of language drove them to define everything they encountered (thus the cliché, “The Greeks had a word for it.”) They gave us, for example, the word barbarian (barbaros), because that is what the language of less verbally developed races sounded like: bar-bar. Thick-tongued. Inferior.
But humans develop what they need. An incredibly flexible language was obviously the key to expressing the Greek genius. If you didn’t have it, the Greeks felt you were lost. Bar-bar. But the “barbaric” peoples of the Sudan, for example, whom the Greeks obviously encountered in their ancient travels, may not have needed a highly developed language to express their genius. Perhaps rhythmic song was more to the point. Whose cultural expression is transforming the arts around the globe today, Greek succinctness or African song?
It is only in the twentieth century that we begin to see ourselves truly awakening to the genius of tribal art, because of the traffic in prehistoric masks and art, the small artifacts that somehow survived the ravages of time. And, the time was right. Painters like Picasso were looking for new ways of seeing. He recognized the genius of tribal art and immediately incorporated it into his work. Others followed. It is important to note that it was an artist who recognized the true worth of tribal art. Picasso didn’t see it as primitive, child-like, stupid, but as insightful, daring, beautiful. Indeed, it is difficult to find artists of any kind today who don’t find the sculptures and glyphs and drawings of tribal man original and stunningly beautiful.
This didn’t just happen overnight. Eighteenth-century thought gave birth to the idea of the noble savage, with all its implications for the Romantic movement and the concept of the inherent dignity of man. But the actual savage seldom benefited from his perceived “nobleness.” Certainly something genuine was being perceived, as in the later nineteenth-century paintings of Rousseau and Gauguin, but both those artists were ultimately concerned with their own ideas of art, which had little to do with tribal art. Other than these early glimmerings that the “primitive” held something valuable, the concept of the noble savage seldom broke the surface of ideology into the world of equality. Don’t forget that those same noble savages were enslaved by the millions, and often by the same people who held them to be noble. It is really only when tribal cultures are first perceived through their art, and not through ideas, that we began to see the true power and beauty and intelligence of those cultures. Why is this? Why did a twentieth-century artist like Picasso see the power of tribal art? Why wasn’t it also seen by historians and anthropologists and philosophers and critics and sociologists and mathematicians? And why didn’t earlier artists see it?
Well, perhaps some did, but maybe the time wasn’t right for it to be generally accepted. When the time was right, however, it was an artist who first saw its true worth. He saw it because, like himself, tribal man was an artist to the bone. He expressed himself only through art, most of which was self-created. Everyone was an artist because there was nothing else but art. Although this surprises some people, there was no history or sociology or mathematics or philosophy or anything else except art until the act of writing was invented. So it is only natural that the true, perceptive link back to tribal man would ultimately be made by an artist. It makes sense then that the conclusion many artists have come to is very much to the point of this book: there is nothing primitive or simple about tribal man, or his art. If art is any indicator of “intelligence,” tribal man was the equal, if not the superior, of modern man.
We are stories within stories within stories
There is another way to describe the link between the artist and tribal man. If tribal man lived easily in the deepest center of himself, in the sea of is, then he has a sometime companion in the true artist. The true artist is a constant traveler to the underworld of the soul—a traveler who reappears from time to time with the gifts, or celebrations, we call art. Thus, it is easier for the true creative artist to journey past the strange, alien surface of tribal art to see it for what it truly is: a powerful portrayal of the soul, but a portrayal whose vocabulary is closer to the vocabulary of the soul than the self.
What I mean by the vocabulary of the soul is that the shapes, colors, words, images, sounds, movements used in tribal art are not the realistic ones we have come to favor in our art. If we put our various abstract experiments in art aside, our artists generally portray the world of the soul by using the realistic world of the self. A cow looks like a cow, because that is what we want in our art. Tribal man was aware of the realistic. He knew what a cow looked like, just as he knew that the odd-shaped, flowing-line figure he drew of a cow was different from the actual cow. He simply had a different way of getting to the heart of the matter. His artist’s intuition told him that his odd, elastic line-figure portrayed the spiritual essence of the cow. It was closer to the way the soul recognizes the cow. So it is only natural that someone who lived closer to his soul would portray the cow in these “unrealistic” terms. The idea of portraying the cow realistically would never have occurred to him. This closeness of self and soul is what often makes tribal art seem child-like to us, despite its often bizarre and mysterious subject matter. Like tribal art, a child’s stick figure drawings are as real to him as the imaginary friend who visits him every afternoon. This is because the child still has one foot firmly placed in the sea of is. In that, he is very much like tribal man. The bones in his head haven’t completely sealed yet. There are still openings. Little cracks. Fissures.
Like tribal art, our dreams also employ a vocabulary closer to the soul than the self, and this sometimes makes them appear as strange—as alien—as tribal art. In very early tribal art, one detects an elastic sense of dimension, time, place, and identity. It is the same elastic sense we detect in our dreams. This is a reflection of tribal art’s closeness to the soul, because it reflects the fact that the soul exists both in time and out of time. This is because the soul is both us and not us. Because the not us exists in a mysterious, unknowable world, we could hardly expect the demarcations of time and place and identity to be as precise as they are in our waking life. This sense of imprecision occurs only to modern man. Tribal man, on the other hand, saw the elasticity of his art as very precise, because it perfectly reflected the true world of the soul.
This may be tricky ground. Some will say that all vocabularies are vocabularies of the self—that the soul has none. Perhaps on the very deepest level, they’re correct. But the earlier metaphor of our total awareness as an ocean that simultaneously supports the conscious self (the boat) and the whale (the soul) is an apt one, because we can’t tell where the self stops and the soul begins⎯we sense our awareness as a continuum. Sometimes that continuum is shaded more towards the soul as we go deeper, and sometimes more towards the self as we approach the surface of our consciousness. That continuum, however, exists only in time. When we enter that timeless place that is also the soul—as through very deep meditation—there is no way to talk about what we’re experiencing. It simply is. It has no face.
As an artist, however, I can’t stay there. In fact I don’t even want to be there because I can’t make art until the soul has a face, or a voice, albeit a very deep, very hazy, very mysterious one. In the world of the soul I inhabit, the soul has already crossed into time. And as an artist, I am standing at that threshold. In that world—the world all artists have inhabited since the beginning of time—it is impossible to say where the self stops and the soul starts: where me becomes not me. The soul has many faces. And many voices. And all of them are you. And not you
I don’t mean to make too much of the closeness of the artist to tribal man. It’s somewhat misleading. At best, today’s artists hear only whispers of what those ancient tribal artists heard—those artists who inhabited the soul’s world almost continuously, so much so as to humble the most gifted of us. While it is sometimes easier for the artist to get past the seemingly strange surface of tribal art, there are times when we all can begin to experience its power and beauty. When we do, we dispel forever the idea that these people were primitive with nothing to teach us. This happens when tribal art bears a close resemblance to contemporary art. Two rare and notable examples are the thirty-thousand-year-old cave paintings of bison at Lascaux, in France and Altamira, in Spain.
How these miraculous paintings came to be is a mystery—a part of the mystery of art. I believe that at each cave there was an initial artist of genius who simply transcended his time, much as Homer and Michelangelo transcended theirs. Homer and Michelangelo may have started in their time, but they didn’t end in their time. The later dark, serpentine humor of the Odyssey is vastly different from the early, statuesque nobility of the Iliad and everything else of its time. And the last, ghost-like, barely formed Pietas of Michelangelo are so different from his early, charged, highly polished David and everything else of its time, that we can only conclude these artists somehow burst out of the constraints of time. Indeed, in their later work, Homer seems to be suddenly living in the time of Cervantes, and Michelangelo in the time of Brancusi.
Thanks to those nameless, preliterate artists at Lascaux and Altamira who also transcended time, even the thickest of us can see that these prehistoric people, despite their lack of shampoo and atom bombs, were not primitive in any way whatsoever. They may have been more sophisticated in the ways of the soul than we could ever expect to be. The cave paintings aside, what makes most prehistoric art so difficult to “get” is that its surface is so radically different from what we are used to seeing: a more realistic representation of the world. Modern abstract art has taught us to see in a different, “unrealistic” way, and may help us a bit in looking at tribal art. But tribal art is not abstract in quite the same way as modern art is.
Modern abstract art is the result of an intellectual decision to challenge the eye. The tribal artist, on the other hand, felt his “abstraction” to be real beyond belief. I have no doubt the hair on the back of his neck rose up when he looked at those intricate, abstract glyphs, much as ours does when we look at Michelangelo’s sculptures. Maybe even more so.
To understand why this is so, you have to throw out all the academic nonsense about “art” and see it for what it really is. Once you strip away all the ideologies and “isms” we have attached to art (and the act of artistic creation), we can see art for what it truly is: a portrayal—or imitation, in human terms—of the soul’s stories. For tribal man, those human terms had a vocabulary closer to the soul than the self. That is why the surface of tribal art seems so puzzling to us. We have to go deep to get it, if we can. Once we understand this—that art is a conscious and unconscious partnership between the self and the soul—we can look even more closely at its true nature. For one thing, this partnership makes art different from our dreams, which occur only when the self is asleep. For if it is the soul’s inherent nature to express itself endlessly, both in our waking and sleeping states, it is the self’s inherent nature to want to portray—to imitate—the soul’s stories. And if you want to complete the circle, the soul’s stories can be seen as portrayals (or imitations) of God’s story. What we have are those endless, concentric, intertwining circles and curves we see everywhere in tribal art. Tribal man had no trouble in portraying the essential mystery of our existence: we are stories within stories within stories.
The soul can’t stop making itself up. What is the soul attempting to do by endlessly expressing itself every hour of our existence? Who is it talking to, and why? We can’t really say. It is a mystery—so much a mystery that just one aspect of it, dreaming, has baffled science. There is constant talk about dreaming being the way the brain reorganizes its memories, but it is clear to anyone concerned with matters of the soul that science is only scratching the surface. And why not, since the only source of awareness science recognizes is the mind, completely dismissing the soul. To have a real understanding of the nature of our dreams, we have to accept that we have two centers of awareness. One of these centers of awareness, the soul, is utterly mysterious and beyond the knowing of science. All science can do is describe the effects, like REM, the rapid eye movement that occurs when we dream. Or what happens to us when we are deprived of dreaming for long periods. (We become emotionally unbalanced.) One aspect of dreaming that makes it so mysterious is that the soul doesn’t seem to care whether we consciously partake of our dreams or not. It’s as if we were composed of two different sets of consciousness. As if we were living two lives. Us and not us. We all know people who go through entire lifetimes swearing they never dream. We know this isn’t true, but what is true is that they somehow manage to completely ignore their dreams. Like talk at a cocktail party.
Yet the soul never stops dreaming. It can’t stop. It is the essential nature of the soul to express itself. The ancient Jewish mystical teachings of the Kabbala tell us that the soul is an actor. This has many implications, one of them being that the soul has many faces, many voices. Strange though it may seem to those who think of the soul as one, it was not strange to tribal man. Only when the act of writing emerged and man became self-conscious (capable of daydreaming) did we see the self gaining control and forcing a unity upon the unknowable. One God. Prior to that, tribal man experienced the unknowable as many gods, not one. And just as the concept of many gods was accepted without question by tribal man, the idea of multiple souls, or multiple portrayals of the soul, was equally accepted. Tribal man accepted without question that it is the soul’s nature to express itself continually through its endless stories of love and hate and life and death and fear and joy. What we have to learn from tribal man is that the soul can’t stop making itself up. Nor can we. Nor can God.
In the Many Voices section of the CD accompanying this book, there is a speaking called “Prisoner of Time” that celebrates this continual expression. It is not a speaking from thirty thousand years ago, but a contemporary version of that art form I call SOULSPEAK.
(Note: There are many other speakings on the CD. Begin listening to them, like background music, whenever you can.)
First close your eyes and listen to it in its oral, multi-voiced, musical form. It loses its power when reduced to a written, single-voiced, non-musical state. Here are some transcribed phrases, however, to give you an idea of its content:
God can’t stop making us up.
And everything we touch.
We are the sound of God speaking.
God only speaks in time.
We are the prisoners of time.
And we are most us
when we are standing
on the glittery edge
where God is making us up
and we are making ourselves up
at the same time.
This speaking is concerned primarily with the mystery we call God. All we can truly know about that mystery is what the character Pip (for example), in Great Expectations, knows about Dickens: nothing. Pip exists for Dickens, but Dickens doesn’t exist for Pip. Fate (a blindly felt moving force) does, but not Dickens. Dickens is outside of Pip’s world—of Pip’s ability to imagine, to know—just as God is beyond ours. We can only guess at God’s nature by witnessing the effects of that nature. Like the French philosopher, Descartes, if we look at these effects hard enough, and long enough, a pattern emerges. That pattern, when you reduce it all down, consists of endlessly repeated forms of creation and destruction: birth and death. Everything else is really a subset of those two primal forces. We can also sense that they are linked in some primal way, which in tribal art takes the form of the snake eating its own tail. Those circles again.
How do we make sense of these inter-linked cycles of creation and destruction? We make sense of it through stories. Stories imitate that huge, intuitively sensed but essentially unknowable story of unending birth and death we call God’s story. The exact intent and structure of God’s story is never clear to us. We sense the story only indirectly. We have no idea of the plot, the characters, the words. How could we? After all, we are only the sound of God speaking.
The relation of novelist to hero is an apt one because Dickens’ intent is never clear to Pip. It can’t be. If anything, Pip feels what we feel: that something larger is guiding us, but we don’t really understand what, or why. Again,
We are the sound of God speaking.
Not the words. Not the text. The sound. The vibration. The feeling. Because of this, the best we can do is imitate the mystery through art: the snake eating its own tail. And when we create stories that successfully imitate this mystery, we immediately recognize them as intuitively true, and beautiful:
And we are most us when we are standing on the glittery edge where God is making us up and we are making ourselves up at the same time
Keats was right: Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty. This then, the portrayal of mysteries, is the essential function of art. Everything else is secondary—runoff from the mainstream.
In this text two terms have been interchanged: art and stories. This is because art