Hayden and I have been discussing “spirit”. I can’t do our conversation justice by attempting to summarise it here, but at least it reached a point where we happily agreed on various points, including a definition of spirit that covered the vast history of the concepts covered by this word.
I suppose our real starting point was rejection of the notion of spirit as something opposite to body, or – to add insult to injury – superior to body. I am sure that in the history, there have been those who have considered spirit as a substance, even though most agree that this, by definition, is precisely what it is not. Those who understand that spirit is not a substance – it can’t be weighed, have spatial co-ordinates and so forth – still treat spirit as an entity. The universal spirit is God, the spirit of a human being is soul, and then there are angels and “sprites” of all kinds.
Today we have the phenomenon of “spirituality” without specific beliefs in spirits as entities, but with various beliefs nonetheless. The big question that sceptics ask is, “Where is your proof?” But the very question is alien to the proponents of spirituality. “Proof” belongs to the material world. The spirit world, or should I say the spiritual world, trades in a different currency, personal experience or sometimes faith. No rate of exchange between the currencies in the different worlds has been established.
I’m not really happy having a foot in two different worlds. I’m in the “integration” phase of life. So what is spirit? Hayden and I agreed that it is a way of looking at things. If you imagine that trivialises the subject, then think again. We need several ways of looking at things to acknowledge all our experiences, deeply personal as well as communal.
And now to a topic which is more connected to the above than it seems. For several weeks I have been wanting to write about photography: how indispensable it is to our world and to cyberspace in particular; but how hopeless it is at capturing the essence – all right, let me say it, the spirit – of what we have seen, what has moved us. It struck me first when I wanted to capture for this blog the magnificence of a certain landscape near my home, particularly in the evening when the trees cast long shadows, and at that particular season – late May – when the fields of ripening wheat were of a certain vivid bluish-green. My frustration at not being able to capture or share went deep, and yesterday I found myself buying some oil pastels, charcoal and a sketchbook. Henceforth, my digital camera will be used as a scanner to copy these sketches and present them to you here. What primitive, what childish joy! What a lifetime will be required to learn the skills! Let me live as if each day is my last and, simultaneously, as if life goes on forever.
I am dissatisfied with photography because – at least with my camera – it merely reflects the surface of things and does not capture spirit.
The original post continued with <a href=”https://rochereau.wordpress.com/2006/06/24/11459/”>some words about one of my first pastels</a>, drawn from life, which properly belongs in the category of “Neighbourhood”, except that I’ve put it under “make & mend”, which covers creative activities other than writing.