Un-unified, Partial, and Ongoing Thoughts about “God” and “Soul”

By Alayna Munce

I’m of two minds (or probably more like eighty-two minds!) when thinking about the questions that Zong!, Loyalty Management, and Expressway, along with other works featured in Influency, have raised about “soul” and “God.” Here are some thoughts…un-unified, partial, and ongoing.

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When Margaret Christakos spoke with reference to Zong! about how certain books we’ve discussed had “articulated some place and space in their imaginary for human soul, and poetry’s relationship to it” and about the one place she’s not uncomfortable with the word soul—soul music—I thought, yes!, and felt a buoyant relief; I share her discomfort. But at the same time I thought, oh, and felt deflated; I crave comfort.

She went on to speak about her intuition that soul music’s groin-sprong and its use of romantic love’s magic are, on a more fundamental level, about us being “inside music’s poetry and poetry’s music as a way to express and enact survival.” This insight grounded my yes and reinflated my oh.

Expressing and enacting survival. Ongoingness.

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In writing for Influency I have reflected on poetry’s ability to have political efficacy by “tilting the shape of consciousness” or “changing the cadence of things,” as Margaret has observed. This also speaks to our need for secular graces and secular grief ceremonies, and on how that ability and that need can intersect—how we need our attention concentrated publicly, need to bend our attention in unison, need our consciousness altered, need to find new ways of saying grace and holding wakes, need to haul the word bless out of the sacred and into the secular without it losing its charge in the transition. 

I consider myself a very secular person. And yet… It’s the unspoken/unspeakable shape of this “and yet” that often draws or excites me in people’s work. When NourbeSe disrupted the balance of her own book and read only a word or phrase from the reconfigured legal text, followed by an unhurried litany of the tiny names at the bottom of the text, I found it intensely moving—both as a decision (to treat her book as a living thing, constantly re-encountered) and as an act (the public claiming of time for those names).

I was interested in a hesitation I had when she was taking questions about Zong! I wanted to ask about the phrase on the cover, “as told to the author by,” and about the list in the back of the book called “Manifest.” My hesitation was partly just general shyness and tentativeness, but I think it was also partly a respectful impulse, akin to reverence, the kind of hesitation one has to speak of fragile, precious, hard-to-describe things (sacred things?).

Does the question of communication with the dead / honouring of the dead / resurrection of the dead necessarily have to do with questions of soul and God? Do we need to talk about this? Does talking about some things fatally deflate them?

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“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (3)

“how bone become sand become the tale that cannot be told in this tale the tao the way of the dead of what does this mean”

– M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (127) (Am I doing a violence by taking out her spaces?)

A few years ago, in a reading course I took with the poet Tim Lilburn, I read simultaneously, chapter by chapter, five different translations of the Tao te Ching. I was resistant at first (always ready with a cringe at the first hint of new-agey appropriation, anything smacking with a sense of entitlement to transcendence), but it was a wonderful thing to do. In between the various translations, the pulse of an untellable shape began to flicker for me. A freshness I could trust. An ongoingness. Untellable. And yet…

Recently an old friend and I were talking about making difficult decisions, the moments in life when an inconvenient, undeniable need for change emerges in a person, disrupting the status quo of relationship. How to know if it’s an impulse that should be followed? “What is the instrument you would use to know?” he asked.

Discernment. What to be loyal to? And how to discern that loyalty? Not manage, but discern. Discernment as ongoing. But with reference to what?

My favourite parts of Sina Queyras’s talk on Zong! were when she tracked her visceral responses to the text. The body as an instrument of knowing when we’re onto something in poetry.

The body loves a rhythm. Especially a rhythm that enlivens (that expresses and enacts survival), a rhythm that fuels an ongoingness, that stokes a healthy appetite for disruption. That trains or practices in us habits of attention that seek “to reveal the hidden agendas of language” (Zong!, 197). That awakens or guides in us a willingness to speak / learn / listen to this “language of the limp and the wound. Of the fragment” (205). A willingness to ask the painful, enlivening question, “Are they ever my own words, though?” (193). So that we can unearth the “ruse in insure” and cease “to cede the truth to the need to be sure.”

As Lilburn writes in an essay in Living in the World As If It Were Home, “the truth lies through language in language’s brokenness. None of the names is as true as the rhythm of naming then cancelling the name in quest of a further aptness that woos the mind with even more insistence” (30).

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When I first read Glen Downie’s Loyalty Management, I wondered if, in his opening poem “Purgatorial,” instead of “I know now / that was God // circling my name on a list / saying / He’s ready” (15), Downie had chosen to write something like, “I know now / that was the world // circling my name on a list / saying / He’s ready," or even, “I wonder now / was that the world // circling my name on a list / saying / He’s ready?” whether I would have been more aligned with the sense of epiphany there. But after hearing Glen speak so frankly, humbly, and realistically about residual faith, I’m not so sure. I felt glad for the momentarily-firmly-planted feet of his “I know now” (those three broad beats) as one kind of voice, one kind of gesture in the conversation.

I liked what Adam Sol got at briefly when asked about his own involvement in ritual, his own faith. He spoke about how, in his experience, the ritual serves itself even as one is suspicious of it, how communion with whoever’s in the room becomes the thing, “forget who’s watching.” My friend Shapiro goes to synagogue to talk to God. I go to synagogue to talk to Shapiro.

For me, one of the most moving moments in Expressway was the litany in “Progress” ending in “If anything is clear from the twentieth century it is that / no one can afford to be loyal. / That the individual is all alone” (62).

What I love about Influency is that it enacts and expresses (trains and practices) a willingness to enter the room, the commons. A willingness to engage in the conversation, ongoing, its magics inseparable from its discomforts.