‘God lives, and my soul lives!’, the Jews vowed in ancient times.

Is there a God, is there a soul?

Such, or almost such a question, has long been asked by thought. Some even consider this question solved. It is not for nothing that the latest psychology has been given the title of ‘psychology without a soul’, as its desire to do without this dubious, as if unscientific notion of a whole man is so obvious. There is the same struggle against the idea of man (or rather, the soul) as against the idea of God, and, apparently, from the same motives. Chaos, lack of wholeness is somehow more pleasing to the ‘scientific’ mind than organised unity. Blind evolution instead of purposeful development; the fog of unconscious motives instead of a complex but integral soul life… For someone who does not want to see order in the world (however complex and elusive this order may be), it is better to look at man as a swarm of moths, the unity of which is only in the imagination of the observer.

Between a swarm of moths and a human being, however, there is a significant and undeniable difference. A swarm of moths has no creative gift. Even the birds singing in the forest sing separately; their common voice is not a chorus, but noise. The works of the human personality are whole, though many-composed; can an ‘imaginary unity’ produce them?

Creativity is the most complete and noteworthy testimony about human beings. The psychology and philosophy of creativity is an area in which anthropology borders on theology. Indeed, why is it that when we focus on an object, it begins to tell us about itself (and this is what inspiration is all about), and to tell us things that we ourselves did not know a moment before? It is possible, of course, to suppose that we unconsciously think about many things without noticing it, and only in a moment of concentration do we remember what we have thought about… but I doubt this very much. Inspiration has the character of a stream of conclusions and images which we have not thought of until this moment; at any rate, the immediate sensation is such. Someone tells us, and we cannot say who…

Is our inspiration personal or impersonal? On the one hand, the answer seems obvious. The gift of creativity is inherently personal; one example of innate human inequality. On the other hand, what is the similarity of works to the personality of their creator? Little or almost nothing. Pushkin’s poems resemble Alexander Sergeyevich, a Tver landowner known to his contemporaries, no more than the law of gravitation resembles Isaac Newton. Inspiration owns us all the more, the less ‘personal’ in us in the worldly sense of the word; the less we think about ‘our own’, speak ‘of ourselves’. The mixture called ‘personality’, in which worldly trash, vanity, and cares form a conspicuous, if not predominant part, is withdrawn and silent in moments of inspiration. Our creative part does not coincide with the personality, it knows something that is unknown to the personality, but we do not always know how to awaken this part.  It is as if on the other side of the ‘personality’, this storehouse of passions and habits, there is another personality, something even deeper: the mysterious soul. All our knowledge, feelings or religious convictions, for example, we receive from this unknown part, and when it is silent, we feel divinely forsaken.

I deliberately use the words that religion has taught us, because it is difficult to speak of miracles in the language of science. The creative nature of man is all mystery, all unsolvable. As a matter of fact, the sweetest songs are songs about the unsolvable. It occupies, without exaggeration, the most important part of human life. The unsolvable surrounds every self-conscious life on all sides. The unsolvable is the subject of true poetry; therefore poetry — real poetry, of course — philosophy and religion are in kinship. They have the same subject: the phenomenon of the human soul in a world in which it is impossible.

Can we study this soul in the right way, in the way, for example, that we study digestive reflexes? I doubt it. The trouble with the prevailing variety of scientific thought is its inability to imagine anything beyond our own complexity. ‘To know things’ and ‘to make things understandable’ are quite different tasks.  Similarly, to understand oneself and to study oneself are entirely different things. To study man means to study the irrational in him, i. e. something that cannot be understood in general. If we limit the study to the sphere of the reasonable, understandable, then the human being will slip away from the researcher, and what remains will no longer be human, but animal — something that unites the human being with the fox and the dog. One should recognise oneself in moments of danger, longing and love, when the flame of inner life is the brightest and illuminates the furthest regions of the soul. The search for the truth about oneself (the only fully known human being) is connected with the search for the richness and fullness of the soul life. ‘There’s rapture in the bullets’ flight // And on the mountain’s treacherous height…’

And who is this seeker of truth, the witness of man? As a rule, a poet, less often a philosopher. The philosopher is too preoccupied with ‘constructions’ and ‘conclusions’; he often neglects the ‘raw material’ from which poetry and extra-philosophical wisdom are composed. The poet does not draw ‘conclusions’ and, as a rule, completely neglects ‘constructions’, but listens attentively to the voice of that hidden and distant thing that reveals itself under the whirlwinds of impressions and feelings — his soul.

When an ordinary person is in pain, the lyric poet feels not only pain, but also a certain sweetness that is inseparable from it. He should weep, or at least despair, but instead he writes poetry. The lyricist rarely sings of pure joy; far more often she seeks inspiration in sorrow, longing, unrequited love. The poet is a living refutation of the materialistic formula about ‘reality given to us in sensation’. He perceives not just ‘reality’ but reality plus something else that gives it a unique flavour. This is reminiscent of the perception of a lover for whom both sun, stars and mist are full of the beloved. ‘My feeling’s sad and light; my sorrow is bright; // My sorrow is full of you alone’.

The lyric poet begins with the most general of all: with love and death; and continues, as a rule, by passing from the general to the particular: to the story of Pugachev, to the commandant of the Bielogorsk fortress. It is quite probable that poetry is indeed the way to silence. In the end, words become unnecessary and unimportant for the soul. Of all words there remain only words of prayer and ordinary, not poetic conversation. I do not think, however, that a poet who has learnt the sweetness of creation (to avoid the wrong word ‘creativity’, which means not an act, but a quality, an ability) can be completely silent. The beauty of thought and the beauty of words are necessary to him not for the sake of the approval of others, but because of an inner need; a need, I think, of a religious nature. Creativity is a form of worship available to some, their liturgy. And that is why in the days, weeks and months of poetic silence the poet feels himself excommunicated from the temple.

I did not speak of ‘poetic silence’ by accident. The poet’s soul is silent for a certain, if not most, part of his life. It can be said that we are not evenly animated at all: at other moments (a considerable part of the time of our life) we are driven not by our soul but by habit. The more we submit to habit, the further we are from ourselves and from a sense of the nearness of God. A life quite subordinated to habit is a life of longing. The truly human lies beyond the repetitive. Its domain is that of the unique, the independent, the new. Old age begins where the receptivity to novelty, the desire for novelty, the capacity for novelty, ends. To be an office clerk, a man of ‘duty and skill’, one does not need a soul at all… When we live by habit, we do not live at all, and our soul, feeling this, responds with mortal longing. Habit binds us to the world and disconnects us from our own soul. It is both attractive and impossible to live by the external alone, by the glitter and lures of the external world alone.

Everything we learn about man, we learn either from poets or from ourselves — in those moments when our soul is not silent. Here is another difficulty of cognition of man. Learning about him is always learning about ourselves. All deep knowledge of the human being is in its origin self-knowledge. There is no mirror that would reflect the ‘human in general’, except for the mirror of human weaknesses. That is why everyone who wishes to solve the riddle of man must solve it himself, looking into himself, listening also to the voice of poets — not for the sake of ‘captivating sounds’, but for the sake of revelations of the inner life of the soul, which is expressed in these sounds.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity. Essays on Cullture.

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