Resident

Manacled in hands

O who shall, from this dungeon, raise A soul enslav’d so many ways? With bolts of bones, that fetter’d stands In feet, and manacled in hands; Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear

Andrew Marvell — from a Dialogue between the Soul and the Body

Sometimes when I look at someone through Tim’s eyes, I can see another resident spirit staring straight back at me. Naturally, I do all I can to imbue Tim with the warmest of feelings towards the carrier, male or female, in order to ensure continued or repeated contact. I am not so self-sufficient as to pass up opportunities, however mediated, to mingle with my own kind.

To tell the truth (and I am incapable of doing otherwise), I am not sure how many of us there are out here. At first I assumed that every human must have at least one resident. But by now I have seen so many eyes display not the slightest hint of a spark of any transcendent aspect, of any spiritual dimension, that I have reluctantly concluded that most of them are just so much meat.

I assume there was a time or space before Tim, but have no clear recollection of it. This doesn’t worry me unduly. Rather it confirms me in my belief that, when not in residence, we are soul soup, indistinguishable from each other.

I’m not sure of the mechanism by which we individuate ourselves and insinuate ourselves into a ball of flesh, but I feel sure that there is an element of choice involved, that we could stay as soup if we wanted.

I just know that once we have committed to one particular fleshy host, we seem to be here for the duration, for better for worse, till death us do part.

And it can get lonely. It doesn’t matter how clearly you know that spirit has no real boundaries, that we’re as one with each other here as we are in the soup. Consciousness, it would appear, does have boundaries, and I hit up against them every minute of every day, having to find indirect evidence of underlying union in the twinkling of an eye, the cadence of a line of verse or the stroke of an artist’s brush.

By the same token, it doesn’t help to know time as a fiction, once we have voluntarily harnessed ourselves to its yoke. We have to plod our way through the carrier’s span of life, at the carrier’s pace, without the benefit of his anaesthetic ignorance.

I am perhaps too disparaging towards our hosts, but sometimes it’s frankly difficult to see what they bring to the party. I feel confident in asserting that the greatest works of pictorial art can only have been substantively the work of a resident spirit, albeit one better integrated into the host’s hand/eye co-ordination than I can claim to be.

Likewise, surely the best works of literature need the breath of the spirit to bring them to life, to raise them above stolid narrative.

The most I’ll concede is that we operate in a symbiotic fashion. If we are responsible for the hosts’ glimpses of underlying union, they give us the transient experience of separation.

Many thanks for reading!

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