Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    All Soul Parts Returned
    All Soul Parts Returned
    All Soul Parts Returned
    Ebook145 pages1 hour

    All Soul Parts Returned

    By Bruce Beasley

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    When the Gnostic Gospels collide with new age spiritualism, the Oxford Happiness Test, and treatises on Buddhist practice, we know we're in the territory of a Bruce Beasley collection. Alternately devout and heretical, Beasleyknown for his intense and continuing soul-quest through previous award-winning booksinterrogates the absurdities, psychic violence, and spiritual condition of twenty-first century America with despair, philosophic intelligence, and piercing humor.

    Bruce Beasley is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Theophobia (BOA, 2012). The winner of numerous literary awards and fellowships, he lives in Bellingham, WA, where he is a professor of English at Western Washington University.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateSep 18, 2017
    ISBN9781942683469
    All Soul Parts Returned

    Related to All Soul Parts Returned

    Related ebooks

    Body, Mind, & Spirit For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Konda Mason Has Love Capital

      May 16, 2018

      Konda Mason Has Love Capital
      19 min read

    • Article

      “Start Now. Start Where You Are. Start With Fear. Start With Pain. Start With Doubt. Start With Hands Shaking. Start With Voice Trembling But Start. Start And Don't Stop. Start Where You Are, With. What You Have. Just... Start”

      Dec 1, 2020

      Pema Chödrön is our favourite wise woman. Beloved Buddhist teacher, author, nun and mother, she has inspired millions of people around the world who have been touched by her example and message of practising peace in these turbulent times. The Pema C

      1 min read

    • Article

      Calling on Jizo

      Aug 7, 2018

      Calling on Jizo
      9 min read

    • Article

      Fortune Telling Through Time

      Dec 3, 2020

      When drinking loose-leaf tea, some of the leaves inevitably stick to the bottom and sides of the cup. Tasseography involves ‘reading’ the shapes formed by these leaves to predict the tea drinker’s future – an angel, for example, means good news is on

      2 min read

    • Article

      Buddhism? There’s An App For That

      Mar 19, 2019

      $79.99/YEAR Dan Harris created 10% Happier with renowned Insight Meditation teachers Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein. It offers the basics for free, plus a large collection of talks and meditations. $6.99 One of the earliest meditation apps, Bud

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Biology Of Compassion

      Jan 19, 2022

      The Biology Of Compassion
      2 min read

    • Article

      Gravity And Grace And The Virus

      Nov 24, 2020

      It was strangely comforting to read things that had been written in a time of crisis, yet one that was not this crisis, this unbearable time. The post Gravity and Grace and the Virus appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Why We Dream

      Jul 28, 2021

      Why We Dream
      1 min read

    • Article

      The Buddhist Guide To Mindfulness

      May 18, 2021

      Uncover the spiritual roots of mindfulness meditation and deepen your practice with this just-reissued special edition from Lion’s Roar. Featuring teachings and commentaries from Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dzogchen Ponlop Rin

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Great Letting Go

      May 31, 2020

      The Great Letting Go
      3 min read

    • Article

      Good GRACE

      Jan 6, 2022

      Grace is usually peddled as the stuff of cover-ups; the added ingredient that takes all your failures and mistakes and the times when you’ve fallen short, and makes up the difference, hiding them away as if they were never there. Grace makes your par

      2 min read

    • Article

      21st Century Samsara

      Jan 19, 2021

      21st Century Samsara
      5 min read

    • Article

      Medicine WOMEN

      Mar 9, 2023

      Medicine WOMEN
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Beauty of Being

      Dec 14, 2022

      THE feeling of green. Shapeshifters. Pina Bausch. These are among the sources of inspiration the poets in our eighteenth annual feature shared regarding their yearslong journeys toward the publication of their debut collections. Each of the following

      2 min read

    • Article

      On Apocalyptic Poetry

      Jun 25, 2018

      On Apocalyptic Poetry
      14 min read

    • Article

      On Writing Poems Facing Into The Broken World

      Mar 1, 2020

      Kaveh Akbar and Jane Hirshfield have been in a running e-mail conversation since January 2016, when Akbar first contacted Hirshfield about doing an interview in his Divedapper series, before his first, widely acclaimed book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Al

      16 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Iľja Rákoš

      Dec 23, 2020

      I’d been out of the hospital following (let’s call it) treatment for COVID-19 about a month. My hospital ward of 50 patients had one oxygen concentrator. Despite my blood-oxygen saturation levels of 90%, that device wasn’t coming my way anytime soon.

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Dark Side of Awe

      Jan 29, 2024

      The Dark Side of Awe
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Writing Wisdom of Derek Walcott

      Mar 20, 2017

      “The future happens,” says the philosopher in Derek Walcott’s stage retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, “No matter how much we scream.” Walcott died on Friday at the age of 87—and instead of screaming, I’m feeling grateful towards this great poet, playwrig

      7 min read

    • Article

      Grandeur Of The Unimportant

      Jul 1, 2018

      APZ Books The reasons a contemporary American poet might consider writing political poetry these days are too many to name. I would include the government’s attempt to silence dissent in the media, in the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA

      13 min read

    • Article

      How To Inhabit The Word

      Apr 4, 2022

      Your book, In Sensorium, calls us to make work grounded in sensation: touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell.

      4 min read

    • Article

      From Cantares Mexicanos

      Dec 1, 2023

      Last night I dreamt that I was employed as a suicide prevention specialist in ancient Mesoamerica. We had no phones then so no hotline to call or anything like that. I held these gatherings going place to place for people to tell me their stories and

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for All Soul Parts Returned

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      All Soul Parts Returned - Bruce Beasley

      THE PARTS

      Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Torn-to-Pieces-Hood

      Part I Thou Must Leave

      Report to the Provost on the Progress of My Leave

      Me Meaneth

      Reading Jesus Again, with a New Prescription

      Part II Disorientation Psalm for Schopenhauer

      Tohu Bohu

      Looking Down the Cliff, with Schopenhauer, on Black Friday

      The Last Good

      I Don’t Like My Soul Parts

      Reading The Purpose Driven Life, with Schopenhauer

      Part III Hymeneal

      Nuptial Song

      On Marriage

      Antithalamion

      What Do You Think the Poet Is Trying to Say?

      The Name of the Island Was Marriage

      Offspring Insprung

      Part IV The Sixth Dust

      Revised Catechism

      Cleft for Me Let Me Hide Myself from Thee

      Such and Such and Such and Such

      Part V The Mass of the Ordinary

      Kyrie

      Embolism

      Sanctus

      Credo

      Fraction Rite

      Agnus Dei

      Benedictus

      Gloria

      NONORDINARY TO THE POEMS

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Colophon

      TORN-TO-PIECES-HOOD

      Come undone, soul. It’s what you’ve wanted, isn’t it, to go to pieces. Dismember, scatter self from Self.

      Who knew the soul had frequently been torn? Had shed its parts all over and they’d fled to hide, piece by piece, in a murky otherworld known only as Nonordinary Reality.

      So say the shamans. So say the shamans who offer for a fee to bring them back, in a drum-drone and trance and stench of incense, to trace the hollows, sky-fissures, lower and upper realms of the Nonordinary and cajole those cowering fragments back to a mass of their kin soul parts, here in the Ordinary. To breathe them back onto forehead and chest, brain and heart. Who is I but the mass of its soul parts, the ones that stayed, the ones that—like the gospel’s prodigal son—left and squandered and came back, ready even to eat the slop of the swine?

      The constitutional disease from which I suffer, William James wrote in a letter, "is what the Germans call Zerrissenheit or torn-to-pieces-hood."

      A mass is a collection of incoherent parts seen nevertheless as a singular entirety. A mass of errors. Torn-to-pieces-hood as a mass of rent remainders that populate, all unknowingly, the ordinary.

      Ordinary means, among its mass of other meanings, commonplace, unexceptional, of no particular interest or importance. Ordinary means, among its mass of other meanings, the collection of chants and prayers that form the body of the Roman Catholic Mass. In the Ordinary of the Mass the god-who-came-back enters, again and again, the wafer and the wine, enters again and again into Time, into Ordinary Reality, to reheal all over again our latest state of torn-to-pieces-hood.

      When the traumatized soul-in-pieces flees Ordinary Reality, it leaves, too, the Ordinary of the Mass, tears apart the fabric of the mass of the ordinary.

      On this, as on every, point, the Baltimore Catechism is quite without doubt: A spirit is also indivisible; it cannot be divided into parts.

      Parts of us are always leaving. More and more stray soul pieces crowd the Nonordinary. So much can pull the soul apart, like rain slashing through a spiderweb strand. Any part can find it easier to make its way on its own in the Nonordinary, when it’s terrified, bereaved, rejected, in despair. Most of us in Western culture have been walking around for some period of time without parts of our soul, says a shamanist website, matter-of-factly. All these tatters where soul once was, like a worm-eaten book.

      Human life must be some kind of mistake, wrote Arthur Schopenhauer, who must have left a vapor trail of soul parts behind him everywhere he went.

      If you imagine . . . the sum total of distress, pain, and suffering of every kind which the sun shines upon in its course, he wrote, you will have to admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little on earth as on the moon.

      Soul parts, once the shaman has hauled them back, won’t put up with any shenanigans, says a shamanist’s pamphlet. If you do nothing with the soul parts, they could go into repeat soul loss . . . leaving you feeling worse than before the soul retrieval.

      No soul has time for shenanigans. It is busy rending its garments, like a desert prophet.

      I think a part of my soul is coming back. Last night I dreamed my father, who died when I was fifteen, had never made it all the way into his grave, though my twin brother and I had hauled his corpse there ourselves, dragging it upright between us through the woods. My sister said she kept seeing him out of the corner of her eye, and once, she told me, on an unlit road he had reached into her car, running beside it, grabbing the steering wheel while she tried to hit the accelerator hard enough to lose him. He’s still out there, she told me. He’s coming back.

      Forgive my soul parts; they know not what they do.

      Even St. Augustine knew the soul could get dislodged. He punned on the Latin for religion, which meant to re-tie, to re-bind, like a ligament. "True religion is that by which the soul is united to

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1