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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us February 24, 2006 I'll Shut Up — Right After This What if the world has a soul? John Darling I’m having lattes with Deborah, and she’s buying — and she presents a big shopping bag full of new books for review. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to have someone hand you a big bag of new books to read. It’s for her magazine, Sentient Times, which is distributed up and down the coast from Eugene to Marin and has a nice, pretty painting on the cover every time and she says some people object to that, if you can imagine it, because it has no political or consciousness context. It’s just beautiful, that’s all. We settle in at our table, sharing all kind of stories of the many months since we talked and I sort the books into piles — relationships, environment, political, conspiracies — and we start talking about love (ours, with our partners) and that enduring, naïve question of Freud’s: What do women want? Everything, I respond, and they should and must have it. The woman at the next table, her fingers freeze on her laptop and you know she never has and never again will hear a man say that. Yeah, I expound, working the issue, women should get all they want, even if men can’t understand that, and, above all, they should get endless showers of adoration, attention, approval and affection, since they are not just symbolic of the sacred feminine, but are it. Deborah nods. She knows. What woman doesn’t? It’s hard to put it in a political context that contains politically correct stuff like equality, fairness, mutuality, but it’s essentially on the mark. Men are not equal to women. And there is no other way the world can work but by undoing patriarchy in its entirety. Women contain the wisdom of the world, the Soul of the World, a.k.a. the goddess Sophia (wisdom), as Robert Sardello puts it in his “Facing the World with Soul.” I found this man’s book at a yard sale, which is a process I submit to, of letting the Universe or fate school me. I never heard of him. But all his books have the word “soul” in the title and contain phrases like this: “The impulse leading to the desire to bring about a correction of a one-sidedness of psychology issues from the observation that the place where therapy needs to be practiced has shifted from the isolated chamber of the psychotherapist’s office to the world.” Whoa. I love this. I like sentences that need to be re-read. I get it. He’s saying psychology is over and our shrink is — the soul of the world. Sardello goes on, “Medicine, education, money, food, energy, media, technology, religion, buildings, economics, all those organizing forms that together might make culture, no longer do so, but instead are making a pathological civilization.” This is written in 1992, a long time ago. It’s a sweeping, condemning indictment. Is it true? Well, the buildings are gnarly, the medicine, education, food, media, OK, not much better. The economics work for the rich, but that can’t be sustained. OK, can’t argue with this. “The new symptoms,” he says, “are fragmentation, specialization, expertise, depression, inflation, cruelty, hardness, violence and absence of beauty. Our buildings are anorectic, our business paranoid, detached and abstract, our technology manic. These symptoms indicate the loss of the containment characteristic of the vessel of the soul.” Which is a wordy way of saying we’ve lost our soul. Got it. And, he adds, Sophia, as in ancient times, is the world soul and is still here and, though most people seek to save their soul as individuals, whether New Age or Christian, we can only save our soul in concert with the world soul, together, and that’s what we’re starting to do and it’s very hard. We celebrate Valentine’s, with a long morning at the Bean Scene, across from the college, where the barista makes little hearts on your cappuccinos. I suspect it’s an artificial Hallmark holiday, but Ann looks it up in Barbara Walker’s Encyclopedia of Women’s Myths and Secrets. OK, it’s not artificial, but another martyr-saint day, papering over of the ancient Lupercalia, honoring the she-wolf who suckled Rome’s founders, Romulus and Remus and indeed was marked, as it is now, by the exchange of pieces of paper with people’s names on them — and you get to bed down with whoever’s name you draw. Dang, will those randy pagans ever learn? Meanwhile, Condi Rice asks for 20 mil to pressure Iraq. I mean, that’s enough to send 20 kids all the way through college now. Our bill for Mideast wars goes past 200 bil — and lordy, Bush asks cuts of 12 bil in aid to struggling college students, who already were going to spend their whole careers in service to the lending industry. Thankee massah, for whatever help we working poor can get for our chilluns. And, in talking to the R candidates for governor of this beaver state, one finds they are still, in mimicry of the Great Communicator, 25 years later, running against the government, this while they’re using it to hand tax funds to the wealthy — and draining the blood from public education, saying it’s harmful to R children, who need home schooling, vouchers (that is, tax money) and charter — i.e., fundamentalist — schools to shield them from a degenerate, pagan society. And the veep, while hunting tiny little birds without a license, instead nails a fat cat GOP contributor, not a rare species, but certainly fat enough to see in Texas scrubland, and doesn’t see fit to report it to police, let alone the uppity press or electorate — any more than they would step forward about holding Gitmo prisoners without bail, or doing illegal wiretapping or reading of our e-mails at their pleasure. Meanwhile, a trip around the Internet this morning reveals a million-dollar bounty offered for the head of the artist who triggered the Muslim cartoon riots, another milestone in the history of God — and CalTech reports the Greenland ice sheet, in response to global warming caused by us busy bipeds, is undergoing mechanical breakup and melting into the sea twice as fast as five years ago, thus confirming bipeds are getting twice as dumb, twice as fast as previously thought. The Soul of the World weeps. John Darling is an Ashland writer and counselor. 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