Week 6 - March 11
Field
Guide to the Soul
The child is father [mother, uncle, aunt} of the Man --trailing
clouds of glory
For
Rachel, Just Before Speech
We
are the body, moving toward demise;
we are the soul, remnant of another life. Epistle
And always, rain tapping on a zinc roof But there is wisdom
is the sound of fingers, thrumming flesh. in the hour in which
a boy
sits in his room listening
Always I return
to the things of this world, tethered. to the sound of weeping
coming from other room…
You have come to me
from something, somewhere, I cannot name; …it is what I know
and so able to tell.
you who have a voice that does not speak Li Young Lee
any language I know, yet unfurls its wings,
alighting
in each corner of this house;
you who are mine and not mine,
tell
me the answers
while there is time.
Shara McCallum
Assignment:
a. What does
the child you were have to teach you about the soul.
Do not condemn that child to being a generic boy or girl
BUT GIVE RESONANT PARTICULARS OF THIS CHILD
b. McNiff:
Art Heals - group art therapy
i. "The
challenge, then, is first to free our creativity and then to
sustain it in a disciplined
practice."
ii. "In 'Letting in a Safe Place" (1997) I elaborate…on
the medicines of the studio, the importance of safety in establishing
creative and healing environments."
iii. "The process of making art and healing by it is absolutely
consistent
iv. "Art's medicines are based on surprises, unlikely twists,
and the infusion of fresh content into our lives. Years of working
in studios have repeatedly shown me that these
contents come upon us when we least expect then and frequently
against our wills."(19)
v. "…resistance, doubt, and even annoyance can contribute
to the overall
chemistry of the creative process" (19)
vi. "Art does not profess to rid the world of suffering
and wounds. It does something with them, realizing that the
soul is truly lost when afflictions cannot be put to use."
(32)
vii. "Imagine the surface saying, 'I will accept whatever
you do, so long as you work with sincerity."
Assignment:
Create a studio if you have not already. ( By studio we mean a
place devoted and sacred to your writing - it can be a desk, your
car, a spot in the garage or in the attic or a toolshed --- or
a particular picnic table in a park or in a place in your mind
you furnish and go to) Think of all those paintings by painters
of the place they paint -those studio interiors
In a poem describe your studio -maybe as if your poem was a
painting
"The
philosophers …had something to say about place (topos in
Greek). Theophrastus maintained that every living thing has an
oikeios topos or :favorable place where all energies and conditions
are suitable to tis flourishing." (Hughes qtd. in Cousineau
100)
5. Goodrich:
A Woman with a Wandering Eye
6. An Archeology
of the Soul
i. Phil Cousineau
"Prologue"
a. "If
we're not bewildered by the mysteries of the soul, we're not
thinking clearly."(xix)
b. "For many, soul is the constellating image for the paradox
of unchanging depths in an ever-changing universe."(xxi)
c. "Music might not heal you baby, but it'll help your
soul" - Frank Cocker, WWRL
d. "It is the irreducible, "I-in-the-eye," the
core element, the blue flame that makes me feel distinct from
anyone else who has ever lived…For me, ' the mystery of
all things' that tortured Lear is just this persistence."
(xxvii)
e. Rudolph Otto" "The Origin of the Numinous
"the most interesting idea of the soul is not the form
given to it in fantasy, multifarious in its variations, but
the element of feeling - stupor - which it liberates, and the
character of 'mystery' and 'wholly otherness' which surrounds
it. (15)
f. Thompson: The Fall of the Soul into Time
"The Fall is not only once and long ago; it is recapitulated
in each instant of consciousness."(25)
g. Santayana on Lucretius' De Rerum Naturae
"The atoms of the soul are indestructible" (31)
h. Aquinas
"…there is a mover which is altogether immovable…
Such a mover is the soul."(43)
i. Longfellow
"The soul of man [and woman, Henry W!] is audible, not
visible." (45)
j. Jung
"We only believe that we are masters in our own house because
we like to flatter ourselves." (56)
k. Barrett
"The
soul as substance! Horrors! What a dreadful lapse back to Descartes…
But…
a substance is that which persists through change. It may have
altered in the process, but it is still recognizably the same:
a persisting identity through time. It is in this latter sense
that I wish to stress the substantiality of the human self."
(58)
l. Saint John of the Cross -"the Dark Night of the Soul"
On that happy night - in
secret: no one saw me through the dark --
and I saw nothing then ,
no other light to mark
the way but fire pounding my heart. (93)
Some resources:
Sardello: Love and the Soul - revisioning psychotherapy, following
Hillman's lead, so it honors the soul
Pinkola Estes: Women Who Run With Wolves - a celebration of the
wild woman archtype
Whyte: The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul
in Corporate America
"Preservation of the soul means the palpable presence of
some sacred
otherness in our labors…." (15)
Tompkins and Bird: The Secret Life of Plants - an argument for
the intelligence and soul of plans, based on a number of scientific
experiments
Rosen: Saved by a Poem - exploration of the healing power of poetry,
especially the spoken word
Orr. Poetry as Survival - again the healing power of poetry
In your
groups of 3 do soul work with the poems you brought
Besides exploring what in the poem you are pulled to and what
needs work explore what is the glimpse of soul in the poem
Also, if you have photograph of "soul" poems - share
these
Walking to
oak-Head Pond and Thinking of the Ponds I Will
Visit in the Next Days and Weeks
What is so
utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,
not the inside
of a stone.
not anything.
And yet, how often I'm fooled -
I'm wading along
in the sunlight
and I'm sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead -
I can see the light spilling
like a shower
of meteors
into next week's trees,
and I plan to be there soon -
and so far I am
just that
lucky
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.
I don't know
where
such certainty comes from -
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind -
but if I had
to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth
with such
cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body and shines
against the
hard possibility of stoppage
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders and gives way.
Mary Oliver
Give
your soul a name - and an endearing habit
Field
Guide --- semester project
Over the course of this Spring Workshop: create a FIELD GUIDE
it can be a field guide to slugs or wildflowers or things with
wings or terrors or small blessings or punk rock songs or poets…
but have at least 5 of the poems in your chapbook be modeled after
a Field Guide ---scientific description, coloration, means of
identifying, habitat, kind of "speech or song," location,
habits, feeding
