The Soul Of Artifacts

It is a widely held view that 'things' are not just 'things.' Artifacts both invented and discovered are repositories for personal and collective meaning and significance. They become containers of our ideals, our fantasies, our fears and our fictions. Things, then, are alive with soul.

Things are animate objects relative to the human psyche.

To me it is not so important to disocver whether or not 'things' are animate in fact, or whether it is a mere fiction as a result of projections of the human psyche onto 'things.' What is important, is the mere realization that for us--for humans, for humanity--things are alive with meaning and significance by virtue of our psychological relationship to them. Artifacts have soul; they are ensouled.

For instance, someone may literally pour their soul into an artifact to the point where others are able to intuit soul in that artifact. Art is the great repository of the human soul for just this reason. It is not just the material conditions of anartifact that are resonated with. People--well, sane people anyways!--don't partake of an ensouled artifact and then go about analyizing the spectrum of colours used and employed as if it were a mere technical achievement. Sane people sense the existence of soul in the artifact. It could be Beauty. Or it could be Pathos. Either way, what captures the imagination and fixes our attention is the presence of soul.

Perhaps this is why there has been such a steady union of Art and Religion through the millennia. The symbology of Art has tended to serve a Religious function of 'binding' us to soul: the Passion of Christ; the emptiness and space of a Zen Garden; the polytheistic orgy of a Tibetan Mandala. Art communicates. Artifacts communicate. And I suspect that what we are coming to discover in an age of increasing commodification is that there really is a difference between ensouled artifacts and artifacts devoid of soul--which is perhaps another way of saying that there is a difference between ensouled artifacts and mass-produced artifacts generated in an act of devotion to the gods of efficiencyand quantity.

It is a difference that a young child knows directly, intimately, beyond conceptualization. The replacement Teddy Bear newly purchased is not the Teddy Bear dripping with soul. It is not the living, animate Teddy Bear that has been there through thick and thin. It is not the Teddy Bear that smells right, that has scars and torn fabric in all the right places. It is a Teddy Bear devoid of soul--the one thing, soul, that matters more than any other to the child. The difference that makes all the difference.