In Search of Soul. Alejandro Nava

modern and ancient ways. As Bruce Lincoln points out, long before the word became synonymous with reason in the age of the Socrates and his disciples, logos was primarily a speech of cunning and guile, employed by the weak and the young against the strong. Homer and Hesiod associated the term with the ruses of deception and duplicity used by trickster figures to compensate for their relative powerlessness (e.g., Hermes, called master of guiles, used his “seductive logoi” to trick his older, stronger brother, Apollo; Odysseus is given the epithet “clever” or “cunning” throughout The Odyssey as he is shown outwitting stronger opponents).¹¹³ In the case of hip-hop, whether rappers are conjuring Greek or African tricksters, their sly skills can be considered a rendition of this ancient view of logoi, in which subversive slang, outlaw expressions, and irreverent counternarratives are employed by the poor and young to outwit the enemy. In these instances, the playfulness of the trickster, or the Faustian pact as I have described it, is a symbol of defiance, a prophetic disturbance of the repressive aspects of the Puritan American sociopolitical order.¹¹⁴

      I think of J. Cole’s description in “Dead Presidents 2” as a combination of the kind of profane cunning and sacred inspiration I have been discussing here: “my flow like a devil spit it, and heaven sent it.”¹¹⁵ In this compact sentence, J. Cole encapsulates many of these disparate experiences in black music. His lyrics, he suggests, are gritty and slick like the devil’s language or perhaps twisted like a serpent’s tongue, but finally inspired by God. At its best, the genre of rap is a forked tongue in this way, sometimes venomous and poisonous, biting hard at social decorum and political perfidy, but then, in the same breath, spitting faith and hope, transforming the poisons of ghetto life into a cure. With traces of both poison and potion, hip-hop turns music and lyrics into a wily form of speech (logoi), against the black holes of the bourgeois capitalist order that suck light from the lives of the poor and disenfranchised. “I pay the toll fighting for my own soul,” Lauryn Hill remarks, “’cause the bourgeois type of mental sucks like a black hole.”¹¹⁶

      In these examples the meaning of “soul” swings back and forth between the sacred and profane, high and low culture; it can signify spiritual complexity as well as a culture’s street wisdom and cool aplomb, especially in music, dance, and verbal virtuosity. In her reflections on soul and hip-hop, Imani Perry clarifies the issues: “By soul I mean that which has some spiritual depth and deep cultural and historical resonances to be felt through the kind of music and sounds made by the vocalists. . . . Soulful music is music of joy and pain, unself-consciously wedding melody and moaning, the sound of the dual terror and exultation of being black in America.”¹¹⁷ In this reading soul gives voice to many layers of style and substance—struggle and suffering, terror and jubilation, vulgarity and sublimity—and stitches them together like an auditory collage or mix-tape of various sentiments, beliefs, and values.¹¹⁸ The product, as Nas once said about his own style, is a wild arrangement of poetry, preaching, and straight-up hustlin’.¹¹⁹

      Ultimately, then, I view the power of blackness through the eyes of these spiritual and cultural styles, in which flirtation with the profane, vulgar, and foul is an instrument of salvation and a disguised form of love and justice. One might say that this construction of blackness contains a heavy amount of irony, in which blasphemous and forbidden thoughts conceal a virtuous interior and saintly soul. In other words, as Kierkegaard and Melville tried to warn us, looks can be deceiving: Beneath the glitter and glamor of Christendom, beneath all of its moral rectitude and sanctimoniousness, there may be hidden sin, a charnel house underneath clean white sepulchers (Melville’s image). Conversely, it could be that true goodness remains unrecognized by the rulers of the world or the guardians of holiness, so that if we want to search for God, or search for soul, we need to turn to the parts of our world where poverty and desperation are rampant: in the trials of the streets, in the crowded despair of prisons, and in the crosses of the hood. This is to say that the path to redemption in Judaism or Christianity is never a straight line but rather something more rambling and unpredictable, like the trail of a vagabond, or the shuffling, whirling, and winding of a break-dancer, or the sly contrivances of a rapper. Yeats was right, in this sense, to call good and evil “crude analogies,” because sometimes the path of soulfulness requires the intrepid and bold daring of a soul rebel in the mold of Bob Marley, Dr. King, or Cesar Chavez, and sometimes it requires the impiety of a blues or rap artist in the mold of Billie Holiday, Jelly Roll Morton, or Tupac Shakur.¹²⁰ It seems to me that this is what Emerson meant when he said that the soul becomes when the saint is confounded with the rogue, or what Melville meant when he channeled Job’s defiant roar: “I now know that thy right worship is defiance.”¹²¹

      Sometimes right worship is indeed defiance, and sometimes, to cite Melville again, it is to kneel and revere. If anything, this study explores the ideas, sounds, and styles that include moments of both, that know when it is fitting to negate and defy and when we must affirm in a loving embrace. If there are moments when we must deviate from the crudest versions of “good,” when we must, as Simone Weil says, turn away from God, it will not be long before we fall back into his arms.¹²² The jazz great Louis Armstrong expressed his own version of this sentiment. When accused of turning away from God and embracing the devilish delights of blues and jazz, he would respond in words penned by W. C. Handy (though in his own rasping, gravelly voice): “Just hear Aunt Hagar’s children harmonizin’ to that old mournful tune. It’s like a choir from on high broke loose, amen. If the devil brought it, the good Lord sent it right on down to me.”¹²³ In generations to come, Aunt Hagar’s children will find new mournful occasions to sing and rap about, and the products of their efforts, however infused with hellfire, will remain a gift that has broken loose from the heavens.

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      On Hebrew Soul

       De Eloquentia Vulgaria

      And I tell you that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink.

      —Federico García Lorca¹

      Oh! Rabbi, rabbi, fend my soul for me

      And true savant of this dark nature be.

      —Wallace Stevens

      At the end of Socrates’s Symposium, late in the night when all the revelers at the party have succumbed to sleep except for Agathon and Aristophanes, Socrates shares a prophecy of a poet yet to come. He dreams of a poet who will combine tragic and comic styles in a new, comprehensive manner. Presumably this artist will make poetry out of the wild discord and contradictions of human life—out of grief and laughter, violence and love, the sublime and the ordinary—adding bits and pieces of each to make a rich brew. If one is persuaded by Eric Auerbach’s argument in Mimesis, however, this prophecy never materialized in ancient Greece. While the Greeks mastered tragedy and comedy, high and low styles, they generally kept the two apart, rarely allowing the experiences and characters of ordinary, everyday life to play a significant role in anything but comedy. For the marriage of these disparate styles another kind of genius had to emerge, outside of the aristocratic culture of the Greeks, and it did so at the hands of barbarians at the farthest edges of the Greco-Roman world, nomads and tribes that came together to produce the sacred writ of the Bible.²

      By joining together the incongruent themes of tragedy and comedy, the Bible turned the spectacle of lowly, poor lives—shepherds and wanderers, exiles and refugees, the conquered and colonized—into the stuff of sublimity. For the first time in Western history the lives of the ordinary, poor, and rude were the subject of lofty narratives, with themes that were as sublime as anything found in Greek tragedy or philosophy. In contrast to the emphasis on the ruling classes in Greek tragedy, nothing was too humble or too coarse for biblical texts. They inscribed everything in their pages and made the long treks of exiles and slaves sacred history. Access to the Bible’s tree of knowledge, to its soul, is only possible if we have the eyes and ears to recognize the unlikely wisdom that comes from the experiences of the dispossessed, that oozes from the Bible’s lowest branches like thick sap.

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