Selling a Soul

The deal to trade your immortal bits is an odd plot that keeps turning up. And why is selling your soul or anything like it not a good insult anymore?

The story of selling human souls is an idea that people keep coming back to. There’s Goethe’s Faust and Gogol’s Dead Souls. It’s a staple of the blues. I won’t get exhaustive - this isn’t comparative literature.

But it’s a story that gets under my skin. I’ve written a short film and a long novel with this transaction near the center of the action.

Two outraged sovereigns

The soul is a felt presence to some, and otherwise an idea. As an idea, the soul claims close empathy with the world, while eluding its grasp, eluding even the reach of death. The materialist logic of the world would claim that nothing is past its reach and influence, and that anything seemingly beyond it is a fantasy propagated for ends that are ultimately material.

In light of the social and physical world, the soul would seem to be an outrageous proposition, and vice versa. The sovereignty of one would seem to preclude the other. And we have to operate this mutual impossibility, threatened with ostracism and poverty in the world, then with raging bestial hellfire and unceasing neurotic hunger in the invisible spaces beyond. It’s an amazing situation, and its crux appears in the scenario of selling one’s soul.

The line that is dotted

Selling is what the world does. But under that is the act of convincing. The word convince has roots that suggest “conquering together.” The seller and the customer must come together to conquer. Conquer what? Conquer a preexisting idea? Conquer each other?

The root of the word offers a sense of how difficult the process of convincing really is, and why effective salespeople make so much money. Selling is consensual, but only sort of. There’s mutual manipulation. There’s misdirected hunger.

A slimy subject

A lot of people may skip this essay because of the mere mention of the soul. And I get that. At least in America, the only time anyone talks about our souls seems to be when they want our money or our obedience.

It’s almost as tiresome as when people who try to prove the existence or nonexistence of the soul with some new diagnostic equipment. Why would your immortal soul show its ass to an MRI?

The stakes

So you take your soul - beyond consent and coercion, beyond the fickleness of the will - and enter into an agreement to sell it to someone else. It’s a conflict dressed as a transaction. The stakes are high. The strings are taut, and loud when tickled. All that’s left is to put a finer point on the situation.

The buyers

We, who flatter ourselves as having souls, and who need money for everything else, easily relate to the poor schlub selling their soul. The other side is more opaque. Who would buy a one?

In some ways, everyone. Churches buy them with the odd comfort and odder miracle. Employers pay cash for them in the form of our talent and waking hours. Nations buy them with coercion and status.

There are sundry other bidders. The mortuary-adjacent florist in my neighborhood is always prepping graveside displays. And among the MOMs and crosses, there are the logos of the Yankees, Jets, Giants, Harley Davidson and, recently, Absolut Vodka.

As I get older, I catch more ways that I confuse my obligations with my enthusiasms (see the recent “Missing the Hand That Hits You”), mostly to save myself some trouble. And I shiver at the thought of the wreaths at my own graveside. He always did love Sun Chips and khaki pants, they’ll say. Great. Just great.

But Let’s Not Talk About Work

But seriously, who’s the buyer? Whose name is on the sales papers? It’s the stuff of horror movies and moral fables.

The scariest things are never seen. What if the nefarious buyer hides behind layers of complexity, submerged under shells of ownership and dizzying derivative structures, until it’s indistinguishable from the surface of reality, sort of like money itself?

It’s all obscure and abstract and too mind-numbingly boring to do anything but shrug at, until the bubble pops. Only then, like in 2008, do we get a fleeting glimpse. In But Let’s Not Talk About Work (2013), the protagonist is a mid-level finance guy who packages purchased human souls into securities that can be traded on the open market, though they really only have one buyer.

The main character believes he understands how the world works, and we see him on a series of blind dates, trying to impress women with his knowledge. It’s clear though that something’s off. Then, for reasons too obscure for a 20-minute short film, the global market for securitized human souls collapses. And our protagonist finds his own soul is in that toxic stew of assets, thanks to a skimmed-over clause in the mortgage for his condo.

The movie is about the scale and speed of the world. The souls are bought and sold in the thousands and millions. And they’re bought in the first place because no one has the time or the ability to think about what they’re agreeing to, as opposed to some clear-cut moral failing.

The main character is a typical one in our professional ranks, one I sometimes catch in the mirror - the seller who’s unwittingly sold himself.

If that’s not enough, the movie has a funny mechanical cat and special effects that rely heavily on Chinese food.

A lien on my soul

The soul-selling story is always a story of binding oaths, legal documents, and rigorous adherence to contracts. It’s rooted in the law. And the law says you can only sell what you own.

The soul and the act of selling cut each other at just such a cross section as to reveal the peculiar assumptions behind each. One such assumption in the story is that we own our souls.

As a concept, ownership is something that gets less clear and less absolute the closer you look at it. One aspect of ownership is that you can do whatever you want with your own property. If you own a house or a car, you know all the ways this isn’t entirely true.

But that’s the idea. And the reason that idea of doing what you want with your property is embedded deep in the law, according to David Graeber in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is that our property laws came down for the Romans. And the Romans were keen on the do-what-you-want-with-your-property side of the law because a preponderance of what they owned were slaves.

There’s a cruelty to ownership - smacking the TVs and radios that misbehave, breaking a golf club, punching a wall, kicking a can. It comes around again in thinking that you could sell your own soul.

Presuming ownership of the part of ourselves we least understand may be the original and abiding offense. The story of someone selling their soul is fiction. But the cruelty - under a host of different conditions over the years - may be what keeps us coming back.

Ms. Never

The other time I took a run at the soul-selling idea was in a novel called Ms. Never.

The book, told from a third-person omniscient perspective, has one of the main characters keeping his small-fry telecom business above water by selling the souls he acquires through the never-read cell-phone terms of service.

What would anyone buy a soul for?