What kinds of inanimate objects have souls?

[xiphias]

For whatever definition of "soul" you use. solipsistnation just posted about how he's going to miss his old all-but-junker of a car. Which makes sense to me. Cars are one of the types of nonliving objects that have, or can develop, souls.

Other things in this category include weapons of all sorts, pool cues, musical instruments, stuffed animals, and virtually anything that someone uses ritually. Anything which you'd give a name to.

Anything else? What other sorts of things have souls?

Comments

[gingicat]

Stuffed animals and some dolls.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

Computers - laptops, doubly so. They're quirky, they demand naming, and they work better if you talk to them. Definite soul material.

[gilana]

An old 35mm camera of mine definitely had a personality, if not a soul, but my newer ones don't.

[bercilakslady.livejournal.com]

One of my Mom's mixing bowls. It's passed down from her grandmother. Other bowls don't work as well for mixing up challah, so maybe that counts as having "soul".

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Houses. Definitely.

[bluepapercup]

Wool winter coats.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Motorcycles. Especially anything American, British, or Italian. BMWs need to wait 10 years before developing souls. Japanese bikes need to wait 25; they take a while to reveal theirs.

Indian bikes (Royal Enfield) have souls that get recycled.

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

Computers, some clothes, cookware.

[rosefox]

I'm surprised no one else has mentioned jewelry.

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

I probably didn't because I don't care much about jewelry; I only wear my wedding ring, the same three (three different, that is, but never other) earrings all the time, and a pewter cross on a chain. The wedding ring is about B, the cross is about God, the earrings are about me; the soul isn't in the objects.

Oh, and my glasses, which I picked out for effect, don't seem to have a soul either; they're just windows on the world.

[jehanna.livejournal.com]

Computers, and some computer apps like WinAmp.

[copperpoint.livejournal.com]

Shoes. And not just in the punny way.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Some pens do. Pencils don't. This really surprised me when I was about 9 and started writing with a pen.

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

Most baseball players would probably say their bats have souls, and possibly their gloves, too.

In my experience, the things I mentally assign "souls" to are usually things that are behaving in a way that I dislike. For instance, I don't talk to the computers I use unless they're being incredibly slow, crashing unexpectedly, or otherwise causing me a great deal of frustration. Maybe it's just me, but I prefer my inanimate objects to have as little personality as possible, because, when they display a personality, it usually means they're not performing the tasks for which they're intended as they should.

[brooksmoses]

It sort of depends on the computer. The one of mine that sort of has a "soul" does so by ... well, it's a 200MHz Pentium Pro, and started out with 32MB of RAM, back in '97. I bought it as a former demonstrator model from the campus bookstore in the summer of '98, and have had been running it 24/7 pretty much continually since then.

As of a couple of months ago when I finally decided to retire it, it was running Windows 2000, tended to "feel" as fast as any modern computer (you know how XP gets on 128MB of RAM? Nothing like that at all!), and averaged uptimes of around two months -- making reading all the "Windows is unstable!" Usenet flamewars on it rather a bit ironic, really.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

Perennials--I'm thinking of my roses in particular.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

The important thing is the use of the object as a focus.

If you focus your concentration or will or love through an object, that object can pick up part of your will or concentration and love and begin to embody it. I suppose you could say that of any strong emotion, really. Focus all your love on a stuffed bunny, and it becomes a little bit alive. Focus your will to move and be places other than you are through a car, and it becomes the embodiment of that freedom. That was what this car was to me-- the first car I'd owned, the first time I'd been able to go anywhere I wanted whenever I felt like it. "Hey, I'm going to Boston. RIGHT NOW." And I could go! No bus, no begging rides, just me and my desire to be somewhere.

My Telecaster is right up there, too. It's my guitar. I picked it out, modified it, tweaked it and tuned it and learned how to play real songs on it. I think of all the stuff I could have stolen out of my apartment, that's one of the two or three I'd miss the most. I was asked once, "If you had to leave right now and could only take what you can carry, what would you take?" I immediately answered "My laptop and my guitar." I'm not even that good, but it's _my_ guitar.

Computers are a tough one. They can embody frustration, communication, the desire to create, the desire to escape, all sorts of things. Toth the SGI lurks in the server room, terrible and random. Sometimes it crashes. Why? No idea! It exists to frustrate me. On the other hand, I have my trusty old Mac Plus, which survived longer than it had any right to, stashed in the closet. I'm not sure if it works, but I bet I could make it work, hook it up, and fire up Word 4 for System 6 and start writing again.

[brooksmoses]

Yeah, that. Exactly. (And I think that's somewhat of why I don't quite agree with the use of the word "soul" for this; it's something a little different than that, and it's the wrong word.)

I suspect this explains why my car has been losing its, lately. I haven't been using it much, and ... stuff. Sigh. It's definitely a loss, even though I still have the car.

My quip on computers was going to be to answer the "What else has souls?" question with "Computers. Usually they have nasty little evil ones." Except mine very rarely have the nasty evil sort, really.

[anhelometuo.livejournal.com]

Anything that costs a substantial amount of money, more so if it tends to have 'quirks' about it.

[elgoose.livejournal.com]

A good chef's knife. A cast-iron skillet, potentially. Other types of kitchen equipment, depending on its history. Also some cookbooks or collections of recipe cards.

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

Some rocks, though it's difficult to say which ones other than by example.

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

As cattitude said, Pet Rocks definitely qualify (I've been collecting them for 30 years now). That said, I think pretty much EVERYTHING has soul. It's only obstinate us, that take so long to realize this...

I must say, I love this question!

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Houses.

Every building I've lived in since I left home has had a soul and a name. Some names have stuck, some haven't; the one for this house (Valhalla) is somewhere in between.

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

An exception to what I said earlier occurred to me:

When I was very little, my parents, my brother, and I lived in Austria for a while. One day, in an antique store, my mother came across a small, black, metal child's menorah. Upon being asked, the store owner said he'd had it for about thirty years. This was in 1974 or 1975, so you can do the math as well as my mom did, and probably come to the same conclusion.

My mother decided instantly to buy the menorah, because it was necessary that it should be used, given what had most likely happened to its original owner.

From then on, that's been the only menorah my mother has lit for Chanukah.