Soul and stuff

by Bob Schwartz

Talking about James Hillman, as I did in my last post, got me thinking about other iconoclastic thinkers that have influenced me. Ivan Illich came to mind. Summarized as “priest, theologian, philosopher and social critic”, he was well-known in the 1970s, but has fallen off the screen since. He deserves more attention than ever, since much of his criticism has proved out as circumstances have gotten more challenging.

I just visited some books by him and about him. In this interview he is talking about water:

“There, in a dark, subtle, deep way, we also conceive stuff, that stuff which can gurgle, and chant and sparkle and flow and rise in a fountain and come down as rain. In other cultures, that stuff not only comes down as rain but also comes down as the souls of women who have died and who seek reincarnation. That’s how it’s imagined among the Lacandon Indians in the south of Mexico. In India that stuff flows around the sun as soma.

That’s where a distinction comes in between stuff and surface qualities, sparkle or stench, perhaps. It’s a distinction between that which, at least in old times, people believed they could actually sense with their inner senses, their phantastikón, their inner eye, ear, touch, ability to embrace, and, on the other hand, that which appears to their outer senses….

Now I want to do this history of stuff, because I believe that in this world into which I see the young generation now moving, it is not only their voice they are losing — by imagining themselves according to the model of the computer — it is also that they are emerging as a generation rid of stuff.

Now water is one of the traditional four stuffs from which our Western universe is made. There are other universes, in other bodies, world bodies, which are made of five or of seven elements. Ours is made of four, and water is one of them. In this little booklet, I wanted to raise a question about the historicity of stuff and the possibility of studying it….

I sat down and wrote, for a friend of mine, a little pamphlet, a long letter, which was then published as H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. I tried to trace the history of the stuff of water, and to get at the age-old ambiguity of water, which is a surface and a depth, which can wash off dirt from the skin, by flowing, but also purify the depths of the soul with just a touch. These are totally different activities, washing and purifying. And this gave me an exceptional opportunity to speak about a stuff which at this moment is escaping us socially.

I find it very strange to go to a tap, from which something comes out that is still called potable water but children are told, “Drink from the bottle in the icebox, don’t drink that stuff from the faucet,” and then to take this and baptize a child with it. That’s how things are. That’s what it means to live today surrounded by people baptized in that stuff. I’m not questioning baptism. I’m simply saying, Look at how humiliating it is, how horrifying it is, to live today. You will then learn how to appreciate the moments of flame and beauty….

Other people worry about the human organism not being able to find, sometime in the middle of the next century, any more of the appropriate kind of H2O to make it work. I’m talking about the deadness which sets in when people have lost the sense to imagine the substance of water, not its external appearances but the deep substance of water.”

What Illich is calling stuff might be called the soul of things. Soul is central to Hillman’s vision, as in anima mundi, the soul of the world:

“Let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event as it is, its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image—in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street.”

Soul has many meanings, but that imprecision does not mean we don’t know it when we see/experience it. Both Illich and Hillman recognize what it is and when it is ignored or unsensed.

I believe that our wisdom traditions—religious, spiritual, philosophical—and our arts are ultimately and ideally intended to get us past the surface to “that stuff which can gurgle, and chant and sparkle and flow and rise in a fountain and come down as rain” (Illich), “its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image—in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality.” (Hillman).

To the soul of the world.