You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. ~ C.S. Lewis
Night before last I finished reading a very compelling novel that brought up some intriguing questions about the nature of humanity. Imagine that instead of seeking intelligent life in the galaxy of stars and planets, we looked instead into a galaxy much closer to home but no less accessible: the oceans of Earth. The book starts with that premise. It's not a great book. At 800 pages it is vastly over-written and the author clearly has an agenda, but it's like reading early Stephen King: once I started, I couldn't put it down. I finished the book from bed, set it aside, turned off the lights, and wondered about body, soul, intelligence - and life itself.
That's when Hyla Kaye Dickman wandered through my brain:
Hyla Kaye Dickman often felt burdened by gravity. It just felt wrong to her that she could not float on air, that she could not fly, that vertical was not available to her and that horizontal was bounded by roads and buildings, fields and rivers and hollows and hills.
Even more perplexing was that other people didn't seem to be bothered by this confinement at all. Twyla loved doors and windows, and her canvases always depicted closed doors and shuttered windows, tall fences and locked gates. Twyla even locked the doors of her home, a concept that completely eluded Hyla Kaye. She might close a door against the cold but never against some imagined thing that might bring harm. Her open windows invited bees and other flying things into her house. She once had the company of a black-capped chickadee for three days before it left the same way it had come: through the open back door. When Hyla was ready to run, she wanted no obstructions.
Hyla Kaye had a garden that was really a wonderland of plants and trees and potted growing things that Maude and Caroline sold in their nursery. As she worked, she would often feel the sunshine on her back as both an invitation and a weight. She would easily give herself up to air and light, if only they would have her. She wanted to be like smoke that rose until the air absorbed it. She could lie on her back in a blanket of sweet alyssum and watch clouds form and dissipate, take a new shape and gradually unwind back into the blue of sky. She wondered how that would feel - to live so fully that she became part of everything.
Her sister Nyla was so afraid of life that she gardened her body into an intricate bonsai of toned limbs and starving belly. She was a twig - pruned, polished, and twisted into a form it was never meant to have. Her roots were too shallow for her intentions to thrive, and Hyla worried that one day she would simply cease to be, and no amount of watering or feeding would bring her back. Nyla's fear of life would be the death of her.
But then, all things die.
All things die, and all people are supposed to die, but some people just went on and on as if they were exempt, like Major Dickman - her mother's father - that ancient husk of body that was without soul and so weighted down by the gravity of his evil that in death he would be like a stone that her shoe collects as she tends her garden. Major cast his shadow beyond the constraints of angles of light. Whenever she felt that shadow coming down the street toward the Grill, she would leave her grilled cheese sandwich and cole slaw uneaten, leave her sisters in mid-sentence, her iced tea in mid-sip, and simply walk away before the soulless shadow could find her, her own soul guiding her gravity-bound body across the green, along the alley behind Nyla's shop, and into the embrace of her own home.
Where she shut the door.
