Soul Mates

Thomas Moore

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062652706
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This companion volume to Care of the Soul offers more of Thomas Moore's inspiring wisdom and empathy as it expands on his ideas about life, love, and the mysteries of human relationships.

In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore explored the importance of nurturing the soul and struck a chord nationwide—the book became a long-standing bestseller, topping charts across the country.

Building on that book's wisdom, Soul Mates explores how relationships of all kinds enhance our lives and fulfill the needs of our souls. Moore emphasizes the difficulties that inevitably accompany many relationships and focuses on the need to work through these differences in order to experience the deep reward that comes with intimacy and unconfined love.

THE INTIMATE IMAGINATION

But as all severall soules containe

Mixtures of things, they know not what,

Love, these mixt soules, doth mixe again,

And makes both one, each this and that.

The Extasie, JOHN DONNE

Chapter Six

CONVERSATIONS AND LETTERS

“TECHNOLOGIES OF INTIMACY” are the ways we go about creating and sustaining closeness in our relationships, expressing and evoking the “withinness” in community and friendship. It isn’t enough to be concerned with intimacy in an abstract way, or to see it only as a feeling that comes and goes without our participating in its design. Intimacy, like everything else, requires art.

I am not talking here about communication in any superficial or rational sense. “Communication” has become a catchword in discussions about relationship, and it is a truism to observe that the trouble within a relationship is a failure of communication. But what passes for communication can be to relationship what information is to education—a soulless exchange of facts. We sometimes think we are educated when we have compiled a certain quantum of data, and we may think we’re being intimate when we “communicate well.” Good communication allows us to express our thoughts and our feelings to another clearly and adequately, but it’s worth remembering that intimacy may also develop in the gaps in communication, in silences and in awkwardness, in muddy attempts at expression, and even in the lies and subterfuges that sometimes appear in a relationship.

In order to cultivate intimacy we need to find forms of expression that emerge from and touch the soul. For the most part these things are obvious: a gift that is particularly meaningful, a late-night conversation in which feelings rise to the surface, a letter at a time of deep emotion, or a quiet walk with another through a woods with few words exchanged. We know that these forms of intimacy are valuable, and yet in our modern world we seem to forget their importance. We accept the current concern for communication—we may have an extremely sophisticated telephone system in our home or we may use the latest lingo from pop psychology—but neglect the kind of interchange that is primarily for the soul. We may also confuse bare self-expression with honesty, and think that by being outspoken we are being intimate.

Our task in this technological era is not to invent a new theory of communication or a new method of therapy, but to develop the art and craft of intimate expression. In most cases it is a matter of giving value to simple forms of exchange: taking the time needed to write a letter, to buy or make a special gift; spending money on textured paper and a high-quality pen; allowing meaningful nuances in our gifts and in our choice of words to reach the soul of the other. Once we shift our attention from communicating to expressing intimacy, we are on the way toward soulfulness in our relationships.

Conversation

TRUE CONVERSATION is an interpenetration of worlds, a genuine intercourse of souls, which doesn’t have to be self-consciously profound but does have to touch matters of concern to the soul. The following brief passage, from a letter by Ralph Waldo Emerson dated September 30, 1842, alludes to several elements in soulful conversation:

Hawthorne and I set forth on a walk. . . . Our walk had no incidents. It needed none, for we were both in excellent spirits, had much conversation, for we were both old collectors who had never had opportunity before to show each other our cabinets.

First is the idea of taking a walk while talking. Walking can be a soul activity, so long as it is not done for some heroic purpose such as getting somewhere, losing weight, or winning a race. It was easier, perhaps, in days past to exercise the soul this way because there were good places in which to do it—no danger from fast automobiles and more access to nature—and not as many alternative forms of travel. Walking inspires and promotes conversation that is grounded in the body, and so it gives the soul a place where it can thrive. I think I could write an interesting memoir of significant walks I have taken with others, in which intimacy was not only experienced but set fondly into the landscape of memory. When I was a child, I used to walk with my Uncle Tom on his farm, across fields and up and down hills. We talked of many things, some informative and some completely outrageous, and quite a few very tall stories emerged on those bucolic walks. Whatever the content of the talking, those conversations remain important memories for me of my attachment to my family, to a remarkable personality, and to nature.

While I was a student in a Catholic seminary, regular walks were built into our schedule, and I believe that much of the learning I did in those days took place on pleasurable walks around the grounds of the monastery. I also recall a recent walk with a friend across Hampstead Heath in London, followed by a visit to the home of John Keats. This walk stays in my heart both because of the pleasure of the company and the connection it forged with a soul mate of sorts, Keats, whose work, though he died over a hundred years before I was born, inspires and guides my own. I also have painful memories of walks undertaken during the heartache of separation and divorce. In certain kinds of walking and talking, the soul comes out of hiding and shows itself with unusual intensity of emotion.

Emerson also notes that his walk with Hawthorne had no incidents and that it needed no incidents. The soul is not nearly as concerned with events and action as the conscious mind is. It has no need for events, and in fact incidents can get in the way of the soul’s emergence in conversation. For Emerson, the important thing was that both men were “collectors,” that they had thoughts in their “cabinets”—memories to exchange, ideas to discuss. The soul is more a container than an instrument, and these two soulful men must have had much to bring out for each other’s enjoyment as they walked the forty miles Emerson tabulates for their two days’ journey.

Conversation does not have to be confessional in order to be soulful. I notice that sometimes people who are just beginning to become more psychologically aware feel compelled to speak whatever is on their mind or in their heart too directly and too innocently. Some people play a game of “I’ve bared my heart, now you bare yours.” But soulfulness is not created by naive exposure. What matters is not how much you expose about yourself in conversation, but that your soul is engaged. Two people working on the plans for a house or immersed in a recipe can be caught up in a soulful conversation—the topic doesn’t have to be personal.

In another letter, written to Thomas Carlyle on March 13, 1839, Emerson makes this point:

The office of conversation is to give me self-possession. I lie torpid as a clod. Then comes by a safe and gentle spirit who spreads out in order before me his own life and aims, not as experience, but as the good and desirable. Straightway I feel the presence of a new and yet old, a genial, a native element. . . . I regain, one by one, my faculties, my organs; life returns to a finger, a hand, a foot. A new nimbleness—almost wings—unfold at my side.

Talk from and about the soul may be about “the good and desirable,” about the direction in which we are all going as human beings, about the life and world we commonly know. The soul seems to prefer talk that is close to life and yet not only pragmatic and technical. Its favorite modes are reverie, reminiscence, reflection—those re- words that point to the soul’s task of working imagination into past experience. Conversation restores blood to the limbs and gives wings to the body precisely because it is one of the chief conduits of soul, and it is soul that quickens the body and lightens the weight of literal life.

Conversation may also relieve us from the pressures of everyday activity and decision-making, opening us up to undisclosed levels of our experience. Soul resides in the overtones and undertones, not in the flat body of literal events. Conversation performs a pleasurable and gentle alchemy on experience, sublimating it into forms that can be examined. Experience itself takes wing from conversation.

I would reverse the notion that conversation is important because it is therapeutic, and say instead that therapy is helpful because it is conversational. To the soul the important thing is talk, not healing. It is much more significant to the soul to talk than it is to find some technique for repairing life. Conversation might be an Emersonian mode of psychoanalysis, lifting experience into the somewhat higher regions of imagination and making us feel more alive.

From Emerson’s point of view, conversation is a way of coming to oneself, a mode of relating to oneself as much as to another. Maybe this is one of the reasons why conversation can be so pleasurable: we become reacquainted with ourselves. How often we’ve heard people say, “I didn’t know I had this thought until I spoke it.”

When he describes his conversations with Hawthorne, Emerson uses the intriguing image of the cabinet. In Jungian terms, the cabinet is a womb, a woman’s way of containment and incubation. Beyond that, a cabinet suggests a way of keeping things that are personally important, perhaps old and filled with memories. A great deal of anima—the mood and presence of soul—surrounds a cabinet, and in that sense Emerson is suggesting that in our conversations we can bring along our treasures of memory and thought: all those things that are inextricably ours, that we take with us as we go from place to place. This treasury of inner, personal materials is the stuff of conversation and is the basis for developing a soul mate.

James Hillman makes the important point that not all of our ideas are soul ideas. Some are purely intellectual, cut off from soul. These may be interesting and may provide their own pleasures, but they do not engage the soul. The soul is always rooted, not necessarily in relevancy and application, but in the particulars of life and personality. In conversation with a soul mate, we can explore ideas in a way that is not limited by the special demands of the solitary intellect. We can include our opinions, our life stories, our prejudices, and our own style of expression. Soulful ideas connect to the everyday events of life without necessarily being about them. They have capillaries in touch with the deep emotions and fantasies that run through a personal life or a culture.

Conversation is different from discussion and argument. It is less pointed and focused. In its early history, the word converse meant not only to talk, but also to live and to dwell, and was sometimes also used to mean sexual intercourse. We can retain these old echoes of the word even as we use it to denote talk. Conversation is the kind of talk in which one feels one is really living. A good conversation may give us a sense of dwelling in a place even more strongly than its architecture or natural setting. Some rooms only come alive as rooms when people are enjoying conversations in them, and no matter how grand a room may be, if it does not nurture conversation, it may seem empty and cold. If the soul is not served, architecture has failed.

A few aspects of talking that I have observed during my years of doing psychotherapy apply to ordinary conversation, not least because a certain kind of intimacy is created in the private setting of therapy. First of all is the therapist’s office itself, where we have a place to sit and talk that is not open to interruption and is designated only for talk. It isn’t easy in this world to find such places. Restaurants and cafés sometimes fulfill this role, but they can also be filled with too much activity, and the people sitting and talking in them may feel rushed.

It’s difficult to find places, whether public or private, without televisions, telephones, and radios, all of which seem to be designed to stop conversation. Not long ago I found myself in the large waiting room of a hospital where I tried to gather my thoughts about an illness, but the television was blaring so loudly, as twenty people watched it intently, that I couldn’t focus, let alone make any contact with anyone else there.

Another aspect of talk in therapy can also be a model for ordinary conversation: what is particularly striking about therapy is that at least one person present is doing an exceptional job of listening. The person who cannot listen cannot converse. One has to take in what the other presents. Conversation involves holding the material the other has taken from his “cabinet,” treating it with attention and respect. I have attended many formal events in my professional life called “conversations,” often structured discussions in an educational setting, in which no one really listens to the other. Someone may be taking notes, or more likely there is a tape recorder endlessly magnetizing all the talk, but no one is truly hearing what is said. There is little sense of the erotic in these discussions because there is no receiving, no pleasure in holding the thoughts and stories being offered—the body is not involved.

I find that among couples having marital difficulties, conversation is often difficult, if not impossible. One party wants to hear certain things from the other, but he will not really listen. Or one person wants to hear certain confessions or admissions, but she will not confess her own state of being. In place of conversation, we have a talking game in which a power struggle is the most obvious focus. “I will not take the burden of speaking,” an irate husband declares. “She has to admit what she has done first, then I will talk.” Power issues dominate this kind of exchange, precluding any possibility for conversation. It’s no surprise that couples having sexual difficulties can’t converse.

Another aspect of therapeutic talk that has relevance to ordinary conversation is the allowance of painful and shadowy matters into the dialogue. “Polite conversation,” a superficial exchange of pleasantries, may not be enough to evoke soul. Just as in a highly intellectual discussion the heart of the matter may be at the very peak of an idea, when the discussion has reached a point of abstraction when insight dawns, so in intimate conversation soul is evoked often at the very darkest core, the place both or all parties may wish to avoid. Going for the sore point is sometimes the shortest route to soul.

An interesting metaphor from modern life, “the bottom line,” betrays our exaggerated attention to conclusions and applications. Conversation has no bottom line, it doesn’t have to arrive anywhere, and more often than not it will lead to even further talk instead of a solution or an answer. It may take some fundamental shifts in our very idea of talk in order to appreciate the value of true conversation that turns ideas and experiences over and over, satisfying the soul with its nuances rather than with extraordinary insights or explanations.

Since the material discussed is of paramount importance in conversation, there is little ego involved. People trying to win an argument, make a point, preach a sermon, hold forth on a theory, or give testimony to a belief are not engaged in conversation. These agendas are burdened with narcissism and offer little room for soul. Conversation is an inherently soulful activity, and therefore requires that the ego be given a limited place.

Conversation hovers between people, takes its time to get in motion, finds its rhythm, and slows to an ending. A quick conversation is possible, I suppose, but it will always be truncated, a substitute for the genuine thing. A conversation tends to grow at its own tempo and in its own directions. Notice that when a conversation is under way, the links between topics are not always logical or predictable.

Perhaps the most important thing of all is simply to value conversation, to realize how valuable it is for the soul, and to recognize that some of the complaints we feel in our bodies and in our moods could be alleviated by giving the soul what it needs, including something as simple as conversation. Many of the things that nourish the soul are quite ordinary, and therefore easily overlooked or set aside when seemingly more important matters demand attention. It may seem more important to go to a lecture than to sit around talking, when in fact the soul may need the latter much more than the mind needs more informa...