All Soul Parts Returned
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About this ebook
When the Gnostic Gospels collide with new age spiritualism, the Oxford Happiness Test, and treatises on Buddhist practice, we know we're in the territory of a Bruce Beasley collection. Alternately devout and heretical, Beasleyknown for his intense and continuing soul-quest through previous award-winning booksinterrogates the absurdities, psychic violence, and spiritual condition of twenty-first century America with despair, philosophic intelligence, and piercing humor.
Bruce Beasley is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Theophobia (BOA, 2012). The winner of numerous literary awards and fellowships, he lives in Bellingham, WA, where he is a professor of English at Western Washington University.
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All Soul Parts Returned - Bruce Beasley
THE PARTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Torn-to-Pieces-Hood
Part I Thou Must Leave
Report to the Provost on the Progress of My Leave
Me Meaneth
Reading Jesus Again, with a New Prescription
Part II Disorientation Psalm for Schopenhauer
Tohu Bohu
Looking Down the Cliff, with Schopenhauer, on Black Friday
The Last Good
I Don’t Like My Soul Parts
Reading The Purpose Driven Life, with Schopenhauer
Part III Hymeneal
Nuptial Song
On Marriage
Antithalamion
What Do You Think the Poet Is Trying to Say?
The Name of the Island Was Marriage
Offspring Insprung
Part IV The Sixth Dust
Revised Catechism
Cleft for Me Let Me Hide Myself from Thee
Such and Such and Such and Such
Part V The Mass of the Ordinary
Kyrie
Embolism
Sanctus
Credo
Fraction Rite
Agnus Dei
Benedictus
Gloria
NONORDINARY TO THE POEMS
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Colophon
TORN-TO-PIECES-HOOD
Come undone, soul. It’s what you’ve wanted, isn’t it, to go to pieces. Dismember, scatter self from Self.
Who knew the soul had frequently been torn? Had shed its parts all over and they’d fled to hide, piece by piece, in a murky otherworld known only as Nonordinary Reality.
So say the shamans. So say the shamans who offer for a fee to bring them back, in a drum-drone and trance and stench of incense, to trace the hollows, sky-fissures, lower and upper realms of the Nonordinary and cajole those cowering fragments back to a mass of their kin soul parts, here in the Ordinary. To breathe them back onto forehead and chest, brain and heart. Who is I but the mass of its soul parts, the ones that stayed, the ones that—like the gospel’s prodigal son—left and squandered and came back, ready even to eat the slop of the swine?
The constitutional disease from which I suffer,
William James wrote in a letter, "is what the Germans call Zerrissenheit or torn-to-pieces-hood."
A mass is a collection of incoherent parts seen nevertheless as a singular entirety. A mass of errors. Torn-to-pieces-hood as a mass of rent remainders that populate, all unknowingly, the ordinary.
Ordinary means, among its mass of other meanings, commonplace, unexceptional, of no particular interest or importance.
Ordinary means, among its mass of other meanings, the collection of chants and prayers that form the body of the Roman Catholic Mass. In the Ordinary of the Mass the god-who-came-back enters, again and again, the wafer and the wine, enters again and again into Time, into Ordinary Reality, to reheal all over again our latest state of torn-to-pieces-hood.
When the traumatized soul-in-pieces flees Ordinary Reality, it leaves, too, the Ordinary of the Mass, tears apart the fabric of the mass of the ordinary.
On this, as on every, point, the Baltimore Catechism is quite without doubt: A spirit is also indivisible; it cannot be divided into parts.
Parts of us are always leaving. More and more stray soul pieces crowd the Nonordinary. So much can pull the soul apart, like rain slashing through a spiderweb strand. Any part can find it easier to make its way on its own in the Nonordinary, when it’s terrified, bereaved, rejected, in despair. Most of us in Western culture have been walking around for some period of time without parts of our soul,
says a shamanist website, matter-of-factly. All these tatters where soul once was, like a worm-eaten book.
Human life must be some kind of mistake,
wrote Arthur Schopenhauer, who must have left a vapor trail of soul parts behind him everywhere he went.
If you imagine . . . the sum total of distress, pain, and suffering of every kind which the sun shines upon in its course,
he wrote, you will have to admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little on earth as on the moon.
Soul parts, once the shaman has hauled them back, won’t put up with any shenanigans,
says a shamanist’s pamphlet. If you do nothing with the soul parts, they could go into repeat soul loss . . . leaving you feeling worse than before the soul retrieval.
No soul has time for shenanigans. It is busy rending its garments, like a desert prophet.
I think a part of my soul is coming back. Last night I dreamed my father, who died when I was fifteen, had never made it all the way into his grave, though my twin brother and I had hauled his corpse there ourselves, dragging it upright between us through the woods. My sister said she kept seeing him out of the corner of her eye, and once, she told me, on an unlit road he had reached into her car, running beside it, grabbing the steering wheel while she tried to hit the accelerator hard enough to lose him. He’s still out there, she told me. He’s coming back.
Forgive my soul parts; they know not what they do.
Even St. Augustine knew the soul could get dislodged. He punned on the Latin for religion, which meant to re-tie, to re-bind, like a ligament. "True religion is that by which the soul is united to