Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Where's the Magic?

I am a very cranky person. Too often, I rant about love. There is something amiss about this. So I figured that I need to try and make some sense of my general discontent, especially since it seems to render impotent whatever constructive things I want to say. When I think about it I guess I am suspicious of the superstitious nature of most forms of human belief. The magical sense we give to things we like a lot or that we cannot imagine ourselves to be able to live without. Now, I am a romantic and a believer in God, faith, mystical reality, and other things most confuse with magic. However, the difference between the magical and the mystical--the sacred mysterious--is mostly dispositional, as I see.

Magic renders itself so intelligible that it is not really magical in any mythical sense, it is real. So real that we can possess it as an object, as a thing. The mystical, on the other hand, never quite becomes intelligible to the point of comprehension, much less possession. Like questions of physical, biological, or chemical fundamentals, explanatory power is very, very limited. We run out of intelligibility and begin to guess and wonder and pray. The magic of things we want to be true so badly that we distort them to our own image is nothing really. Nothing other than lesser images of ourselves. And magic wrecks havoc on our language. We say all kinds of silly things like this or that could change the world or do this or that intuitively good thing.

The fact of the matter, it seems to me, is that there is no magic, there is no fancy trick that renders things intelligible to the point that we no longer need to wonder and pray. Mystery is not magical, it is simply the real that sits outside the horizon of human understanding and keeps us trying to reach that unreachable horizon, until we find our rest...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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