Turn Up Your Soul
Scrolling through Twitter one morning, as one does, I saw that someone posted a video with the caption, “turn up your sound” but I mis-read it as turn up your soul. We see what we need to see sometimes.
Maybe it’s nearly time to reconstitute the world:
My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
—Adrienne Rich
Maybe it’s time for poems to fill with light again, for poets. Which is to say, all of us.
A poetry of the meaning of words
And a bond with the universe
I think there is no light in the world
but the world
And I think there is light
— George Oppen
In my study, as shown above, there are most likely a lot of conversations taking place. Between Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Mrs. Dalloway, a cloud. Who knows what they’re talking about? On the bookshelves as well. As it turns out I file Anne Sexton beside Hermann Hesse.
Sexton: “I am not lazy. / I am on the amphetamine of the soul.”
She also said, “Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
I’m not one of these people who is going to tell you everything will be alright. For many it simply won’t be. Or hasn’t been.
A poem from Hesse’s book Seasons of the Soul:
Now and Then
Now and then everything feels wrong and desolate,
and sprawling in pain, weak and exhausted,
every effort reverts to grief,
every joy collapse with broken wings.
And our longing listens for distant summons,
aching to receive news filled with joy.
But we still miss bliss,
fortunate fates elude from afar.
Now is the time to listen within,
tend our inner garden mindfully
until new flowers, new blessings can blossom.
Hesse thought of himself as an advocate for the soul, and wouldn’t that be a thing to be remembered for?
I have some hope for us this next year, for our souls. Yet right now I admit I’m feeling that certain things are a bit wrong and desolate. There’s the story the drummer Neil Peart tells about riding his motorcycle and the cliche of driving so far, thousands of miles, and then relaxing a bit too much the five miles before you get home, and then wiping out, crashing. And I feel like that works for this time, too. We’re close to home, and I’d prefer not to crash.
Clarice Lispector’s lines live firmly in my head right now:
“For anything can happen and damage the most intimate life of a person. What will have been done to my soul next year? Will that soul have grown? and grown peacefully or through the pain of doubt?”
For now, I cast my lot with those whose souls are turned up as loud as they can go in spite of everything. I cast my lot with those whose souls are a light.
There is a translation of Sappho’s fragment #156 translated by Paul Roche that goes:
I am as limp
as a wet worn-out dish cloth
I don’t think our souls will come out of this the same. Mine is a worn-out dish cloth right now. They’ll all be a little battered for sure. There will be cracks. But maybe we’ll have learned to put our ear down close, listen hard to our souls. You know, crank up that soul radio. At the same time, two hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, please. Drive to conditions.
