Of Words and Souls

I wonder if my soul has words written on it. And if it does, what words are they? As I've been walking through the worlds of Virginia Woolf and Charles Williams and Neil Gaiman, I always have a book of poetry going. Poetry where a poet, in the space of a page, can make me ponder love, life, the Cosmos, loss, sex, our place in the Universe and Nature, the color blue, mythology, history, God. Maybe in the space of three stanzas. Can do what it takes novelists 500 pages to do. Condense the soul into words, just a few, and make it speak.

Because a poem is made up of words, speech is how the soul is embodied. (Frank Bidart, from an interview at the end of "Metaphysical Dog.")

Sometimes when I read something that someone I know writes, I can hear their voice saying their words. At its best, I feel like my writing has my voice, my speech, my soul embedded in it. You want to see what my soul looks like? Can you see it in my eyes? Is my soul blue? Or could I better show it in something I've written, something that feels like everything I have to say, or have said yet. Can my soul live on a page, or on a screen, separate from me, created by itself? Or can you hear it in my voice? Tricky fu**ers, these souls. How can we get our arms around them?

Whatever it takes to get the whole soul into a poem. (Bidart, same interview)

Last evening, we were sitting on a dock on the Tred Avon River. A heron flew by overhead and landed by the shore. We have established that herons do enough for me that I have one tattooed on my arm. I've talked about herons as my spirit animal on here before. Watching a heron fly, with its legs kicked back long behind it; then watching it transition, ungracefully to land; and then to see them still, balanced, stoic in the water. I wonder if something outside of you, observed by you, can speak your soul? I wonder if my soul could be captured in that clumsy transition from air to water, when the legs come down and arrest forward momentum, both looking improbable, but working every time. My ungraceful, improbable, functional soul.

The words, like a bonfire encased
in glass, glowed on the horizon.

Can a soul be contained in words? Are words written on the soul of one who writes? If words are connected to the soul, maybe they would look like a bonfire encased in glass, glow(ing) on the horizon.

But I think Bidart's right. That's the creative struggle. To get the whole soul into the poem, the painting, the art. Maybe words, maybe art, maybe love is how the soul speaks to another or to itself.

And Druids Come Back in Fashion

Birds rarely shut up in the spring. It doesn't matter what time you wake up, their soundtrack is on a loop. Whether or not you are a fan of birdsong might determine what you think of spring.

If birds became quiet, like people can, we would want their noise back. Silence is a place people can find and have trouble coming back from. Frank Bidart says:

When what we understand about
what we are

changes, whole
parts of us fall mute.

And that leaves me quiet. When what we understand about what we are changes, whole parts of us fall mute. And I have had those days. When I am walking through the grocery store looking at other people going by, and wondering, does anyone else feel this way, and then thinking, everyone in here has had some shit to deal with, to work through, and when we pass by each other in the aisles, we don't know the other person's story. He or she might have just found out they have cancer. And not told anyone yet, is picking up dinner and some wine to go have that conversation.

And there are times when if someone asked what's up, I wouldn't have words for it. Things have shifted, but not yet to a place where language has caught up to it.

Jorie Graham contemplates a maybe related change:

We call it blossoming--
the spirit breaks from you and you remain.

Spring is the season for blossoming. I am reminded of it and awed when I am cutting the grass or walking the back yard with a beer. The roses in the back garden weren't there last week and this week, full bloom. Wisteria was bright in our bus stop faces, but now it is green and quiet. Maybe after blossoming, wisteria understands itself differently and falls silent. Until it remembers again, next spring.

Spring is loud. It moves. Change on the outside does not happen quietly. Spring and the soul can also be about renewal, rebirth. Blossoming. And that kind of change, in the spirit, brings on silence. We don't have words. But we are waiting for them to catch up. I like another thought from Graham about that:

.............Just as
from time to time
we need to seize again
the whole language
in search of
better desires.

Maybe the words we had don't work anymore. Maybe as we change, their meanings change, no longer suffice. Maybe we need to step back and grab up the whole language again, not just the words we've come to rely on. Maybe awesome becomes magnificent and roses become tulips and druids come back in fashion.