The Unedited Soul

In her foreward for a collection of short stories by Franz Kafka, Anne Rice wrote:

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion.”

Sometimes I think there are two versions of ourselves vying for dominance —an unedited soul that represents who we know ourselves to be at the deepest level, and another soul we feel compelled to edit and cast a stage light on in an effort to be who we think we ought to be.

The compulsion to be someone you are not can be hard to resist in the present, but is a bit easier to dissolve when you imagine yourself in the future looking back:

It’s hard to imagine any version of the future where you look back fondly at all the posturing you felt you had to do with your family, friends, and colleagues.

Thankfully there’s an unedited soul for us to fall back to, whose nature I think the poet Walt Whitman describes perfectly in his poem Song of Myself: “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world.”

‘Yawp’ is just the perfect word.

A yawp is a pure thing. There’s nothing needlessly refined or polished about it, it means to shout hoarsely — to let your voice project with all your might.