Anima ae f.

I encountered a most wonderful sort of passage, today, in my literary excursions.

It is a particularly beautiful scene that comes early on in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' memoir, Living to Tell the Tale. Do be aware, though, that I tend to be of the mind that Marquez is generally incapable of writing anything that isn't beautiful (also please excuse the use of the word "beautiful," it seems so...imperfect [? Flawed? Half-assed? Take your pick...]) a descriptor for someone like Marquez, an author I think possesses a rare, tremendous power, as he so often forces me to approach disturbing things right beside him in his work. He is eerie and raw and I still recall my first encounter with him in high school, with Of Love and Other Demons, in which Abrenuncio the physician (one of my favorite characters ever) proclaims: "You people have a religion of death that fills you with the joy and courage to confront it. I do not: I believe the only essential thing is to be alive."

You know, I really didn't intend there to declare my intense love for Marquez all at once...I originally thought I'd let it slowly trickle out--not the ultimate case, apparently.

Anyway, back to what I stumbled upon today.

The passage goes like this:

My mother hurried to explain the truth: no one was opposed to my being a writer as long as I pursued academic studies that would give me a firm foundation. The doctor minimized everything and spoke about the writer's career. He too had wanted one, but his parents, with the same arguments she was using, had obliged him to study medicine when they failed to make him a soldier.

"And look, Comadre," he concluded. "I am a doctor, and here I am, not knowing how many of my patients have died by the will of God and how many because of my medications."

My mother felt lost.

"The worst thing," she said, "is that he stopped studying law after all the sacrifices we made to support him."

But the doctor thought this was splendid proof of an overwhelming vocation: the only force capable of competing with the power of love. And more than any other the artistic vocation, the most mysterious of all, to which one devotes one's entire life without expecting anything in return.

"It is something that one carries inside from the moment one is born, and opposing it is the worst thing for one's health," he said.

Yes. Yesyesyes. Oh, I do love me some Marquez.

I knew I could count on him to help me reach some kind of conclusion. That being: You have to do what you love, or at least, what you feel deeeeeep in your marrow that you must be doing, even if it makes you miserable, because if you don't do what you love, then you'll still be miserable, probably more so than you will be doing what you really, truly ought to, and that's just a whole lot of miserableness that would be exceptionally miserable to live with. Utter misery, either way, but slightly less if you are at least producing those things which your soul is meant to.

I have been thinking much about the soul, lately. Rather, that is to say that I have been dwelling in the same space as my mind and soul. And my mind and soul have been canoodling with each other as of late, painting each others' toenails and braiding their hair and drinking martinis with olives, thinking soul-thoughts and soulfully minding the mind and together they are kind of like listening to Britney Spears or watching America's Next Top Model. You know, when you first hear the music, you think noise, but after hearing it played over and over and over again you find yourself singing along and begrudgingly thinking to yourself, damn...this isn't so bad, after all. Or when you watch ANTM and you know in your heart of hearts that it really is the most inane material that you could possibly fixate on for 60 minutes of your day, but hell, isn't that Tyra so damn crazy you just don't wanna stop?

But Tyra and Britney and their (amazing) questionable stabilities aside, we have to consider how vital a thing the soul is. And the mind. You can't really have one without the other. I mean, I suppose you could, but that'd be like a John without a Yoko or Shakespeare without iambic pentameter or Harry Potter without a wand (incidentally, forgive my brief nerd-spasm here, but only 50 days until HP6! Which is just about the greatest thing to happen all year. But I'll save that for another time, I guess. Know, though, that it's going to be brilliant. Or so the previews are currently leading me to believe. I've got to break out the trusty old robe and tie. They might need ironing before the movie...) Anyway, my whole point is that the mind and the soul are in a sort of mutualistic relationship, I suppose. Like clownfish and sea anemones, or Gungans and the Naboo (for the more Star Wars-ian-inclined).

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow proclaims, "Soul! If anybody had ever struggled with a soul I am the man."

Oh, we struggle with the soul. To simply exist and breathe is to struggle with the soul. And yet I can't really define it. It's the thing that hurts when we encounter the rawness of living. You easily know it when it happens because we are oblivious to so many things, but then those times hit us when something in us pangs and when we examine what surrounds the terrible ache there's often something like love or solitude or rage there, or some other massive thing that can't be defined or contained or made to be malleable. The soul knows intimately all the things that cannot just be stamped down and packed away.

The mind, too, knows these things, but not the same way. The mind knows these things. The soul encounters these things. Together, they might be cleaved together into some kind of whole thing. We need them both. One to fully understand the other. You could probably subsist without one, like how people can live on one kidney, but there would never be the realization of the real truth of things.

It would be a half-life.

In his 1982 Nobel Lecture, The Solitude of Latin America, Marquez said, rather perfectly:

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

When the soul knows the mind and the mind knows the soul, that's when I think we can finally believe in something.

And I think it probably takes a lifetime to get there, if a person can ever even be that lucky. I suppose most die without allowing the two to ever fuse. But literature helps. It can almost get us there.

Anyway, this is rapidly deteriorating into the realm of I-don't-have-any-idea-what-the-hell-I'm-talking-about-anymore, but I don't want to do my Latin homework and summer is just so, so close and Marquez today just got me thinking (and subsequently rambling), and I really love him and I really love his words and I really love the idea of the soul and the mind in some sort of untainted, harmonic balance.

With that being said, there is little time to make all these things somehow work.

You know, I think there are few things that really, irrevocably sear the soul, and the mind. There are just so few things that strike them and leave an indelible mark. I also think that when you find those things, there is no option but to cling to them as tightly as you can and never, ever let them go.

Paul Celan has a poem. It is one such thing. A soul-mind-searing thing. I want to end my brain's little bout of rambling here with it.

Do yourself a favor: read it, let it resonate, let it sink into and merge with your own soul.

That's how we might somehow go on.

So, Celan:

TO STAND in the shadow
of the scar up in the air.

To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you
alone.

With all there is room for in that,
even without
language.