'Soul'?

I try to avoid using the word ‘soul’, except ironically. It seems to be used either as an excuse for not thinking about how to explain a sensation, or less commonly it’s barely-disguised religious mumbo-jumbo.

Now I’ve just come across this hidden example of the genius of Virginia Woolf:

“…she was conscious of a movement in her of some creature beating its way about her and trying to escape, which momentarily she called her soul…”

Th character in question is Sasha Latham, in a story called ‘A summing up’ (The new dress and other stories, Alma, 2024, p46-49). Referring to this ‘soul’, Woolf goes on to call it:

“by nature unmated, a widow bird, a bird perched aloof on that tree”

which, in the final paragraph

“flew away, descrying wider and wider circles until it became (what she called her soul) remote as a crow which has been startled up into the air by a stone thrown at it”.

That’s the way yer do it. I note that Jung refers to a “kind of soul… whose purpose it is to pin down and capture something uncannily alive and active” (Archetypes of the collective unconscious, para 55). As human beings we experience sensations for which we do not have the vocabulary: that after all is not uncommon, and that is one reason why creative writing is important. Sasha Latham is experiencing something, she finds a word for it, and Woolf describes the sensation, leaving the word neither more nor less useful, but the reader enriched.

As a footnote, regarding the phrase ‘mumbo-jumbo’ used above, I was concerned that this could have been culturally crass and possibly racist. Reference to my trusty etymological dictionary and dictionary of historical slang suggest that its possible origin in west Africa would probably not have been complimentary.