In last night’s dream Freud slumped against a wall and warned it could all sink deeper and I said “fair enough” so we slipped below into the industrial kitchen of a ruined asylum. It looked like a storm had blown through. The old switch board stood like an ox but with a hundred wires. I asked the good doctor: “What is it about the “soul” that it needs prepositions?”
**
Of or from the soul constitute our relational understanding, our separateness, for souls are always understood as being transitive extracorporeal rhetorics. Sometimes we get silly and say “Come Soul clap your hands,” by which we mean, “c’mon, say something” as if perhaps, in a final reduction, the soul is like a horse counting numbers with its hoof.
**
Surely “of or from” the soul will always be easier to say than “with” as soulful accompaniment is mystic and evades phenomenology—with the soul is like the hue of heaven, unfounded and pious. Now I’m on this humorless path because I believe in the soul—that green force of the sea—and because hugging it, loving it, turning with it, it’s impossible to tell who is my teacher. I am “with” for certain.
**
When the soul is kidding it says it’s sad. When it’s having a riotously good time it listens for oncoming rain. Wind blows darkness against your cheek. Soul is admiring.
So I wake this way.
My soul was convinced that it loved me. In my life I sat in the grass, knitting it a failed sweater.
Sometimes we get silly and say “Come Soul try this on.”
**
In the dream Freud and I talked into the dead telephones.
Planet of the Blind 