“My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call to you—are you there?” (C. G. Jung, The Red Book)



“There is no country on earth where the ‘power-word,’ the magic formula, the slogan or advertisement is more effective than in America.” (C. G. Jung, “Mind and Earth,” Civilization in Transition, para. 102)



Soul is hard to find in America. Indeed, America is hard to find.



Hard to find;

wild strawberries swans herons deer

those things we long to be

metamorphosed in and out of our sweet sour skins —

Hard to find; free form men and women

harps hope food mandalas meditation

Hard to find; lost not found rare as radium rent free

uncontrollable uncanny a chorus

Jesus Buddha Moses founding fathers horizons

hope (in hiding)

Hard to find; America

—Daniel Berrigan, S.J., “America is Hard to Find."

And yet, “America” is everywhere. A veritable spiritus mundi, a 25/8 whirlwind of projection and “power-words,” as Jung would say, a sense that the advertisement of self is the same as self and the slogan confects the soul. In such a situation, the soul goes into hiding.

Jung’s own words to his lost soul are also ours, in this time and this place. Are we not called, through our individual and socio-economic symptoms, to a journey of recovery of soul from the exile to which it has been banished? Standing in our way is spiritus mundi, that collective apotheosis of ego-enflaming inflations. Perhaps the first thing we need to be clear about is that anima mundi can be distinguished from spiritus mundi. Although W. B. Yeats understood spiritus mundi in a manner similar to the collective unconscious, when “a vast image of Spiritus Mundi” troubled his sight in his celebrated poem, "The Second Coming," this “shape with lion body and the head of a man, / a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” embodied counter-values of chaos and nightmare. One could say that as “Things fall apart” and structures dismantle, we are washed up on a new shore where we may find our souls in the darkness of the ruins.

We have come a long way from the anima mundi as described in Plato’s Timaeus, where our anima is “the consubstantial scintilla, or spark of the Anima Mundi, the world soul (Jung, CW 11, para. 759). Still, the question of soul persists and Jung’s work is a singular effort in soul recovery in a soulless time. Where do we go? What do we do in the face of the Cronos-like images of spiritus mundi? Turn away and turn toward. There are two types of images. The first are those whose splinter psychic logic is to fixate and possess, seduce and misuse. In traditional thought, these have been referred to as idols—e.g., the golden calf or golden whatever. The second type of image is the symbol which relates things which are opposed and apart, does not collapse otherness and even opens to transcendence. In traditional thought, these have been referred to as icons or even sacramental realities—e.g., the imago dei which human beings are in their diversity and unity. This transcendence-immanence of symbols is the way of the soul and soul-finding. As always relating to something/someone other, the soul and its symbol language is radically capax alterius and is never reduced to the agenda of the power complex of the ego and its “power-thoughts” and “power-words.”

America is hard to find, though it is everywhere, and soul is hard to find, perhaps in a Babylonian exile. There are strong and gentle traditions of prophetic, artistic, and religious soul in America. Are they now in a reliquary, having been drowned out by a crass and vulgar materialism and a lack of conversation? Conversation itself assumes a discourse of self and other and hence a sense of the symbolic. It is a back and forth where one is not collapsed into the other and the other is not collapsed into one. Can these soul in America traditions be recovered by the re-beginning of a conversation and a venturing forth of the symbolic sense? And are we on a threshold that we but need to cross in order to come back home, “And know the place for the first time” (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets)?

As I ventured forth in these brief musings with a poem, I conclude with one. In the spirit of the symbolic conversation where the way of the other is the path of soul-finding, I look outside of America, since it is hard to find, in order to find soul, “On the Threshold.”

Be happy if the wind inside the orchard

carries back the tidal surge of life:

here, where a dead web

of memories sinks under,

was no garden, but a reliquary. The whir you’re hearing isn’t flight,

but the stirring of the eternal womb;

watch this solitary strip of land

transform into a crucible. There’s fury over the sheer wall.

If you move forward you may come upon

the phantom who will save you:

histories are shaped here, deeds

the endgame of the future will dismantle. Look for a flaw in the net that binds us

tight, burst through, break free!

Go, I’ve prayed for this for you—now my thirst

will be easy, my rancor less bitter …

—Eugene Montale, “On the Threshold,” trans. by Jonathan Galassi.