'We can find no scar'

on the soul, with help from Olga Tokarczuk and Emily Dickinson

A man falls ill and wonders what could possibly be the matter. He is sick but not sick. He can perform the motions of what he has always taken to be his adult life, busyness, meetings, a passion for his work. But on the inside, he feels a certain listlessness, something edgy. He might call it by any number of names, the void, feeling low, anxiety, depression, but Olga Tokarczuk, in The Lost Soul, refrains from these labels, these small words for so vast and wrong and normal a state. The man goes to the doctor, and in the world of Tokarczuk’s book, the doctor is a true one, one that knows how to point the way toward healing, even if heal by himself he cannot. You have lost your soul, the doctor tells the man. You’ve been going too fast—too many meetings, to much travel, too much will. You’ve left your soul behind. What do I do, asks the man. How do I find my soul again? Oh, don’t worry, says the doctor, your soul is probably just moving through the terrain you left behind a couple of years ago. All you have to do is sit down and wait. Be patient. Your soul will catch up to you.

Tokarczuk’s book is more picture book than anything else. After this exchange, the reader turns page after page of drawings by artist Joanna Concego. These images are heavy and dense, pencil stroke and monochromatic gradation stand in for the man’s confusion and loneliness as the pictures show him moving into a small house in a lonely forest. He sits at a table and waits for his soul, personified on every other page or so as a small child making its way through landscapes the man ostensibly evacuated long ago. The man’s beard grows long. The potted plants in the house around him grow wild. The woods around the house fill out with leaf and animal that fall away again with changing seasons. A few pages before the end of the book, the soul appears at the man’s the door. They confront each other and the reader, two faces, one wise and older and lonely, the other young and wise and wonderful. Love arises at the end of the story through the meeting of the man and his soul. Concego’s drawings bloom into an erratic garden of wild wood and cultivated monsterra inside the house. Tokarczuk tells us that the man celebrates the return of his soul by burying his watches and suitcases, which, when harvest season come around, sprout into strange patches of flowers and pumpkins.

When I saw the pumpkins in the patch near my home this fall, I was struck by the oddity of their color, how impossible and strange their orangeness seemed. After a period of joy and clarity following a spiritual experience in the basement of the hospital where I undergo nuclear bone scans every six months or so, I had found myself back in the familiar territory of disgust and despair. When I finally embraced the spiritual path that I had unwittingly been on ever since I turned over the first tarot card back in grad school, I had been set on carrying along my usual cultural predispositions as signposts of “still being a good and relevant person.” I thought I could inoculate myself against spiritual bypassing if I still performed precisely the right kind of analysis in my writing and in my living. As if by privileging the material breakdown of material reality into an unflinching apportionment of “hard fact” existing alongside or contradictory of “spiritual truth,” I could somehow get stamps of approval from both the people I saw in my cultural milieu as aspirational and also from God. Or, I think this is what I thought was doing, on the surface. Behind the intention of being the spiritual lady with the proper real-world chops was also my desire to somehow get rid of disgust and despair, my desperation for life to never again be as bad as it has sometimes felt.

But a succession of awakenings since undergoing chemotherapy at the beginning of this year made this position untenable. Every time I open my laptop or log online, I see the void that my culture has appeared to drop through. Often that seeming void is there, in daily life, in real-time interactions and relationships, too. I cannot pretend I agree with the same-old arguments, that my body can assemble itself into the same-old posturing. People rail against the evil inherent in social media platforms while insisting they must be on these platforms, railing, to survive. Women seek to ruin each other on the basis of this or that feminism, rather than wondering about the self-deception in advocating for anyone’s ruin. At my son’s school, teachers and administrators tell us that “AI is just a tool” and that “boys will be boys.” So many of us try to numb or nullify the sink-and-rush of our minds, missing that to grow the intuitive and intellectual capacities of the human being necessitates, at base, a kind of delusion that must be looked at, loved, worked through. Impossible hues come from the muck of the soil, the orange of the pumpkin from the push upwards toward light in a season where it seems that everything should be dying. I feel clarity in myself and confusion, as a writer, about how to speak it. Confusion, as a person, about how to live it. I fall silent.

What does it mean to bury time and its symbols? If I have to be out of phase with a kind of time, let it be this culture’s time rather than the time of my own soul. Let me sit quietly until my soul catches up to me. Is it possible that spiritual bypassing only happens with a hard focus on matter or with the insistence on senselessness, on “I can’t imagines,” on the white-knuckled grip to the thing you think you desire, but then when you get it, whatever it is, you can’t quite rid yourself of that prick of dissatisfaction, that listless edge, that cleaving to a label to help you understand why you’re still teetering against a lack of true enjoyment, if not sorrow itself?

Buddhism stays with this sorrow. The Buddhist path to enlightenment begins with an investigation of the three basic characteristics of reality—no self, impermanence, dissatisfaction. When cancer happened, Buddhism was an easy rock to cling to, a practical survival guide. Everything sucks, but if you go into “everything sucks” hard enough, you can reach a place of bliss. You can become attached to non-attachment, which is one of the ways Western Buddhism plays out. There’s not really a place for the soul in Buddhism, or at least in the secular Western conception of it. That didn’t bother me for a long time. It didn’t really bother me until I had the experience—wild, uncanny, as real as the dirt my feet were standing in—of my unborn daughter flirting with the new buds on the tree in our backyard one April. She wanted to come down to us. She wanted to be with us, and so I said yes to her. Theological and spiritual and existential questions abounded. What was this? Who was she? Who am I? What is a human being? What does it mean to live a fulfilling life, in our time, at all? Are there ever universal answers to these questions? Are there ever particular answers to these questions? What is the relationship between the universal and the particular?

In Valentin Tomberg’s book Christ and Sophia, he writes about Snow White as an image of the soul in one of the most striking passages in the text itself:

Soul is not revealed in the universe; the laws of the universe bear witness to a wonderful wisdom—wisdom in whose presence human reason feels like a small and tiny creature—but the rigid lines of those laws are only the soul’s coffin. It is not a dull, opaque coffin, but as transparent as crystal; nonetheless it is rigid and silent. At the same time, however, it bears witness to what it lacks. Just as cold bears witness to warmth and rigidity bears witness to movement, the cosmic coffin bears witness to the soul. In this sense the crystal coffin ‘contains’ the soul and demonstrates—through its coldness and rigidity—what the soul would have to be if it lived in the world; it reveals a dead soul.

Thus the immensely meaningful fairy tale of Snow White–the crystal tomb with a dead maiden guarded by dwarves–arises before the soul of those who see the universe as a ‘moral impression.’ This image expresses the fact that the present cosmos is one of wisdom, but one in which love is absent. This is the essential result of contemplating the universe from the outside as it appears to the consciousness between birth and death. When viewed from the inside, the wisdom is so dynamic, inclusive, and overwhelming, that it is important for the soul to assert itself as a soul, with the content of a soul, in this sea of purposeful wisdom … The soul would, in fact, be condemned to a shadowy existence if not for the fact it brings a force, or essence, from the Earth that makes it possible for the soul not to lose its being. This force was learned on Earth and in the soul it becomes the capacity to love (292).

In the same week that I read this passage, I dreamt of women’s faces dissolving; a friend helped me to pour lye on Snow White’s face so that her “body would dissolve faster.” About a week later, I was driving to the top of a mountain to pick the last of the seasons’ apples with my kids, my husband, and his mom. The whole world was covered in fog, fog so thick and beautiful you couldn’t see anything through it. But the sun was also shining. In between the fog, in these strange and piercing moments, the sun would strike, just so, on a curve of a mountain, a hang of an evergreen, the top of the old train station that no one uses anymore. Revelations. Bits of soul. Beautiful, I thought, climbing into the driver seat of the car. But I was tired and lonely and busy and not that moved. I opened my phone to answer a message from a friend on a Discord server, when I began to feel that familiar-yet-always-impossible feeling moving through the base of mind. It raised the hairs along my neck and arms, flushing out my cheeks, making my heart beat fast and also slow down, like it had no need to ever beat again. I had to put the phone down, because I knew what was happening, the thought had come into my mind, the true thought, the one that is truer than the true: I’m waking up again. I looked up into the sky and I saw myself and my husband, and all the faces of the people I loved, as heavy fog, as sharp light, as sharp light and heavy fog. I began to drive to the mountain, just to come back down it again, laden with apples and this more-than-human feeling, and I realized I had lived this landscape before, not in a mundane sense, but in the sense that it was exactly what I had imagined, two decades ago, when I first read Emily Dickinson’s poem “There’s a certain slant of light.” I had seen this time before. I had lived it before, in a vision of the poem that I had eventually gotten tattooed on my wrist.

“Oh my god, I am the imperial affliction!” I cried out, indulging a dumb habit of joking to myself as the price of admittance and entryway into hard and lovely thought. I thought about these long years of illness, what a struggle it’s been to find my way to love in the face of the destruction of all those big desires I had for myself all of my life. This is the Heavenly Hurt! That my illness gave me time and space for the shadows of myself—all my nail-bitten desires—to hold their breath and then eventually to take leave of me, this is so obvious that I have written about it before. But in an ironic way, in a bitter way, in such a way that I kept myself from the truth of what it is that has been happening to me. The “lye” in my dream of Snow White was the “lie” of this world: that our material measures of success—pristine princess in a glass case, silent soul—are the markers of wholeness and health. What a gift, then, to have undergone a disease that bears witness to what that vision of reality lacks. It is a truth that sounds crazy and terrible. But is beautiful, true, and good, in the way that Dickinson’s poem is ostensibly about something crazy, terrible, and sick but is, at the same time, about something beautiful, true, and good. It is a truth about the ability to directly experience the reality of the divine, and to directly know the nature of the soul that calls out for and always-already knows the divine. In everyday reality, that knowledge comes in slant, as beauty and horror together, as Heavenly Hurt and internal difference.

This was my soul catching up to me. This was myself as Tokarczuk’s main character, waiting, in my own way, until it did. In the margins of my old copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems, my 17-year-old self has hearted and underlined “There’s a certain slant of light,’ and beside certain lines has written hilarious things identifying myself with the speaker of the poem. When I was younger, I alternately felt ashamed and brazen that my favorite poem was a poem about depression, because that seemed “too on the nose.” More than depression, though, what I never quite got until recently is that the poem also reveals depression’s opposite—transcendence, a radical aliveness—spoken through and attested to by the voice of the soul. From the “consciousness that exists between birth and death,” transcendence will always have to include pain, requiring as it does, the appearance of the movement from birth to death, over and over again, in ourselves, in our loved ones, in our desires. The soul contemplates the apparent, ceaseless movement toward the end of all things, and in contemplating it, brings to reality its missing element, the true thing that can only be learned here on earth, through our human foibles and our evils and our artificial desires, wherever they lead us.

The missing element is love, and “none may teach it—any—,” which means it’s already something you know how to do. Wishing you a soul-making season of love, whatever form and however long it takes.

Lyra atop the Blue Ridge at sunset.