Soul man...

As Sam and Dave warbled: 'I'm a soul man. I'm a soul man. I'm a soul man. I'm a soul man'. (went on a bit didn't they?).

I love that once I have a thought that I can’t easily let go of it, it makes me annoying sometimes, a bit of a dog with a bone, but I’m like that.  I’ve been thinking about immortality over the last few days and how some believe that the ‘soul’ is immortal. I don’t know for sure if we are born or die with a ‘soul’ or if the ‘soul’ exists at all. I know that I’m sentient in my body, that I’m aware of myself (sometimes too aware what with my legs and back) and I’m pretty sure that awareness develops as we grow and some develop their awareness quicker than others. What did that Fat Boy Slim say? 'Check it out now - the funk soul brother', so that's what I'm doing bro.

If I do have a ‘soul’, for want of a better word, where does it reside? Is it in my mind, my subconscious, my heart, my body, my bottom (not my feet, because that is a sole) or is it simply made up of the way I view things and my experience? Do we all have one, or just some of us and if we do have one that how come so many people can do terrible things? Are there good souls and bad souls? There are certainly arse souls (I know quite a few of them). I’ve met people who seem to have no ‘soul’ at all, people who think they have one simply because of their supposed piety and compliance to rules and values that are usually not their own, others who have a ‘soul’ because they deal in love daily even if they are still very young. In fact, some of the most soulful people I've known were and are children, which begs the question, if we have a soul, do our souls degrade and get weaker as life wears us down on it's grinding wheel? Could it be, as They Might Be Giants jingled, that 'there's a Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch who watches over you, make a little birdhouse in your soul'? 

What is it made from? Spirit (in which case make mine from rum), energy, ectoplasm, wood, plastic, or (and this would probably get The Beatles vote) rubber? To my mind, a large part of what our ‘soul’ could be made from is how we each live our lives to our values and how people remember each of us for those values (in which case I'm up a waterway outlet without a rowing stick). Our ‘soul’ may reside within their heads and not in each of us at all and when we die our ‘souls’ cease to exist except to the keepers of our memory (pass me my medication please, I seem to be on some sort of hallucinatory trip). A ‘soul’ might not even be a given, a right, something to make shine or darken, it may simply be the sum of what we do and who we are in life. How often do you hear people say 'he/she was a good soul' when you are of the opinion (or certainty) that the person they are talking about is as rotten as rotten can be?  It's often the seemingly good soul that murders the victim in the library with the lead piping (that's how I work out who the murderer is and that generally works, especially with Misommer Murders).

I'm with Tom Waits on this: 'Won't somebody tell me, answer if you can, want somebody tell me, what is the soul of a man, I'm going to ask the question, answer if you can'. Upon my soul, I’ll find out one day for sure as I splutter out (or not as the case may be, and not yet I hope). Perhaps I should just trust in my soul for now and grin and 'bare' it. As Soul to Soul said: 'Back to life, back to the present time, back from a fantasy, oww woww. Anyway, I leave you to ponder. I've got another bone to chew on (woof - woof).