The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Entertaining Ideas: Barbara Knott

Soul as an Agent of Yearning

Picking up on the Soul Talk of our Home Page, let’s notice again that soul is vibrant with yearning … for expression, for connection, for the bliss that comes from feeling kinship with all life. Anyone who reads around in Grapevine articles will notice common themes related to questing (path, journey, initiation, development, fulfillment), to sacred spaces (nature, wilderness, world), to shapes of becoming (cocoon, acorn, seed), to processes (flowering), to states of being (ecstasy, bliss). Readers may notice again and again our attention to the idea that there is in the body an invisible but strongly felt, powerful urge to move into relationship with otherness. Some call that urge “soul.” Sometimes we call it “imagination.” Imagination gives body to shapes as yet unrealized in the world. The poetic imagination often is seen as soul.

Both D. H. Lawrence, novelist and poet, and David L. Miller, mythologist, speak of soul as the Holy Ghost, with an accent on the sensual yearnings that often accompany expressions of soul.

It is the individual in his pure singleness, in his totality of consciousness, in his oneness of being: the Holy Ghost which is with us after our Pentecost, and which we may not deny.

When I say to myself, “I am wrong” knowing with sudden insight that I am wrong, then this is the whole self speaking, the Holy Ghost. It is no piece of mental interference. It is not just the soul sending forth a flash. It is my whole being speaking in one voice, soul and mind and psyche transfigured into oneness. This voice of my being I may never deny. D. H. Lawrence, “Fantasia of the Unconscious,” (p. 165) quoted in David Miller, Three Faces of God (pp. 99-100).

The Holy Ghost, the incalculable soul, the poetic imagination—such is the nature of the third which is the life connection. A poem is the Holy Ghost in its function of linking idea and life, tradition and reality, myth(ology) and psyche(ology). Poetry is the clue to the Trinity … as it “disappears into the brush.” David Miller, Three Faces of God (p.100).

James Hillman, archetypal psychologist known and befriended by David Miller, gives an eloquent answer to the question he himself asks, What does the soul want?

According to Hillman, The soul wants many things—to be loved, to be heard, to be named and seen, to be taught, to be let out, out in the street, out of the prisons of psychological systems, out of the fiction of interiority which forces it to project itself to gain outer recognition. We know too it has a vital interest in the life and behavior of its keeper on whom it depends, but this interest is not in the life and behavior as such, to help it or cure it. Rather it seems to be an interest in life for soul’s sake. It seems to ask that our sense of first importance shift from life to soul, that life be given value in terms of soul and in preference to a soul valued in terms of life. Thus, it does not brook neglect in life—this above all, and so it is like the ancient Gods who considered impiety to consist in one great sin, neglect. (in Healing Fiction, p. 12).

To Hillman’s comments, Anthony Stevens adds these:

By soul, Hillman meant a perspective rather than a substance. He conceived the soul as a self-sustaining and imagining process on which consciousness rests—'an unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experience, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern’. The sense in which he has most frequently used the term in his writings is to designate ‘the imaginative possibilities of our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical '.

The soul is to be equated with ‘poetic basis of mind’ and must be the primary concern of ‘depth psychology’. Whereas most religious, psychological, and social aspiration is upwards, Hillman believes our therapeutic orientation should carry us downwards in quest of the deeper meanings of the soul’. (in Private Myths, pp. 337-8).

We might say, then, that soul speaks in images. Finally, these important insights by Bill Plotkin. What an image of yearning he creates here, with a flower:

Even in our synthetic, egocentric society, the soul stirs in our subterranean depths, endlessly calling, pushing up like a flower through the cracks in the concrete pavement of our lives. We catch glimpses in our dreams and in fragments of poetry and song, in the distant howl of a coyote or in a bird’s sudden flight, in sunsets and the rapture of romance. (in Soulcraft, p.43.)

Flower Power

photo by sandy mason

Sources:

David L. Miller, Three Faces of God (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Fortress Press, 1986).

D. H. Lawrence, “Fantasia of the Unconscious,” Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (New York: Viking Press, 1960).

James Hillman, Healing Fiction (Putnam, Connecticut: Spring Publications, Inc., 1983).

Anthony Stevens, Private Myths (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft, (Novato, California: New World Library, 2003).