In Search of Soul. Alejandro Nava

flame, still leaping and dancing. Perhaps there is something of the exotic in this desire—like the taste of chocolate to a tongue that has only known insipid foods—but more generously, it can be seen as a measure of her discontent with modern European culture, on the one hand, and on the other her genuine willingness to explore the whole circumference of the soul, even parts of her being that her culture did not deem credible any more, parts of her that were inflamed by the Russians.

      In England, Woolf argues, the soul is now an alien term and has been replaced by a more staid and rational concept, alone and aloof, flat and emotionless, something that we call the self.⁷ In the exchange of the self or the brain for the deep-down caves and grottos of the soul, we have been left with an entity that lacks the numinous density of its older ancestor. If we want to find the soul at its meridian, where it still scorches and blackens, she advises us to look directly into the high-noon sun of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lev Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov. “Indeed,” she writes,

      it is the soul that is the chief character of Russian fiction. . . . We are souls, tortured, unhappy souls, whose only business is to talk, to reveal, to confess, to draw up at whatever rending of flesh and nerve those crabbed sins which crawl on the sand at the bottom of us. But as we listen, our confusion slowly settles. A rope is flung to us; we catch hold of a soliloquy; holding us by the skin of our teeth, we are rushed through the water; feverishly, wildly, we rush on and on, now submerged, now in a moment of vision understanding more than we have ever understood before, and receiving such revelations as we are wont to get only from the press of life at its fullest.⁸

      In reading Woolf on the Russians, I get the feeling that her pen was dipped in the same feverish ink as her subject matter, because it flies off and rushes through her essays, plunging deep into the seething whirlpools and unfathomable depths of its characters, their beauty and vileness, their saintliness and licentiousness. In her reading, the Russian soul is a maelstrom of astonishing extremes, with its scurrilous sins and unexpected graces, its capacity for perversion as much as mysticism, self-deception as much as enlightenment, baseness as much as nobility. And through it all, there is an unmistakable ethical intensity, a throbbing pulse that alerts the reader to the plight of the distressed in our human, fallen world. She clings to the Russian writers’ dramatization of soul—like a rope that drags her through the water gasping for breath—because it seems to buoy her soul with the kind of oxygen lacking in her own modern, bourgeois world. She wants to imbibe deeply the Russian soul, soaking her liver in its alcohol like a Karamazov, because this literature is frequently drunk with surprises and wonders, tragedies and comedies, and yet is perfectly sober when it comes to compassion for our fellow sufferers in the world. “The simplicity, the absence of effort, the assumption that in a world bursting with misery the chief call upon us is to understand our fellow-sufferers, and not with the mind—for it is easy with the mind—but with the heart; this is the cloud which broods above the whole of Russian literature, which lures us from our own parched brilliancy and scorched thoroughfares to expand in its shade.”⁹

      She summons Western readers to brood over the profound shades of Russian literature for its instinctual, unstudied ability to speak to the heart on the matter of human suffering. If nothing else, it provokes, agitates, and even rubs raw the reader’s conscience, calling us to solidarity with others and to a mode of perception and understanding that is more profound than the triumphs of intelligence. On this point, her sentiment is close to the famous line by John Keats: “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”¹⁰ Whether in Keats or Woolf, intelligence without soul is a singing voice without lungs behind it, a voice without pathos, pain, or depth.

      Keeping in mind Woolf’s assessment of Russian soul, this study follows a similar trail, but with African American and Latin American traditions as its guiding spirits. My study operates with an assumption related to the ideas of Woolf and Keats: that there is something wildly quixotic about its endurance in the modern world and something surprisingly revelatory in this foolish passion for the soul, something that can school the modern intelligence on the matters of the human spirit.

      As mentioned in the introduction, I suggest we look at these themes and refrains on the soul in two major ways: first, with biblical and theological traditions in mind, and second, in the spirit of the profane, in which “soul” becomes synonymous with exuberant styles, cultures, literatures, and, above all, the powerful currents of music.

      ON NAMING SOUL: AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE SACRED AND PROFANE

      When reflecting on the idea of the secular in the mid-twentieth century, W. H. Auden made the perceptive claim that it had its origins in “the belief that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and that, in consequence, matter, the natural order, is real and redeemable, not a shadowy appearance or the cause of evil, and historical time is real and significant.”¹¹ In this judgment the idea of the secular was a seed already entrenched in Christian thought, a seed that would mature in the course of Christian history and fully blossom in modern times. Because of the tangled intersections of the sacred and secular in Christianity, where historical time and the natural world are stages for the advent of the divine, the relationship between the sublime Word and the stuff of creation should be seen, Auden contends, in symbiotic rather than clashing terms. In contrast to Gnostic repudiations of time and space, the saeculum in Christianity is the womb in which God enters into time and space. In the unity of Christ, the sacred and secular are reconciled.¹² An absolute repudiation of the secular is thus a theological mistake and heresy. It forecloses the infinite possibilities and surprising appearances of God in every facet of the human drama.

      My study follows this theological intuition in searching for epiphanies in both sacred and secular guises, but this claim should not be misconstrued to mean that we should conflate or collapse the terms altogether. The distinction between the two is worth defending if only to remind us of the contributions of each domain of human experience. Richard Kearney puts it in these terms: “Only secularization can prevent the sacred from becoming life denying, while only sacralization can prevent the secular from becoming banal. . . . The secular involves the human order of finite time, while the sacred denotes an order of infinity, otherness, and transcendence that promises to come and dwell in our midst.”¹³ The careful balancing between the two dimensions can avoid the pitfalls of theocracy, holy war, and ecclesial imperialism, on the one hand, and the threat of nihilism, on the other. When an aggressive version of the sacred overwhelms and anathematizes the secular, as in some of the most violent fundamentalist reactions to modernity, the inclination is to bar the revelations that may occur outside the sacred realm, and that may happen unexpectedly in any number of experiences; when the profane is the sole and dominant motif, however, the inclination is to strip the human and natural world of mystery and to replace them with mechanistic and material ideas that are flat, predictable, and soulless.

      The main lesson here is that such separations (“soul and body” and “supernatural and natural” can be added to the pairing “sacred and profane”) are products of contingent historical genealogies in modern Western Europe and should not predetermine how we understand the meaning of “soul” in Judaism or Christianity or its meaning in African American or Latin American traditions.¹⁴ This is an important point to keep in mind in my study, because conceptions of soul in African American and Latin American traditions, as in premodern Christianity, wantonly trespass across these borders, breaching the barriers that try to keep them apart. I insist, then, on the curious juxtaposition and intermingling of the sacred and profane in these Afro-Latin traditions and hope that the reader can see the redemptive possibilities of both ideas of soul. For this reason, the metaphors of the crossroads and a border are illuminating for my study, insofar as they demarcate regions in between the sacred and profane, somewhere on the transitional boundaries and open plains of these binary oppositions, where contrary and divergent winds breathe life into the idea of the soul.¹⁵

      In this regard there is something richly suggestive about the Yoruba deity Elegua, god of the crossroads, trickster figure, and patron of drumming and rhythm. As the god of the crossroads, he sits at the junction of divergent paths of the sacred and profane, in places where the pious and pompous would never venture, where Robert Johnson once promised his soul to the devil in order to learn how to make his guitar