So all of my blog posts are going to be semi-out-of-order, I've been writing in my planner because I always have it with me, so first and foremost I'm going to post my random, sort of stutter-y final paper so that it gets out there. (Here's the part for brutal honesty, I thought we had class on Thursday and that was when everything was due, so pardon typos and things! If anyone feels like checking back on my blog later, I'll have a scan up soon of a charcoal I did because my animation wouldn't turn into what I wanted it to and I scrapped it.)

Salvation Through Connection

The biggest and most important method by which ailments/disquiet of the soul can be repaired is through connection with other souls.  In talking with Tor about his project, I was struck by the idea of ailments of the soul.  A soul that can be injured just as the body can, struck down by loneliness or consuming anger, by pride or grief…a soul crippled by a feeling of emptiness.

The biggest and most important method by which ailments/disquiet of the soul can be repaired is through connection with other souls.  Gerritt’s artwork also sort of kickstarted me into a better mindset to write this than I’d been previously working with: the idea of the chasm/abyss/deep dark scary empty hole that plagues all of humanity, both man and woman (evidenced by the androgynous figure he was going to use).

Nicholas Urfe, an average man with an average life, feeling as if something is missing, with a deep longing for something, anything really to fill the emptiness in his soul.  "The pattern of destiny seemed pretty clear: down and down, and down."

By the end of the book, Nicholas has had people revolving around him, he is the center of (albeit very strange) attention, and nothing is enough.  He returns, and in the final speech of the book, knows what he needs.  “You can’t hate someone who’s really on his knees.  Who’ll never be more than half a human being without you.” He spent the entire time looking for answers, validation, experiences with which he could soothe the disquiet in his soul, and yet at the end, it seems as if he simply needed to find a kindred soul.  Maybe the way we heal ourselves is, in reality, through each other.

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes presents to the audience a tale of soul mates.  It essentially says that humans were much more whole, with four arms, four legs, and two faces, every part doubled.  There were three genders in this time, not our two that we have today: man, woman, and the “Androgynous”.  Each had two sets of genitalia, and the “Androgynous” had the genitalia of both men and women. Women were children of the earth, men beget by the sun, and the “Androgynous” was the child of the moon, born of the sun and the earth.  These beings were powerful, and clever.  Their strength led them to confidence in their abilities, and they threatened to challenge the gods.  Like the Titans, these beings were almost exterminated, but Zeus and the others could not bear losing those tributes given to the gods by the humans.  Instead, Zeus decided to slice them in two, both doubling the number of tributes given to the gods by doubling the number of humans, and punishing them for their hubris.  Humanity crumbled, and the half-humans were so miserable that they would simply lose the will to exist, not even eating or drinking.  As many perished, Apollo sewed them up, shaping their bodies into what we know today, and tied them up like a pouch at the navel, the only remaining sign of the original form humans had once held.  These humans, only with one set of genitalia, spent their lives longing for their other half; the other half of their soul.  Aristophanes said that when the two halves find each other, there is an unspoken understanding of one another, that they feel unified and would lay with each other in unity and would know no greater joy than that. They have become whole, they have found their soul mate and their love.

“Our original nature was by no means the same as it is now. In the first place, there were three kinds of human beings, not merely the two sexes, male and female, as at present: there was a third kind as well, which had equal shares of the other two, and whose name survives though, the thing itself has vanished. For ‘man-woman’¹ was then a unity in form no less than name, composed of both sexes and sharing equally in male and female; whereas now it has come to be merely a name of reproach. Secondly, the form of each person was round all over, with back and sides encompassing it every way; each had four arms, and legs to match these, and two faces perfectly alike on a cylindrical neck. There was one head to the two faces, which looked opposite ways; there were four ears, two privy members, and all the other parts, as may be imagined, in proportion. The creature walked upright as now, in either direction as it pleased and whenever it started running fast, it went like our acrobats, whirling over and over with legs stuck out straight; only then they had eight limbs to support and speed them swiftly round and round. The number and features of these three sexes were owing to the fact that the male was originally the offspring of the sun, and the female of the earth; while that which partook of both sexes was born of the moon, for the moon also partakes of both.¹ They were globular in their shape as in their progress, since they took after their parents. Now, they were of surprising strength and vigor, and so lofty in their notions that they even conspired against the gods;

“Thereat Zeus and the other gods debated what they should do, and were perplexed: for they felt they could not slay them like the Giants, whom they had abolished root and branch with strokes of thunder—it would be only abolishing the honors and observances they had from men; nor yet could they endure such sinful rioting. Then Zeus, putting all his wits together, spoke at length and said: ‘Methinks I can contrive that men, without ceasing to exist, shall give over their iniquity through a lessening of their strength…’

Zeus then proposed that they be cleaved in two, making them weaker but also doubling the amount of sacrifices given to the gods by virtue of doubling the population of men.  Once split, they were healed, skin bunched up and tied together forming what we now call the bellybutton. 

Now when our first form had been cut in two, each half in longing for its fellow would come to it again; and then would they fling their arms about each other and in mutual embraces yearn to be grafted together, till they began to perish of hunger and general indolence, through refusing to do anything apart. And whenever on the death of one half the other was left alone, it went searching and embracing to see if it might happen on that half of the whole woman which now we call a woman, or perchance the half of the whole man. In this plight they were perishing away, when Zeus in his pity provided a fresh device. He moved their privy parts to the front—for until then they had these, like all else, on the outside, and did their begetting and bringing forth not on each other but on the earth, like the crickets. These parts he now shifted to the front, to be used for propagating on each other—in the female member by means of the male; so that if in their embracements a man should happen on a woman there might be conception and continuation of their kind; and also, if male met with male they might have satiety of their union and a relief, and so might turn their hands to their labors and their interest to ordinary life. Thus anciently is mutual love ingrained in mankind, reassembling our early estate and endeavoring to combine two in one and heal the human soul.

Well, when one of them—whether he be a boy-lover or a lover of any other sort—

happens on his own particular half, the two of them are wondrously thrilled with affection and intimacy and love, and are hardly to be induced to leave each other's side for a single moment. These are they who continue together throughout life, though they could not even say what they would have of one another. No one could imagine this to be the mere amorous connection, or that such alone could be the reason why each rejoices in the other's company with so eager a zest: obviously the soul of each is wishing for something else that it cannot express, only divining and darkly hinting what it wishes. Suppose that, as they lay together, Hephaestus should come and stand over them, and showing his implements¹ should ask: ‘What is it, good mortals, that you would have of one another?’—and suppose that in their perplexity he asked them again: ‘Do you desire to be joined in the closest possible union, so that you shall not be divided by night or by day? If that is your craving, I am ready to fuse and weld you together in a single piece, that from being two you may be made one; that so long as you live, the pair of you, being as one, may share a single life; and that when you die you may also in Hades yonder be one instead of two, having shared a single death. Bethink yourselves if this is your heart's desire, and if you will be quite contented with this lot.’ No one on hearing this, we are sure, would demur to it or would be found wishing for anything else: each would unreservedly deem that he had been offered just what he was yearning for all the time, namely, to be so joined and fused with his beloved that the two might be made one.

“The cause of it all is this, that our original form was as I have described, and we were entire; and the craving and pursuit of that entirety is called Love. Formerly, as I have said, we were one; but now for our sins we are all dispersed by God, as the Arcadians were by the Lacedaemonians¹; and we may well be afraid that if we are disorderly towards Heaven we may once more be cloven asunder and may go about in the shape of those outline-carvings on the tombs, with our noses sawn down the middle, and may thus become like tokens of split dice. Wherefore we ought all to exhort our neighbors to a pious observance of the gods, in order that we may escape harm and attain to bliss under the gallant leadership of Love. Let none in act oppose him—and it is opposing him to incur the hate of Heaven: if we make friends with the god and are reconciled, we shall have the fortune that falls to few in our day, of discovering our proper favorites. [1]

 And, secondly, I don't really have a connector here besides my ideas floating around my head, I'll present the idea of Tikkun olam, which, in the convoluted not-quite-verbatim way that I like to think about it, also says that we are in pieces, and can only put ourselves back together. In Eliot's Four Quartets, there is a section that also got me thinking of this (Edit: I had no idea Gerritt would recite the piece that contained what had started my thinking on this, but I figured I'd add this in as another coincidence).  Plato's account of souls and soulmates had me thinking of souls waiting to find their souls, and they were waiting without hope, without love--their love, their soulmate.  And yet there is faith, in God's light which has scattered around the world in the broken vessels, faith and hope and love all in the waiting, he says.  All in the waiting for our souls to be healed? Because we are not ready for thought, not without our other half.  And, without healing and our other pieces, there is no dancing, but stillness.

--Note: I have no idea how to talk about poetry in essays, so I've just left it down here.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase that means ‘repairing the world’ (or ‘healing the world’) which suggests humanity's shared responsibility to heal, repair and transform the world. In Judaism, the concept of tikkun olam originated in the early rabbinic period.

A sixteenth century mystic, Rabbi Isaac Luria, taught that God created special clay vessels to contain the Divine light He would use to create the world. However, God's light was so vast, many of the vessels shattered, scattering shards all over creation. While most of the light returned to its Divine source, some attached itself to the broken shards. Kabbalists believe that these shards are all that is bad in the world, these broken pieces in which sparks of light are trapped.

The concept was given new meanings in the kabbalah of the medieval period and has come to possess further connotations in modern Judaism: now commonly used to refer to the pursuit of social action and social justice.  In many ways, the way we use the phrase "Tikkun Olam" today does capture the original intention. When we speak of tikkun olam, we are speaking of fixing what is broken in our society. Tikkun Olam "appears to respond to a profound sense of deep rupture in the universe…”

“… this part of Judaism that I really like. It's called Tikkun Olam. It says that the world's been broken into pieces and it's everybody's job to find them and put them back together again.”

“Well maybe we're the pieces. Maybe we are not supposed to find the pieces. Maybe we are the pieces.” – Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

If, indeed, we are the pieces, then maybe it is our job to find the piece that fits with ours to project the most light.   The integral connections between human beings are the building blocks of the human soul and the only way it can be repaired when damaged.  The connections between people not only create who we are as individuals, but also define how we interact with the world, even to the extent of the possibility of a mythical second half. There are stories from ancient Greek myths to modern Judaism, reflecting humanity’s need for connection, that our salvation lies in the congregation of the pieces.

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[1] Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1925.