The Soul Drag thread has been archived.

I am reopening this one to let you know about my latest finding (which may well have been already mentioned) :
In Bruce Sterling's 'Zeitgeist', when Leggy Starlitz flies back from Hawai, it says (from memory) :
"He was jetlagged to hell. His soul must have been somewhere over the mid-Pacific."

I think I've mentioned before that the concept features in a Steve Aylett story ("The Passenger"?) with a detailed description of the notion that is similar to wg's. Aylett uses it to more surreal purposes, of course.

Specifically:

One of the band had told me the soul was left behind during high speed travel - took hours to catch up with the body and that was the cause of jetlag. Even suicidal roof-jumpers left their chewed souls up there - high buildings were forever haloed with circling wraiths. So maybe some echo of me might remain. My luggage in the hold contained enough nitrotex to find out. This was it.

- Steve Aylett, "The Passenger", first published, online, in geek, 1997.

See also.

You know, as I was on my way to France this past summer I remembered Gibson's theory of soul-delay, or at least Cayce's theory.

However, it took no more than a day for me to get adjusted. Being my first trip overseas I didn't know what to expect, but it wasn't bad at all.

I think that the first trips soul delay is not a factor because, besides being young which makes you much more resilient, there is the excitement of the new, the adrenaline discharge of the experience, the sensory overload of a new world. So soul drag is not strong enough to be noticed.

However it is the world weary travellers, those who have stopped feeling the heart race when visiting another continent, who have been through countless repetitions of the travelling ritual so it goes in automatic. Those are the ones who notice the heavyness in the bones, the mind numbing fog, the slow reflexes. They have the contrasting experiences to differentiate soul delay from simple tiredness.

Boredom, or at least commonality, breeds the soul loss. Excitement makes your soul fly eagerly back to your body, to feel the joy of the new (or the fear of the unknown, sometimes).

Appropiate. Although despite all his travelling I doubt Omar Khayyam had soul delay. But his soul certainly ached.

quote:

Les hommes bornés ou orgueilleux établissent une différence entre l'âme et le corps. Moi, je n'affirme qu'une chose: le vin détruit nos soucis et nous donne la quiétude parfaite.

This is one of the few regrets I have from my family's exile, that I cannot understand Khayyam in the original Persian, but only in Western approximations.