In Search of Soul. Alejandro Nava
The following abbreviations are used in parentheses in text to refer to works by these authors in chapters 4 and 5.
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA
| CP: | Collected Poems, ed. Christopher Maurer (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002). |
| DS: | Deep Song and Other Verse, ed. and trans. Christopher Maurer (New York: New Directions, 1975). |
| G: | Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). |
| IL: | Impressions and Landscapes, ed. and trans. Lawrence Klibbe (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987). |
| SL: | Selected Letters (New York: New Directions, 1983). |
| SV: | Selected Verse, ed. Christopher Maurer (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995). |
RALPH ELLISON
| CE: | The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995). |
| GTT: | Going to the Territory (New York: Vintage Books, 1986). |
| IM: | Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). |
| JT: | Juneteenth, ed. John Callahan (New York: Vintage Books, 1999). |
| SA: | Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). |
Introduction
Be the voice of night. . . .
Use dusky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.
—Wallace Stevens1
The old generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow-up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald2
I concede at the outset of this study that the phenomenon we call “soul” is relentlessly opaque and shadowy, a nebulous thing seen through a cloud darkly. In spite of the best efforts of reason over centuries of study and vigorous inquiry, the soul remains a strange property of human life, something that exists beyond the utmost boundaries of knowledge. More a source of wonder than an object of reason, soul belongs to a category dedicated to the art of questioning rather than the science of knowledge because the study of the soul involves a quest without definitive answers, endlessly deferred and yet endlessly compelling. While the great classics of art, music, literature, and religion have spoken of soul with great frequency, the confidence in what can be said and described eventually falters on the shoals of the deep and inexpressible, which is why so many works of art resort to the hope that it can be evoked and felt if not exhaustively described. Music and religion are close companions on this score, as they assume the ability of the human spirit to reach sublimity with words and sounds that are allusive and elliptical, that indicate the limits of language as much as its rich possibilities. With this conundrum in mind—speaking of something familiar, but inexorably foreign, something near but as distant as the horizon—I explore the soul’s elusive identity and try to add something to these attempts of human speech to name what is fundamentally nameless. And also with this conundrum in mind, I follow Wallace Stevens’s admonition to choose dusky words and images, to darken my speech when speaking of the soul’s uncanny mysteries.
Other issues this book considers are less conundrums than they are predicaments or crises of the spirit. We live in a time when the values of the soul—beauty, love, justice, compassion, contemplation, and reverence—are frequently replaced by the values of the marketplace—money, power, and pleasure—or in some scientific circles, by materialist accounts of the brain. When modern culture is most hostile to mystery and spiritual meaning, it has a way of diminishing and cheapening the most precious goods of life. Whether the soul is assailed by consumer temptations and indulgences or by an aggressive empiricism intolerant of transcendence, Western culture seems increasingly reluctant to acknowledge depth in the cosmos or human person, fearing that God may continue to lurk in the dark spectral spaces of the unknown. In his “psyche-analytical” approach to this question (a discipline concerned with “soul-analysis”), Jonathan Lear puts the issue in these terms: “Are we to see humans as having depth—as complex psychological organisms who generate layers of meaning which lie beneath the surface of their own understanding, or are we to take ourselves as transparent to ourselves?”3 His sympathy, as mine, is with the former approach, in which the human soul is seen as a great, deep river with various crosscurrents and frothy vortexes of meaning running through it, forever blocking a clear vision of the bottomless ground of our being.
In my view, the battles fought over these questions are more than speculative questions of philosophy, psychology, or theology; there are more dangerous cultural and political implications. Seen in the context of modern history, for instance, the refusal to concede depth and complexity to non-European peoples often fueled violent imperial projects of conquest and exploitation. In the minds of many Europeans, colonized individuals and communities were named and depicted as they saw fit, regardless of what they thought. Think of the legendary reluctance of Native cultures to bare their bodies and souls to a camera or daguerreotype in this light; perhaps the anxiety was really about the destructive power of the Western gaze as Native American lives and ways were pried open and invaded until everything of value had been plundered. Maybe the reluctance to pose before a white man’s camera represented a refusal to be understood on others’ terms, a refusal to be turned into a caricature. Perhaps it was a way of guarding the dignity of Native bodies and souls, of keeping their inner selves blurred and impenetrable to Western strategies of representation, knowledge, and power. Perhaps it was a strategy in the same mold of James Brown’s expert use of ruses and subterfuges to preserve the inner sanctum of his soul. “He had years of practice,” writes James McBride, “covering up, closing down, shutting in, shutting out, locking up, locking out, placing mirrors in rooms, hammering up false doorways and floorboards to trap all comers who inquired about his inner soul.”4 Whether in Native histories or in the life of James Brown, there is a lesson here about the value of concealment and secrecy in the face of Western tendencies, when they lack proper respect for the spirit world, to strip the human condition of soul.
While many of the contemporary artists that I follow in this study recognize the opportunities and prospects made possible by the modern world, they also have profound misgivings for these reasons. These artists are conflicted moderns for whom modern achievements have been impressive in some ways but remarkably thin and shallow when it comes to the development of the human spirit. Lauryn Hill has spoken of a rampant miseducation at work here, a fundamental betrayal of the nobler aspirations of life. The result, she fears, is a generation of “lost ones,” big on self-gratification and small on soul. “I’m about to change the focus,” she raps, “from the richest to the brokest. I wrote this opus to reverse the hypnosis.”5 I invoke Lauryn Hill because I want to make clear my kinship with her efforts to break the hypnotic spell that has the modern age transfixed by the economy of appetite and avarice and to change the focus from the richest to the brokest.6 In following the diverse genres of religion, literature, and music in this book, one may expect widely divergent opinions, but I argue that these artists form a unified ensemble of voices when it comes to privileging the jewels of art, wisdom, and compassion over the consumer culture of profit and possession.
MAP OF THE BOOK
This study is concerned with two major streams that have shaped Western ideas of soul: religious and biblical versions of soul (part I), and cultural, musical, and literary interpretations (part II). Though the demarcation here is a diaphanous and porous border, with dimensions of each leaking into the other, these categories allow us to consider soul from different angles, first as a biblical and theological concept and subsequently as a question of style in music, folklore, poetry, and literature. When speaking of this second inflection, I center my attention on African American and Spanish/Latin American traditions for the simple reason that they converge with my own area of expertise and, more personally, touch aspects of my own culturally conditioned soul; this is the music that is nearest and dearest to my own life.7
If