Soul / Self
The poems of Walt Whitman—to cite one prominent nexus—veer episodically between soul and self. Famously, he will “loaf and invite my soul,” but also, famously, he writes a poem entitled “A Song of Myself.” The verb is telling: the soul must be invited. The soul doesn’t have full-time religious status for Whitman and lives outside of churches. The self is attached to the person and offers the savor of identity, at once tasting the world and merging with the world. The self corroborates the excitement of the nascent democracy. Every citizen is a self.
Whitman wrote in the nineteenth century. In the course of the twentieth century, the self—to put the matter starkly—swallowed the soul. Or the soul evaporated and the self grew large in the soul’s absence. Or both happened at the same time. Once upon a pre-modern time, a soul was God’s guarantee that every person was a valid spiritual creature capable of redemption. God stamped soul into everyone. As the mundane world became something more than a vale of tears, the soul lost its currency. People could validate themselves through their actions and acquisitions. They were no longer the playthings of kings and lords. Science had answers to many unknowns. The soul’s answer to the woe of mortality came to seem not very important.
No one ever saw a soul. Soul was mysterious and non-materialist, a rumor but one that counted for a margin of spirit within a body. To be sure, soul could make itself felt in various enterprises such as music and art. Someone would say that a song was sung with soul. No one would say that a song was sung with self. The singer automatically was a self of some sort. Whether soul came into play was, however, another story.
Given all that was going on in the modern world, what could the soul count for? Soul didn’t drive a car or practice a specialized vocation or pay taxes or join an army or buy a ticket to the movies or possess a passport. Soul seemed an old-fashioned extravagance, a relic best consigned to the spiritual attic. And the fact of its being indefinable made it tedious. In a world devoted to experts, how could one care for something so imprecise? Soul came to seem hokey, a cousin who stopped by now and then and could never explain where she had been.
What the soul formed was a shadow for the self. Solid yet permeable, the self had no shadow. Self didn’t exist but felt real. Everyone answered to a name and the name led a life. Names always had been leading lives but the lives came to feel more solid than they once had felt. In earlier times, children often weren’t named right away because they were likely to die. In the valley of the shadow of death, the soul had a rightful place: identity could be easily erased. Identity amounted to little more than dust, if that. The soul, on the other hand, was an enormous ghost that neither lived nor died but hovered in both worlds. To communicate with the dead you had to have a soul. A self could never do that.
A self could do a lot of other things. The welter of identity defined the self. A self, accordingly, could be set or fluid. A self could accrue or be lost. A self could be particular or wide-ranging. A self could undergo the crisis of “Who am I?” The crisis could be daily. A lot of words and pills could tackle that crisis, which could remain unresolved. Perhaps that was the point of the self.
If each person is busy validating him or herself, then the collective business of the society is that validation. Everything is secondary to the assertive work of the self. “Look at me” and “Here I am” and “Listen to what I have to say” and “Notice who I am,” are some of the self’s mottoes. When everyone is hollering such mottoes, a major hullabaloo—modernity—is created. Modernity barely tolerates silence because silence feels empty. Silence is not doing anything. Silence is not demonstrating that something exists by making a sound about it. The great clamor of modern cities feels good to the self. It confirms identity whereas silence wilts identity. Silence is always vast. No assertive chatter in the meditation hall.
Whitman sought to make the self large and encompassing, a worthy goal though the lures of identity proved shifty. People could possess more and more. Their possessions came to define them. This didn’t make people larger, however. It may have made them smaller in the sense that they became preoccupied with their passion for acquisition. Whitman didn’t want to acquire anything. He wanted to be part of what was going on around him. He, like most poets, adored energy, something the modern world had a lot of. Whitman saw the energy as a good in its own right. He loved vitality. No machine, however, interfered with that vision, which was humanist in the sense that being human came foremost. Even when he evoked crowds and categories, Whitman still was counting one man or woman after another.
A world made only of selves is a sunny but brittle world. Each human face beams its determination at each other human face. No one can see because everyone is blinded by the glow of identity. This isn’t a parable but a fact of modern times. Whereas, previously, the human agenda was laid out—work and death far beyond Eden’s garden—the self’s purposes, gradually but forcefully, took over. The ghost of the soul no longer lingered in the background, protesting the evanescence of identity. In modern times, there was too much to be accomplished to make evanescence an issue. There was too much to be asserted—ideologies, personal testimonies, strategies for happiness. Meanwhile, perfectionism—the belief in the self’s unlimited powers—stared out of every constructed window.
The talkative self wants to make itself known. That is how it knows it exists. The soul can loaf, linger, and speak when called to speak. The soul is the deep chord of being human, what can be felt but not explicitly defined, that dwells in the precincts of love and dread, the awe at being here on this planet. Self takes that for granted and moves forward, always forward. Whether the planet can support billions of selves is questionable. The self always has another demand; the soul does not know what a demand is.
"No one can see because everyone is blinded by the glow of identity." This, paradoxically, opened my eyes.
So interesting to think of Whitman in the context of this essay. Right after inviting his soul in Song of Myself he invokes the soil. Self, Soul, Soil. Song.
The “vast silence” invoked in this essay is, I think, the same vastness surrounding Whitman’s “Noiseless Patient Spider”, which is to say, his soul…