The search for soul is in the writer's reason for being.

By Peter P. Jacobi

Soul is that intangible which animates us and gives focus to what we think and do and feel. In another sense, it implies the core, the essence of something.

And, yet again, soul can refer to the depths of feeling expressed.

Preachers and teachers of faith must deal with the first aspect of soul. But the other meanings are ours to consider and manage as writers and editors.

The Writer's Soul Unleashed

In writing, it's the soul we’re after, you see.

Our own soul squeezed from some deep within to become a riotous black on a vacuum of white. We become words on paper. Squirming every which way. Uncontrollable. Seeking to escape, to jump off paper or screen into some void from which they cannot be retrieved.

And when they do, we are left diminished.

Can there be a resurgence of soul, we wonder, a renewed strength of spirit, strength enough so we can and will try once more, perhaps only to fail again?

On that struggle Dylan Thomas wrote:

I fell in love -- that is the only expression I can think of -- at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though, sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy.... There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable. Out of them came the gusts and grunts and hiccups and heehaws of the common fun of the earth; and though what the words meant was, in its own way, often deliciously funny enough, so much funnier seemed to me, at this almost forgotten time, the shape and shade and size and noise of the words as they hummed, strummed, jogged, and galloped along.

The Subject's Essence Captured

It's the soul we're after, you see.

But not our own.

The soul of our subject, its inner being lifted onto paper and screen and verbalized so that it can be seen or envisioned or encapsulated as it never has been before nor ever will be again.

Once again, however, soul -- quicksilvery as it is -- defies enslavement. It fights to remain, at least in part, a mystery.

Mike Lupica, once a New York Daily News sportswriter, accomplished a capture of subject. He was at a Sylvester Stallone–hosted party in Manhattan on the night after the Tyson-Bruno fight. Muhammad Ali entered, he the guest of honor. Lupica wrote:

After all the boxing nights that were all about him, we watch a 50-year-old man moving slowly and silently through life the way stroke victims do.

He does not float like a butterfly anymore. He just floats. His wife helped him with his dinner Saturday night. He leaned close to his dessert, a piece of cake, and managed that himself.... At the All-Star Café Saturday night, people talked about how intensely Ali stared at the screen, and a straw forgotten in his mouth, when Tyson finally came out of his dressing room, a little before midnight. They wondered what Hollywood's thinking, about nights like this, if he could remember them.

The Reader's Soul Transformed

It's the soul were after, you see.

But not only our own or that of our subject.

The soul of someone who reads our words and surrenders to their charms or horrors, to their passion or repose, to their energy and concept. The soul of someone caught by our musings and, therefore, changed forever. Because, after all, it's not to take that soul we’re after. It's to enrich, enlarge that soul.

But that can be as near impossible as the capture of self and subject. The reader's soul is a floating thing.

Jane Sutton supplied the story for World Vision magazine titled "Robbing God's Cradle." She writes:

Pattinathar's whole life used to be a small hut and endless days making beedi cigarettes. Five years ago, the boy, then 12, labored for little more than $1 a week in a beedi-making factory in North Arcot, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. He spent long hours sitting cross-legged, elbow-to-elbow with other youths, rolling tobacco into cut leaves and closing the ends of the slender, locally popular cigarettes while constantly breathing in carcinogenic tobacco dust. If he failed to complete his daily quota of 2,500 beedis, the foreman beat him.

Pattinathar was a victim of bonded labor, an especially egregious form of child labor prevalent in societies where borrowing and indebtedness are customary for poor families. Impoverished parents take out loans and put up their children as living collateral.

My soul, as reader, is caught for now, at least until another vision or worry takes its place. But what about a reader in India with different realities for burden? How about the man quoted early on in another past article on this subject, the Atlantic Monthly's "Child Labor in Pakistan" by Jonathan Silvers:

No two negotiations for the sale of a child are alike, but all are founded on the pretense that the parties involved have the best interests of the child at heart. On this sweltering morning in the Punjab village of Wasan Pura a carpet master, Sadique, is describing for a thirty-year-old brick worker named Mirza the advantages his son will enjoy as an apprentice weaver.

"I've admired your boy for several months," Sadique says. "Nadeem is bright and ambitious. He will learn far more practical skills in six months at the loom than he would in six years at school. He will be taught by experienced craftsmen, and his pay will rise as his skills improve. Have no doubt, your son will be thankful for the opportunity you have given him, and the Lord will bless you for looking so well after your own."

Sadique, reading the story, which shields his soul from its lesson. He wouldn't understand, or he wouldn't want to understand.

As writers, we win some, and lose some.

The search for soul, however, is in the writer's reason for being. That search is our struggle and curse and test and teasing and wonder and worry.

Why do we do it?

Because we must. As writers, we must.

It is our burden -- to labor.

It is our balloon -- to soar.

We must keep laboring and, thereby, keep sorry.

The world needs souls harvested.

A classic article from a past issue in tribute to the late Peter J. Jacobi, longtime EO writer and author of The Magazine Article: How to Think It, Plan It, Write It.

Add your comment.