Moments come when we feel outside time, seized by a longing, moved by an image, in touch with invisible voices. We realize that we do not live in one world only. As Rilke says, "we are grasped by what we cannot grasp..." Something beyond life lives within life and calls the soul... Repair of the soul ("the damage I have done to myself," as Kabir says) and focus on the job at hand are only half; a man has metaphysical tasks, too. Unless his spirit ventures toward the invisible, a man will be unable to perform the daily round with purpose. He will have little joy, only duty--and rebelliousness. The deepest cause of our discontent and our confused yearnings is the loss of Paradise. The human soul needs anchoring in something beyond itself, in that vision which is the ground of all initiations, a vision which hints that life on earth reflects ideals of perfection.

We live in a poetically underdeveloped nation. Men blame their own lives for a deficiency in the culture. For, without the fanciful delicacy and the powerful truths that poems convey, emotions and imagination flatten out. There's a lack of spirit, of vision. The loss in the heart appears as a loss of heart to take up the great cultural challenges that are part of every man's citizenship.

The growth of a man can be imagined as a power that gradually expands downward: the voice expands downward into the open vowels that carry emotion, and into the rough consonants that are like gates holding that water; the hurt feelings expand downward into compassion; the intelligence expands with awe into the great arguments or antinomies men have debated for centuries; and the mood-man expands downward into those vast rooms of melancholy under the earth, where we are more alive the older we get, more in tune with the earth and the great roots.

If, as Nalungiaq says, "in the very earliest time... people and animals... spoke the same language," then the rectification of language requires closeness with our animal nature. Then the vitality of our language resides as much in the sound of our words and beat of their rhythms as in their meanings. That's why Lorca puts the poetry of duende together with song, dance, and bull-fighting, and that's why poems belong more to speaking than to reading, more to passionate declamation and ecstatic jubilation, keening, crying, and screaming, and to the secret whispers of lovers' lips than to typed lines on bleached paper. Good language asks to be spoken aloud, mind to mind and heart to heart, by embodied voices that still retain the animal and by tongues that still delight in savoring vowels and the clipped splitting of explosive consonants.

The health of any nation's soul depends on the capacity of adults to face the harsh facts of the time. But the covering up of painful emotions inside us and the blocking out of fearful images coming from outside have become in our country the national and private style. We have established, with awesome verve, the animal of denial as the guiding beast of the nation's life.

The cultivated heart, imagined then as a house with many rooms, or an alchemical vase able to sustain high temperatures to assist creation of new substances, or imagined as a walled garden with rare flowers, order, solitude, place for intimacy with another, disdain of ordinary chaotic life, represented immense effort. It still does. Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.

Living in the moment can become a moralistic principle, a burden rather than a way to intensify life. The difference might depend on who takes the lead in the dance and who chooses the music. The soul is a community of many interior persons, many of them capable leaders. The ego is only one among them and probably should not always run the show. A good dancer or musician allows the music to take over, becomes absorbed in the complex harmonies and tempos, and is the servant of the materials at hand. The secret of a soul-based life is to allow someone or something other than the usual self to be in charge.

Our neuroses are the raw material out of which an interesting personality may be crafted. They are sometimes dangerous and debilitating but nonetheless valuable. They are the basic stuff of the soul in need of lifelong refinement. Working this annoying and embarrassing material for a lifetime is a realistic work compared with the search for psychological hygiene--ridding ourselves of failure and confusion.

In order to have soul, we need to be taken from, and that necessary emptying requires some collusion on our part in the theft, some neglect in our defenses, some distraction that interferes with our intentions. It won't do to make a project of keeping the door ajar. It has to come from a distracted mind, one that is not so excessively preoccupied with defending itself that theft is not possible.

Something in us doesn't want to be civilized, linked too closely with Apollo and all his humanitarian accomplishments--medicine, music, ideas. It doesn't want any kind of union, but desperately tries to preserve its individuality and integrity. Something in us wants to be wooden, untalkative, and impenetrable. It wants to revert to dumb nature. Something in us doesn't want to be loved or desired. A tree's beauty is purely unintended and purposeless.
Daphne is wooden. She is that which doesn't want to be communicative, available, friendly, present, or articulate. Instinctively she flees from the most noble of attentions, the most humane of admirers. She would rather be like a tree than a person, an it rather than a thou. The Daphne spirit is so pure that it has no use for the sentimentality of relationship.
Modern psychological thinking doesn't appreciate the necessity presented in this myth. We consider it normal and healthy to be intimate with each other and communicate well. We interpret flight from intimacy as neurotic, abnormal, and practically immoral. But within this myth, flight from interpersonal contact is the norm. Resistance to humanitarian sensitivity is valid. Disappearing from the human scene somehow protects and preserves Daphne in a completely acceptable way.
Rather than judge each other and ourselves for our failure to be sociable, we might reconsider our biases and assumptions, even our sentimentality, about relationship. Perhaps some of our narcissism is a symptomatic attempt recover as strong unrelated sense of self. How can we reach out to another anyway, if we don't have strong devotion to our individuality?