Uncontrolled magic
This is about control.
My first full sentence was an imperative: get down, kitty. My grandmother had a cat that would leap up on the television set and walk across it. I surely heard the other adults around me yelling at the cat whenever it did this; and so one day, little, tiny me looked up, saw the cat pounce on top of the television, and I said it.
Now I am thirty-six and I am thinking about language and how we use language to control ourselves and each other. Even now, as I recall this fact about myself, I can feel a pull to make a rather bold claim about my character; about how my language began in the imperative, a command meant to shape and control the world around me, and how this spoke into existence the foundations of my entire psychological makeup. I am the one who speaks, who commands, who wields his words as a weapon, hacking and sawing his environment to make it what he wills.
Another part of me feels as though this is unfair and that I am making a mountain out of a molehill. We all love stories where a single, simple, seemingly insignificant event sets in motion a whirling narrative. Life tends to be more complicated and less straightforward. Butterfly wings create hurricanes continents away, or so we are told. But what makes the butterfly flap its wings? Is it the caterpillar who causes the butterfly who causes the hurricane? Is it butterflies all the way down? For those displaced by the torrent, I doubt it matters.
And wrestling in me with these other two is a third, one who has a sly grin on his face and is shaking his head.
"Why are you trying so hard to be careful," he chastises. "You worry too much about being... correct."
He's right. Or... he's not? We're clearly not too sure, but this is something we've been leaning into more and more.
Control is something I've heard my father express difficulties with. There isn't anything specific that comes to mind, more of a general impression or memory I have of him talking about the things he has had to work on in life. I believe my brother might have expressed some of the same. It seems to be a male pattern, something engrained in us. Blame the patriarchy or evolution or both.
Letting go of control is the work I have been focusing on and it feels deeply in line with my deconstruction. I paused before I wrote that word. I almost said religious deconstruction, but my process has been more than decoupling myself from Christian doctrine.
One of the many theses of the novel I am slowly writing has to do with the power of naming. It asserts that those who hold the power of naming also hold power over that which they name. We have seen this happen to indigenous peoples across the globe, to people of color, women. It is happening now in our politics, as it has always been happening. Language plays a fundamental role in how societies engage with the world. I believe this wholeheartedly. My approach, however, has drastically shifted.
When I deconstructed my faith, I was standing on the pillars of rationalism. Language, for me then, was focused on hyper-specificity. It was one of creating a world built upon cold, hard facts. Or, as Tai Lopez said there in his garage, knowledge.
My deconstruction continued into this rational world, and I began to question what can we really know. Let me be upfront here and say that I am largely pro-science. My faith in the history of our universe falls upon the scientific process and all the women and men who contribute to it. I believe climate change is real and I think it is woefully ignorant to take a human-first perspective in this–as Denzel Curry put it–dirty, filthy, rotten, nasty little place we call our home.
Much of this rational deconstruction is more eloquently said and felt in Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive?. The kindness and intellectual respect with which Macfarlane tackles the subject of animism is breathtaking. I have never been moved to tears by an audiobook before listening to Macfarlane read his own words. No other writer has moved me as he has. No other writer has been more influential in the further developing of my own world view.
I am fanboy-ing pretty hard here, but I would like to add that Macfarlane is not alone. Yes, he writes his own books, but the beauty and depth within each of them is found in all the other people he brushes up against. There are many notable characters in Is a River Alive?, but two stood out to me: Juliana and Rita.
Two women that seem to have mystical powers. Juliana's "woo-hoos" after finding a mushroom that spoke to her, called and beckoned her to its hiding place were contagious. Rita's ability to read into the souls of Robert and his friend before they journeyed down the Magpie River in Canada sent a chill through my body. This belief, that magic is real and that women hold it, has been the latest work of my deconstruction, my unlearning.
When I say that magic is real, I do not mean casting spells. Well, actually, I do mean casting spells. I guess what I mean is that I do not mean magic in a Hollywood sense, something that is dazzling and perceptible. Though, I guess it can be those things too. What I am trying to say is that magic as it is mostly represented in our entertainment is one of control. I say the fireball spell and a fireball is cast, destruction ensues.
The magic I speak of, the magic of Juliana and Rita, is one of submission, not control. It's a deeply tuned intuition. After seeing Rita perform a ritual on a woman with sage and gentle touches to the temples, Robert asked her what had happened. Had she healed that woman? Rita told him that she did what she needed to do and that was all. She did not know.
She would likely say the same to him if he asked her about the predictions she made of their journey, predictions which all–in their own way–became true.
Do not worry reader, whoever you are. I can feel your skepticism. I feel it too. I am sharing these things as a means of illustrating a different way of being, not as a tool of debate. I believe Robert's experience and I do not have much interest in figuring out how these women did what they did. If you're a staunch atheist, you would probably lean further into rationalism and provide reasons for how Juliana could know exactly where a mushroom would be without seeing it. If you're religious, you might say that Rita's clairvoyance was a result of her unknowing being in touch with Jesus or Allah or maybe even Satan.
Get down, kitty. I return to this phrase–my first phrase–and I am put in touch with my meditation practice. It now feels like a mantra, something to say to the clattering mind that longs to know; no, that needs to know. The mind that feeds endlessly on knowledge and which feels safest in the den of certainty.
Deconstruction of any kind is painful and uncomfortable. We must tear down the den and move ourselves out into the wild. And despite the fact that human beings seem hellbent on destroying themselves, and the world with it, I find it less difficult to find hope than I used to. We made this civilized world what it is and we can unmake it; and I believe we will, but I believe I will not see it.
I am struck now by the final image of Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. The gods of the forest have been killed, Iron Town has been destroyed, and the detritus of all the violence from the film blows away with the wind across a scarred, desolate landscape. Then, time speeds up. We see the grass bloom again. Trees sprout. And the hill which we saw die is reborn.
Life will always continue, even if we do not.