“Animula”

 ‘Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul’
To a flat world of changing lights and noise,
To light, dark, dry or damp, chilly or warm;
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs,
Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys,
Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm,
Retreating to the corner of arm and knee,
Eager to be reassured, taking pleasure
In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree,
Pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea;
Studies the sunlit pattern on the floor
And running stags around a silver tray;
Confounds the actual and the fanciful,
Content with playing-cards and kings and queens,
What the fairies do and what the servants say.
The heavy burden of the growing soul
Perplexes and offends more, day by day;
Week by week, offends and perplexes more
With the imperatives of ‘is and seems’
And may and may not, desire and control.
The pain of living and the drug of dreams
Curl up the small soul in the window seat
Behind the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Issues from the hand of time the simple soul
Irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,
Unable to fare forward or retreat,
Fearing the warm reality, the offered good,
Denying the importunity of the blood,
Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom,
Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room;
Living first in the silence after the viaticum.
Pray for Guiterriez, avid of speed and power,
For Boudin, blown to pieces,
For this one who made a great fortune,
And that one who went his own way.
Pray for Floret, by the boarhound slain between the yew trees,
Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.

T. S. Eliot, 1888-1965

I’ve been thinking lately about touch. A mammal indwells the external by means of touch. The 5 senses are different modes of touching, the organism and external environment interface.

Sight- Photons strike a retina, transformed to electrical impulses. Hearing- Fluctuations in air pressure strike the ear drum. Taste- Molecules stimulate taste buds. Smell- Air born molecules excite the olfactory nerve. The fifth sense is tactile, a stimulation of the body interpreted by the brain, etc., etc..

One more element demands mention. That space between, difference necessarily supports emptiness, a difference mirrored by sexuality , a gap-between-us that resists that collapse to sameness. Differences mediated by touch, interpreted by a mind’s desire, make life zestful, as well as lending life a tragic quality.

A poem written in 1928 by T. S. Eliot traces the transformation of touch, the experience of a new-born, Animula, a little life, a poor soul thrown into a world to be learned by a childlike touching. The aware being in a zone of uncertainty, utterly even desperately dependent, fascinated by imagination, with life as gamified, then at last encountering the “stakes” of responsibility.

“The pain of living and the drug of dreams.”

Only a poet comes up with such phrasing…

No longer a simple soul, – maturity equating to a paralysis of will, fear of failure, over weening self-doubt, denial of my own agency, a specter of what I once was. What does my life amount to? Do I matter? Will I leave anything behind? As Ray Bradbury once said: The secret to life is knowing how to fall in love, and stay in love. Oh to defend that gap of difference!

And what do you suggest? What is to be done?

Nothing really.

“Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.”

And every hour is the hour of our birth!

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I used this tune previously. I just think the simple lyric is an apt counterpoint to Eliot’s sober verses. If You Want My Love by Cheap Trick.