Bright Lights City Gonna Set My Soul Set My Soul on Fire
--VIVA LAS VEGAS
With a box of books and a deadline, I drove to Las Vegas to
contemplate the word "soul." Was I supposed to define something that no
one had pinned down, ever, in all our centuries of Western writing? Do
you know how to spell "fat chance?" Still, if you don't take on a dicey
assignment like this every now and then--well, you've got no soul. Which
may be the beginning of a definition: something about the soul goads you
into unknown, difficult, improbable journeys. But I'm getting ahead of
myself.
Why this soulfully pulsating box of books, and why Las Vegas? Well,
my editor sent the damned box. A wide, haphazard sampling from our new
soul industry. I dreaded opening it. One way to get me not to read a book
is to put "soul" in the title--even if a friend has written it. And one
reason I was chosen for this task was, as my editor put it, "You're
friends with two of the big soul-guys, James Hillman and Robert Thy."
That's true, but it's not like we go drinking together every week.
Rather, I could say of each what Thy once said of Joseph Campbell: "I
couldn't have had my thoughts unless he had thought his."
Frankly, it appalls me that those two original, irascible,
rebellious thinkers now get boxed up with this often icky "soul" fad.
They haven't jumped on any bandwagon; they were delving into the mystery
of soul for decades before it became profitable. But here they were in
this box in my back seat.
And why Las Vegas? The glare and glitter of that city--noisy,
blatant, sexy and obsessed with money--is as far as you can get from the
oh-so-high-minded, earnest, airy, and elevated assertions found on most
of the pages in my editor's box. And part of my "process" (as they say in
Southern California, where I live) is that I work best in the midst of
contradictions. As Henry Miller put it, "The labyrinth is my happy
hunting ground." Where better to consider the soul than in a neon
labyrinth?
Souls Afire
This soul thing ain't exactly news (although maybe the way we've
been packaging it is). Americans have been obsessed with soul from the
moment they first faced this wild continent--as though its very wildness
reached in and pulled their souls to the surface. The Conquistadors'
excuse for oppressing Native Americans was that they were saving souls;
as absurd and self-serving as that sounds now, those Spaniards believed
it. The Puritans came here for the express purpose of living by their
souls' dictates. From those pioneers to Martin Luther King to Ronald
Reagan, we've taken our imagery for America from the Bible's book of
Revelation: a shining city on a hill--a spiritual image, not a political
or economic one.
The very meaning of "America" has always been that this is a place
where we are free to live, without restriction, by the dictates of our
souls. As Walt Whitman put it, "Here a great personal deed has room."
Without the concept of soul, America is just unrestrained desire, and we
lose the very impetus that created such a thing as Americans.
And to me, Las Vegas is the American soul at its most naked and
extreme. Vegas is America as a stripper, wearing nothing but beads and
feathers, a blatant display of our most soul-wrenching paradox: our crass
commercialism and the boundless longing that fuels it. And though Vegas
is many things to many people, there is one thing it is not: Unlike some
of the soul-books in my box, it is not sappy. It is unequivocally the
craziest place I've ever seen, and it doesn't care.
The city is a testament to longing and dreams. People come here for
the same reason they first came to America, hoping for the big score (as
we say in Vegas), the chance to win enough money to live with absolute
liberty. And is not a longing for liberty a thing of the soul?
Whether you fly, drive, or go by rail, to get to Vegas you must
traverse the Mojave desert, 110 degrees in the shade for half the year.
Immense, merciless, the Mojave surrounds the city for hundreds of miles
in all directions. It is an ancient tradition for soul-seekers to journey
into the desert. We are a culture shaped by such seekers. Moses, Jesus,
and Mohammed all lost themselves in the desert in order to find the
burning, overwhelming, monotheistic visions that haunt, comfort, guide,
and judge us to this day. It was in a desert that Satan offered Jesus
anything he wanted, if only he would recognize God's fallen angel. Jesus
rejected the deal, but many of us aren't as fastidious. From
Conquistadors to goldminers, from Mormons to Las Vegas gamblers, we've
been hunting for that devil in deserts ever since. To propitiate a devil
is surely one of the darker acts of the soul.
Tags:
America,
assertions,
back seat,
bandwagon,
books,
fad,
glare,
glitter,
henry miller,
improbable journeys,
james hillman,
Joseph Campbell,
Las Vegas,
materialist,
midst,
s box,
sampling,
soul,
soul on fire,
southern california,
thinkers,
viva las vegas,
word soul
