What would be your "soul vessel"?

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I'm in the middle of the newest Christoper Moore book, "A Dirty Job". The protagonist of the story, Charlie, has to search out soul vessels.

I haven't finished the book and I'm not really sure what soul vessels are so I'm not really going to try to explain but they have something to do with karma. The vessel, it seems, contains all the stuff you had learned when you died and later on, in another incarnation, you can reclaim those lessons once you have corrected your past mistakes by reclaiming the vessel.

Or something like that.

But not really.

I'm not quite sure.

Anyway.

I was thinking -- if I died right this minute what vessel might hold my soul until I could come back later and pick it up.

What thing might I recognize as "mine"?

I think mine would be my 25 year old Canon AE-1.

What might be your soul vessel and why?

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Great question!

I'm bookmarking for now. Will have to think hard. I'm not a "thing" person, but in case this is how it works I had better come up with something. Would hate to have to re-learn all those lessons!

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Wow. I'm torn between my walkman and my thesaurus. That's completely a gut answer, I'll have to do some cogitatin' to figure out what I mean.

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My shoes? Oh, not sole..... <mutter>.

little<brainburn>k

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Hi all!

It is kind of a brain burn question. I've been thinking about it for the last couple of days so I have a bit of a head start.

My old camera is kind of a strange choice.

I thought of it just because it has been my nearly constant companion for so long. It was such a dear thing to me. Parts of it are worn thin from use. It has seen so much of what I've seen. I have a lot of cameras but that is the only one I feel any attachment to. I would never fail to recognize it.

But it is also a very "new soul" kind of choice. I was it's one and only owner. I really don't like to think of my soul as being quite so new.

I've also been thinking about things I have been inexplicably drawn to over the years. I'm a frequenter of second hand stores and sometimes I just come across a little thing that I feel I have to have.

I confess to being guilty of giving things meaning.

A walkman and a thesauras would either be cool vessels, BD (good to see you again, by the way). Music and words.

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What I want to know is, how and where does boom get all these varied topics for threads? I'm betting she's got the whole family and neighborhood working 24/7 on this. :wink: Laughing

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Ha!

If only!

If only I could get the whole house and neighborhood to talk about such things I'd spend much less time on A2K!

Honestly, spend a couple of hours reading C. Moore (and his ilk) at night then spend the next day pushing a kid on a swing for an hour or so. You'll be amazed at what your brain will do. Idle hands are the daydream's workshop.

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boomerang wrote:

Hi all!

It is kind of a brain burn question. I've been thinking about it for the last couple of days so I have a bit of a head start.

My old camera is kind of a strange choice.

I thought of it just because it has been my nearly constant companion for so long. It was such a dear thing to me. Parts of it are worn thin from use. It has seen so much of what I've seen. I have a lot of cameras but that is the only one I feel any attachment to. I would never fail to recognize it.

But it is also a very "new soul" kind of choice. I was it's one and only owner. I really don't like to think of my soul as being quite so new.

I've also been thinking about things I have been inexplicably drawn to over the years. I'm a frequenter of second hand stores and sometimes I just come across a little thing that I feel I have to have.

I confess to being guilty of giving things meaning.

A walkman and a thesauras would either be cool vessels, BD (good to see you again, by the way). Music and words.

Howdy, B'ang, it's nice to come back to so thought provoking a thread.

As you mentioned with your camera, I've always had some kind of portable musical device for as long I can remember; from burning out 9volt batteries night after night in my little transistor radio to tape players, cd players and now an iPod I've always had music around me... and now I get to share it with the Jr. Blaise. I'm confident he's the only kid in his 4th grade class that knows the words to Baby's On Fire.

I think I'd recognize the thesaurus because I've always felt there's more than one way to say something, see something, interpret something for better or worse. I was really fortunate to find a first edition Roget's Thesaurus from 1935 at a swap meet once.... for three bucks!!!

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What a great story. That thesarus may indeed be your soul vessel!

I'm imprinting this story in my mind so that 70 years from now if I happen across someone who has a first edition Roget's I'll know it's you.

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Having retired in 1848 from the office of Secretary of The Royal Society, a position he had held for more than 20 years, physician and polymath P. M. Roget set himself to the pursuit of his lifelong avocation, philology, the study of words. 4 years later, in 1852, he published the first thesaurus to bear his name, the Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, which was comprised of nearly 1000 categories, or classes, of words, encompassing something around 10,000 individual entries. Never out of print since first publication, the work has expanded almost logarithmically, and Roget's name itself has become synonymous with "Thesaurus".

Interestingly, a research paper he wrote in 1824 provided the functional basis for what today we know as movies, though beyond broaching the underlying concept, he apparently lost interest, not again visiting the idea, which was left for others to further expand and refine. Following his funeral in 1869, he was known to have taken no volitional, active role in anything else. It safely may be assumed that any soul Roget may have possessed had been parked somewhere, if souls may be parked, for 3/4ths of a century when that 1935 edition of Roget's Thesaurus rolled off the presses.

Mr. Green

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boomerang wrote:

What a great story. That thesarus may indeed be your soul vessel!

I'm imprinting this story in my mind so that 70 years from now if I happen across someone who has a first edition Roget's I'll know it's you.

If you listen closely you'll hear the SuperChicken theme song.

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timberlandko wrote:

Having retired in 1848 from the office of Secretary of The Royal Society, a position he had held for more than 20 years, physician and polymath P. M. Roget set himself to the pursuit of his lifelong avocation, philology, the study of words. 4 years later, in 1852, he published the first thesaurus to bear his name, the Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, which was comprised of nearly 1000 categories, or classes, of words, encompassing something around 10,000 individual entries. Never out of print since first publication, the work has expanded almost logarithmically, and Roget's name itself has become synonymous with "Thesaurus".

Interestingly, a research paper he wrote in 1824 provided the functional basis for what today we know as movies, though beyond broaching the underlying concept, he apparently lost interest, not again visiting the idea, which was left for others to further expand and refine. Following his funeral in 1869, he was known to have taken no volitional, active role in anything else. It safely may be assumed that any soul Roget may have possessed had been parked somewhere, if souls may be parked, for 3/4ths of a century when that 1935 edition of Roget's Thesaurus rolled off the presses.

Hmmm... a soul parked for 3/4 of a century would do much to explain a certain curious odor on page 57.

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After much thought, I'm thinking my soul vessel might be the old oak washstand found in a barn at the back of my grandparents farm when I was 8 or 9. I refinished it as a 4-H project and got a blue ribbon at the fair for my work.

There was no place for it in our house, so it stayed at Grandmas and Grandpa's until Grandma passed and I moved to my own place after college. Grandma used it to store bits of fabric and bric-a-brac, buttons and notions. It sat at the top of the stairs in a landing, just outside of what was my bedroom my senior year of high school. She had a little painted cast iron gnome on the landing that propped open another bedroom door. And, next to the washstand, still on the landing / hall area, she had an old spinning wheel found in the same barn.

This was one of my favorite places to sit to read since we were not allowed to sit on beds. (Everyone remembers that rule, right?)

The washstand would be my vessel not only because of the summer spent with Grandma sanding, varnishing and replacing hardware, drinking coke from bottles, laughing and then, as evening approached, listening and watching as the coyotes came out, but because of the fabrics she kept inside for over a decade. I absolutely love fabric. I love the textures and colors and ... possibilities.

I don't sew. I could, but I don't. I used to have boxes and boxes of fabric that I bought for no reason at all. I just liked the way they looked all neatly folded and stacked together.

So, the washstand would be my vessel. It's over a hundred years old already. Sometimes when I walk by it, I still catch a whiff of Grandma's house and the homemade varnish she used for dusting. I hope nothing happens to it before I retrieve my soul.

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quick book mark

Like others, I have to think about this one.

My first thought was a pirate ship!

Its that little child in me that is facinated with things like that , that screamed pick a SHIP!!

But, I am not sure the image of a pirate ship quite fits..

Ill be back.

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That is a very cool story and a great choice, squinney.

I can see a lot of your soul being invested in that object. Clearly it carries a lot of your memories. I can certainly see you recognizing it as your own during some life down the line.

And I don't think BD bought Roget's soul - he bought his own soul that he had left in the book when he died. Then, in this life, he recognized the book as his own and bought it to get his old lessons back.

So there is no telling what that foul odor might be.

Thinking along those lines gets rid of the whole old soul, new soul, problem too.

You get a new object to put your soul into each life. Like, this life my soul will go into the camera and I will have to recognize it next life.

In this life maybe my soul vessel is in something else and I just haven't found it yet.

Squinney could have found her soul vessel in the washstand and it carries her past but perhaps she uses it again and will have to recognize it again.

BD could have found his soul vessel in the book and maybe he'll put it back in the book or maybe he'll put it into his walkman and the walkman is the object he will have to recognize.

I want to hear about the pirate ship, shewolf!

I need to start keeping an eye out for my old soul.....

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When I first read this, I thought WTF(?), I don't have anything that I would call a vessel for my soul. A soul being an everlasting thing, what could possibly contain something that has no end? I do have a vessell, two to be exact. They are my sons. My soul lives in them.

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I'm leaving mine in the suitcase where I keep my secret porn stash....

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My ex-es pager. Weeee, what fun things I would do with it!

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An urn, boomer

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if i believed in souls (which i don't and don't attack me for that I just don't) I would be hard pressed for a vessel as I ahve way to many passions to be confined to one object... but methinks it could be Eero Aarnio ball chair, that would do.

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