Care of the Soul
Possible soundtrack for reading this post: Awake My Soul by Mumford & Sons.
The soul craves beauty, needs beauty. The “assumption that beauty is an accessory, and dispensable, shows that we don’t understand the importance of giving the soul what it needs,” says Thomas Moore. “The soul is nurtured by beauty.” This is from that eternal volume, Care of the Soul which I have written about countless times here.
Rome
“Let us imagine care of the soul, then, as an application of poetics to everyday life.”
— Thomas Moore
Would the world be a different place if more people knew how to apply poetics to their everyday life?
There’s a passage in Care of the Soul where Moore talks about the Alec Guinness movie, The Man in the White Suit. One can’t help but see the white suit as something even more symbolic these days. The indestructible, eternal suit, “a triumph of technology” deprives workers of their livelihood, and their soul.
From Wikipedia: “The film reaches its climax with Stratton pursued through the streets at night, wearing the glowing white suit. Chased by a mob of industrialists and workers, he appears cornered, but suddenly the fabric begins to fail. The chemical structure of the fibre proves unstable, and the suit disintegrates before the crowd’s eyes. Triumphant, the mob strips away the remnants, leaving Stratton in his underclothes. Only Daphne and Bertha, a sympathetic mill worker, express pity for his plight.”
Garden of Livia fresco, Rome
Moore says that he would go so far as to say that “if we lack beauty in our lives, we will probably suffer familiar disturbances in the soul — depression, paranoia, meaninglessness, and addiction.”
The soul benefits when we are allowed to be good at what we’re good at. And we’re each a special mix — Moore says that “the soul is highly idiosyncratic.”
I think that most people want a soulful life. This doesn’t mean having an easy or worry-free existence, but we want an ordinary life that has “the depth and value that come with soulfulness.” We want the conditions in which we may cultivate a “richly expressive and meaningful life at home and in society.” This is something that “requires imagination.” And I think that our imagination is at stake these days. Of course it is. How can we imagine and envision futures when the world wars, when tyrants and oligarchs and rapists go unchecked and unpunished?
How do we care for our soul in these ruthless days? I had just read Liz Bucar’s Substack on Rebecca Solnit when I saw that Kerry Clare had posted about Solnit’s new book, which is on my rather tippy TBR pile. Bucar quotes her:
Solnit’s answer:
“I often think one of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies over and over that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex whose superpower is the ability to inflict and endure extraordinary violence. When actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. It brings up something really beautiful that Thich Nhat Hanh said at some point before he died a few years ago, which is: the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha in Buddhist terminology is the community of practitioners.”
She continues:
“It’s the idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an ubermensch. Maybe the community is the next hero. And it’s exactly what Minneapolis is. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society.”
And then Kerry Clare says, “We don’t know what’s ahead, but there is so much possibility.” And we have to hope, just as we need beauty, just as we need to care for our soul.
I keep returning to Emergent Strategy by adrienne mares brown and that line she quotes, “What is the next most elegant step?” It’s not always easy to see on our own. Maybe we need to include others, ask, listen, to such questions. People are used to not being heard, as brown says. What if we asked? What if we listened? What if we applied poetics?
What if we applied poetics, attended to our souls, and demanded a civil society?
Florence, garden at Villa Bardini
