I like this.
It’s not good in there sometimes.
—
Phil Rockstroh
5 mins
A writer must proceed to dangerous places. It is imperative that he/she descend into the danger zone known as the soul. The soul is not a realm inhabited by weightless beings radiating beatific light. Rather, it is a landscape of broken, wounded wanderers; inchoate longing; searing lamentation; the confabulations of imperfect memory; of rutting and rage; transgression; depression; fragmented language; and devouring darkness.
The soul sends dispatches of which few desire to be privy. When ignored, the soul ups the volume of its nightmare dispatches. Reductionists term, the soul’s urgent messages pathologies. Thus, our age is plangent with the pathological. The world bristles with the rage and suffering of maimed, inarticulate-in-their-agonies angels.
In our suffering, we have bloated our bodies, maimed and poisoned the earth, and scoured the hours of our lives of meaning by the compulsive commodification of all things.
We have delivered insult after insult to the soul of the world, and yet it loves us with an abiding and bitter grace.