There must have been a point at which Ezra Pound lost his soul, and certainly a point at which he had lost the ability to back out of the labyrinth of his life. Yet if you look at Robert Creeley, a poet deeply influenced by Pound, you see someone whose complex and healing morality remained undiminished throughout his life, a poet who kept returning to the image and doing what it told him to do. Creeley didn’t lose his soul. It can happen that you don’t have to lose it, even in this culture.

You may have noticed that when I talked about a soul-killing culture it was easy to agree with me but when I began to talk about real souls—maybe even your soul—your intellect took over and enforced a certain precautionary distance from, for example, the image of beasts like shadows in the glass. The same thing will happen if you look at Robert Creeley’s poem “Wicker Basket.” It’s a soul-image—a sturdy woven place he goes to when it’s later/and onto your table the headwaiter/puts the bill, and from the comfort of which he can see very huge stars, man, in the sky/and from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of/apple pie/with a gob of white white ice cream on top of it/and I eat it—/Slowly. And while certainly/They are laughing at me, and all around me is racket/Of these cats not making it, I make it/in my wicker basket.

Even if you can’t believe in the soul you can believe in the image, and its imperative of accepting the apple pie and the white white ice cream when it’s handed to you. Maybe Pound in his intentionality lost the ability to accept images on their own terms, and thus lost his soul. Hillman gives many definitions for the soul but a small one that I like is that the soul is the active interface between self and image.

Checking yourself for a soul, then, requires an icon. It’s similar to writing a story or poem by starting with a well-realized image and writing the words it gives you, and then looking more closely and writing the words the second look gives you, and continuing this process until done.

What you will have gained in that exercise is more than a story or poem. You will have gained a world full of somethingness. You will have gained a sense that all your art is found art, and I think that taking what you find and doing what you can to love it well and show it well to the world is one way you transform those moments when you believe in nothing. It’s the start of a search for the images that activate your soul. Camus, who delved deep into the Valley of Death, wrote that two or three of those images would give enough meaning to life that you could refuse suicide. He called that understanding the discovery of an Invincible Summer within himself.

We live in a culture that likely will kill itself through resource exhaustion or total war or overbreeding. Perhaps that in itself is enough justification to believe in nothing. Certainly it’s cause to be deeply skeptical of those things the culture tells us are life-giving. Certainly it gives heft to the belief that we are in for a long if not invincible winter. Certainly you can say that Santa Claus doesn’t brighten that winter to a noticeable degree.

But at one point in his life Ezra Pound intuited that in the image was a doorway to a different and better world. Writers need to back up far enough to take that doorway. Pound, of course, lost that fine intuition and became imprisoned in this world in far more ways than one.

I’ll close with an image, one from a Robert Bly poem, one which stands in soulful counterpoint to Pound’s much-quoted line, “what thou lovest well remains.”

There’s an imperative for you. Thank you.