The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire

But only continued attempts at accurate soul-speech can cure our speech of its chatter and restore it to its first function, the communication of soul.

We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people.

A particular image, Hillman notes, is a necessary angel waiting for a response. How we greet this angel will depend on our sensitivity to its reality and presence

as Plato said, soul and idea refer to each other, in that an idea is the “eye of the soul,” opening us through its insight and vision. Therefore

the psyche is the subject of our perceptions, the perceiver through fantasy, rather than the object of our perceptions.

The soul, he says, turns events into experience. But it is image that is experienced, not literalism.

The soul has been imaged as the inner man, and as the inner sister or spouse, the place or voice of God within, as a

Man is half-angel because he can speak.

The soul seems to suffer when its inward eye is occluded, a victim of overwhelming events.