Robert,
I love the spare, lapidary language of the King James' Bible, too. No need to convince me there. But I also love the language of
Under Milk Wood. I am puzzled by your assertion that the former is "good" writing and the latter "bad". It is, to me, as if a dry and astringent wine should be praised as the paragon of all drinks, and a double-malted chocolate milk-shake, with all its attendant nourishment, be dismissed as cloying and OTT. Like the two styles of writing, I enjoy both styles of drink.
The dry, spare, clean text of the King James is what I would characterise as "spiritual" in nature; and the D.T. I would call "soulful". Soul and spirit are two terms we have hopelessly muddled today. But they in fact pertain to two different phenomenological realms of experience. Spirit (which the Greeks called
Pneuma) is not a synonym for Soul (which they called
Psyche). Here is how the psychologist James Hillman differentiates them:
Quote:
Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, preferring labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the ‘patient’ part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit’s fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury - to use an image from St. Augustine - a confusion and richness, both ... The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.
The world of spirit is different indeed. Its images blaze with light, there is fire, wind, sperm. Spirit is fast, and it quickens what it touches. Its direction is vertical and ascending; it is arrow-straight, knife-sharp, powder-dry, and phallic. It is masculine, the active principle, making forms, order, and clear distinctions ... Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p 68/9.
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But since we are composite beings, mixed spirit and soul inseparably, I believe we need both spirit-literature and soul-literature for a well-balanced diet.
But it is true that the history of Western culture is the history of domination of Spirit (mind, will, the masculine principle) over Soul (emotion, imagination, the feminine principle).
Under Milk Wood is a rich, lush and nourishing soul-work, and I need it in my diet as much as I need to wash it down with some astringent Biblical wine.
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Mark Allinson