Beginnings/Endings
Soul Manifestos 2024 — #01 in a new series
Soul Manifestos 2024 — a new series
In 2014, I published a book of short poetic essays, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy. The book, illustrated by my longtime collaborator (and daughter) Ruth Thorp, is currently out of print but has continued to be well received over several editions. We are hoping to re-publish it this year, in an anniversary edition with a new end-piece essay to acknowledge the changes in context over the past decade.
Since its publication, I’ve written more about ‘soul’ — as metaphor, as idea, as experience, as ‘self’, as ecology of mind, as collective psyche. Versions of some of these pieces appeared here on my Medium platform, but have now been reworked for this new Soul Manifestos series. As background, you can also find a longer keynote essay (Making Soul?, here on Unpsychology.
Looking back/stepping forward
Back in 2014, in the introduction to Soul Manifestos, I wrote:
I am suspicious of grand visions and theories, but trust imagination and simplicity as tools for good. Some of the people I most admire give small beauties to the world, and live their life with small rhythms and patterns. Here, I have tried to write of a simple, grounded intelligence, and of ways we can work together to integrate such small wisdoms into a practical activism for the future.
and continued:
…these small manifestos are written for wonder, wisdom, joy, love, openness and engagement, and for the common-wealth, common good and the good earth. And they are written against oppression, destruction, ignorance, literalism, certainty, determinism and the hypocritical justifications for continuing on the same path we have been walking down blindly for the past century or two.
Looking back at the book now, there are some things I notice.
My faith in the poetic and literary voice and image, and my trust in the visions and best-in-class, ethical materialism of science, were strong in those pages and remain so for me still. Since then I have discovered newer voices that attempt to bring these things together in exciting, illuminating and very different ways (Carlo Rovelli2 and Nora Bateson,3 in particular, come to mind, but there are many others). These people and their work carry the potential for something truly integrative and ecological, that keeps a clear perspective on what is possible — without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and resorting to literal certainties or descending into conspiracism.
Looking back on the book now, there were also areas that could have had more elaboration, and it is on these corners of the human experience that I hope to focus in this new series of short essays. These pieces are written in a similar style to the original small essays in the book — short, poetic and personal — and their content also mirrors the concerns that Unpsychology has been addressing in the past decade.
There’s nothing definitive about any of these pieces. They explore more than illuminate, I suspect, but I’d welcome responses and pieces that might elaborate upon or provide counterpoints to these words and experiences.
To begin with, below are the final words in the book, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy, published back in 2014. They seem like a good place to start again with now…
To be hopeful — we can do this thing! All we may need to do is to ‘re-mind’ ourselves. We were once animals with big minds; we just need to re-grow them.
We, social animals who can love with passion and breadth.
We, creatures of ecology, whose soft bodies are embedded in the patterns and energies on the earth.
We, soulful animals, born with purpose and startling individuality.
And so the task of soul-making is also one of ‘self-minding’ — finding a way for each of the small rills and runnels of our lives to join with the great, wide rivers of our world, and to empty out — at the end of days — into the deep expanse of ocean.
And this will always be a great story to tell!
Soul Manifestos 2024 #01 : Beginnings/Endings
When my Mum died early in June 2018, after being ill with Alzheimers for a number of years, her dying held deep sorrow, but also a sense of relief. She was a wonderful presence, but her lingering death was hard on her, on her family and particularly on my Dad. The distress felt by those who loved her was partly to do with her loss of ‘self’ and the deterioration of her mind so that, in the end, she had no recognition of anything or anyone. There were flickers of her mischievous personality, but these were all too rare, and her decline was not benign. She suffered greatly, and so did her husband of six decades, to the point where he would return in so much distress, from his daily visits to her care home , that he self-medicated with alcohol.
Her death coincided with my preoccupation with other endings too. In particular, the climate emergency that threatens us with a different kind of dying — a social and cultural one in which the world and human civilisation we take for granted will change beyond all recognition.
Mum’s dying, and this contemplation of more extensive, existential loss, led me back to ‘soul-making’ — a practice I’d been working with these past few years but had, ironically, felt more and more ambiguous to me the deeper I found myself in the practice! I realised, however, that these experiences of loss offered me a further piece of the ‘soul-making’ puzzle: how to become ‘soulful ‘in life — practising to live with deep engagement and joy — through facing our dying with understanding and courage.
Dying — ending — is the final chapter of ‘soul making’ — one that brings it all together, at the scale of the individual human or other-than-human life-form; but also at a wider, collective level too. The final act of every life, every story, every day — is the relinquishment of life — a kind of trust in absence.
So, how does ‘soul’ die in its making? And more specifically how does ‘soul’ that has been crafted over a lifetime, make sense of its own ending?
It’s a dilemma. While we are alive, we can all sometimes feel a little bit immortal. It’s hard to imagine another state of being (or non-being) that isn’t this one. We all know we will die, the evidence is incontrovertible, yet getting our heads around it is one of the most difficult things we can do in living — until, perhaps, we are faced with its reality in front of us in the shape of a dying human (or other-than-human companion) and the end of their particular life. Though, in time, our memory may still fade a little and we might feel a little bit immortal again — living on, until the next time.
There’s another dimension too. The temporality of life — all life — is one thing, but we (thinking self-aware, reflective creatures that we are) can extend the fantasy of immortality, and being in control of time, to our species, civilisation and culture. This happens, even though the vast span of time in which we humans have lived for a relative eye-blink of a moment, is pretty relentless. Eventually all species will die. Humans, as a species, will die. The planet, as a complex ecosystem of life-forms, will die.
And on and on and further out…
I often find it difficult to accept that those who argue that human consciousness represents ‘the universe becoming aware of itself’, can really believe this to be true. Surely, they misunderstand, or ignore, the utter vastness of the universe, and the insignificance of human lifeforms in the wider scheme of things? They may understand something that I don’t, but either way, death is not a thing that responds well to human fantasy. It is relentless and ultimately answers all our human questions. Yet, if ‘soul’ is to be made, albeit ever-changing and incomplete until the end, then death is the act that completes it.
It’s hard to see how my Mum’s soul was ‘made’ by the death she had. Seen through the eyes of those who loved her, there was only desolation and pain — a lack of soul, or something being lost. However, something diminishing doesn’t mean it’s goes completely (until it does of course). Mum’s gradual and awful attenuation nevertheless still has a mystery about it.
Where is she? Where did she go? Was she still her ‘self’ until the end?
The speculation is subjective. It comes from within each of our lives. Mum was a living, soulful part of a transcontexual ecology of mind — and then she wasn’t. She remains as a ripple in our lives, and as an ancestor in the ecological, trans-generational contexts of our times — but as a living soul, she has gone. And this is where this story begins. With the death of a loved one — an ordinary/extraordinary happening that most humans will experience. The loss itself is part of the making of a soul. Then the soul is made — incomplete and unfinished perhaps — and the spark blinks out as we die.
Next time in this series: Soul Manifestos #02 — A question of dying
