Friday 25 July 2008

Magic


I propose to write a short piece about magic and the nature of magic both in our world and in worlds beyond our own of which we sometimes catch a glimpse in the work of various authors who have written accounts of their visits to those wonderful countries. Before venturing any further I need to define what magic is and how I plan to make use of the term. If you were to refer to Peter Kreeft he might tell you that magic and technology are similar in their vision of progress. Technology means instant everything and magic (in a Faustian context) meant turning lead into gold in an effort to satiate man’s greed. This, though, is not the sort magic that I wish to speak of. The one thing that one has to understand about magic from the onset is that like gravity you can use it to work for you or against you. Like all good things evil can pervert it and use it in a mocking fashion but that is about all. J.R.R Tolkien noted this fact; when magic is wielded for the benefit of others it can be used to, in the term that Tolkien uses, sub-create. In a letter Tolkien refers to in On Fairy Stories he wrote:

“Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
And sowed the seed of dragons – ‘twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we’re made.”

Man is like Hagrid, the half-giant in the Harry Potter books, who had his wand broken but continues to wield it in secret when no one is looking. Man wields the magic to sub-create art that is so beautiful that it tugs at the heart strings of his peers. This sort of magic is simply as Peter Kreeft puts it, "the magic worked by our souls". Our ability to sub-create stems from a certain magic "that is worked upon our souls" though. Every single beautiful thing that man creates is inspired by a power he does not understand though that power knows him through and through. I think of artists as wizards who specialize in different fields, like the wizards in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. Some artists are prophets, some are healers and others are war wizards. I watched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children yesterday and in it I found magic that did marvelous work on my soul. All the epic stories whether they are Eastern, Western or African tell the same story: they all tell of the war between good and evil. That is the drama of our lives. With the little pixie dust that is given to us we sub-create great art to remind us of the ongoing war between good and evil. The best magic, I think, is the sort of magic that goes unnoticed. In one of the Sword of Truth books Zedd (if my memory serves me well) explains the role of wizards in a war to Richard. Wizards on both sides of the conflict always seem as if they have no effect because their magic reaches an equilibrium, the one side works magic to counter the other's magic and then tries to slip a spell past their defences until an equilibrium is reached and the men at arms can fight it out. But if the one side fails to maintain the balance one witnesses the destruction that magic can cause in a battle. Real magic is something like this, it works for people without them ever noticing its presence but if if it were to stop working the repercussions would be felt immediately. In The Matrix, the Oracle notes that we never notice the programmes that do their job, but you always hear of those that are not doing what they are supposed to.

There is also the magic that can be found in nature; the magic of trees, lightning, the ocean, the roar of a lion. This magic is so awe-inspiring that pagan societies fell down on their knees before the majesty of nature. With the invention of telescopes and spacecraft nature has become even more majestic. Even when you try to reduce the universe down to science it never ceases to astound. Sir Isaac Newton said:

"I do not know what I may appear
to the world; but to myself I
seem to have been only like a
boy playing on the sea-shore,
and diverting myself in now and
then finding a smoother pebble or
a prettier shell than ordinary,
whilst the great ocean of truth
lay all undiscovered before me."

The universe, multiverse or whatever you wish to call it is lined with mysterious magic that we sometimes capture in the beauty of art and thus I believe that artists are prophets of something so huge and beautiful that it would blind us to look at.

Thursday 24 July 2008

The Numinous


There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
– Hamlet

The one book that is constantly on my mind at the moment is C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces and Peter Kreeft’s talk thereon has me thinking about the central question that the book asks. This astounds me because when it comes to Christianity I am a simpleton – I simply believe. I am one of those people who do not need a concrete reason to believe (by which I mean I cannot present a convincing argument for my faith to a board of very rational people), I simply believe because in some indescribable way Christianity makes sense to me. Religion is difficult for anyone to practice but throughout human history it has been constant. The ancient civilizations looked upon the sun and the sea and felt the need to bow down to these forces because they were greatly moved by the majesty of nature. Everything in the universe shouts the existence of God so loudly that people who have never heard of Him feel the need to bow down to the things that symbolize Him. All religions stem from humans realising that there is some higher power that governs the affairs of man. All religions are like pictures of God by different artists and naturally some of the pictures are clearer than others. The central question that Till We Have Faces asks is this: “Why must holy places be dark places?" Why must religion be so mysterious? If I was a detective I would either be uncannily good at it or the worst detective in existence because I would primarily rely on my “sixth sense” to crack mysteries. The mystery of God is the same for me, I simply believe because in a strange way it makes sense to me. For other people, though, this is frustrating and they demand clear answers. The only thing I know is that, like C.S. Lewis says, Christianity is hard in many ways and very easy in many ways. Christianity is not an escape from earthly suffering it is simply the truth. Like Morpheus, Jesus only offers you the truth. In fact He, Himself, is the way, the truth and the life (John 14: 6). Zion is under siege and inside the city walls there is pain, bloodshed and sorrow. Christianity is like J.R.R. Tolkien notes of good fairy-stories in his essay, On Fairy Stories; it is a eucatastrophe – “the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’”. Our lives are ones of suffering but in Christ the shadow will pass to reveal infinite beauty and we will not know whether to laugh or to weep. We will be like Samwise Gamgee in the heaps of Mordor when he sees the white star twinkle for a moment and its beauty smites his heart and he realises that the shadow is a thing that must pass and that there is light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

In a previous post titled, Life’s Wonderful, I said that all the really good stories that have ever made you so happy that you both wept and cried are more or less true and in his essay Tolkien agrees; there is no other story that is so wonderful that everyone would have it be true than Christianity and then Joy of all joys! It turns out to be really true.

People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. – George MacDonald

Tuesday 22 July 2008

Knowing People


About two weeks ago my friend, Raycene, asked me if it is possible to really know people. I replied that one can learn to know people but only to a certain extent. The thing with people is that they are not very stable - they are like radioactive atoms just waiting to go berserk. I'm reading A Passage To India for my English Literature class and the same question popped up, this time in a different guise. Can human beings really know the world around them? The linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, tells us that language is arbitrary and that the words we use to describe things are just random letters assigned to objects we wish to describe for the sake of convenience. A cat does not look like the letters C-A-T but when one sees the word cat the animal that it represents comes to mind. In this sense language is like an allegory for reality; words stand for real objects in the world. The primary tool that people have for interacting with the world and each other is language but the snag lies in the fact that we do not know anything other than language to describe ourselves and our world. Imagine standing in a cave and having an experience that shakes you to your foundations and trying to tell it to someone else. Words fail to truly capture what you felt, they simply fall short. We have nothing outside of language to work with or to critique language with. Humans and language, I think, cannot be independent of each other. Language can be regulated by people but it is also self-regulating. I can get, in my mind, a glimpse of someone else through language and I can give other people a glimpse of me by language. God gives us a glimpse of Himself in language, a way to get closer to Him. I thus figure that it is not possible to truly know every aspect of someone else or the universe in our current state. Every single person I know hardly know themselves. There comes a point where language is not enough, a point that requires a being to transcend. This whole business is like the arguments Job and Orual (in C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces) present before God and then they realise that language fails when one sees God face-to-face. Orual says: "I ended my first book with the words no answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words." I think that we cannot truly know ourselves, other people or the world in which we find ourselves in Till We Have Faces, we have to transcend above something that is not language. I personally believe that that something is God.

Monday 21 July 2008

The Daily Grind


I'm inherently more of an observer of life than one who participates (I'm attracted to the sidelines more often than not), I enjoy stories and the most mind-boggling stories, for me personally, are those of people going about their daily business. I commute to university, thus I have a lot of time to sit and observe people on their daily grind and it fascinates me how immersed people are in their routines. On some strange level it's like watching ants. The lady with the umbrella - just in case it rains - will always be standing at the corner at 07:45 waiting for the car that picks her up and the man in blue overalls, whom I assume is a plumber, is always at the door of a corner shop at 07:50 eating a sandwich. It's like clockwork the way this all happens. Maybe this is because I'm crazy, but I imagine that underneath all of this preciseness there is some sort of anarchy waiting to be unleashed. In my head I see people throwing stones at buses, burning cars and strangling cats... they're all just waiting for an excuse to escape from mediocrity of the daily grind. That's how all the crazy things happen in the world, one cog becomes loose and all of a sudden there's a revolt against something you did not even knew existed... but it's always been there, looming. Thus I sit on the bus surrounded by the chatter of people on their way to work and a little part of me is afraid that this serene picture could easily explode into a huge ball of violence.

Friday 18 July 2008

One Door Away From Heaven


One door away from Heaven,
We live each day and hour.
One door away from Heaven,
But it lies beyond our power
To open the door to Heaven,
And the key is ours to lose.
One door away from Heaven,
But, oh, the entry dues.


- The Book of Counted Sorrows

The idea that life is the most precious thing that we possess, like Jesus Christ’s or Barty Lampion’s birth, was not announced to me by celestial trumpets or a gigantic green bird sitting on a high hill and whistling in an unheard of manner. I learned of my mortality the first time I fell and scraped my knee and I almost fainted at the sight of my own blood. My life, as it now stands (sometimes it just decides to sit down), is the result of the culmination of things that are intertwined like a spider's web. As I walked to the library yesterday to pick up a few books for my good friend, Raycene, two people kept knocking on the door of my mind, Dean Koontz and Peter Kreeft. They came over to tell me to stop straying from the main path because I have in my pocket a Golden Key and that I must continue my search for the door that this key opens. Ours is a journey similar to that of Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee to the black land of Mordor. For us, though, Mordor is not the destination but a place through which we must pass and we do not seek to destroy our key, we seek the door that it opens. There are so many things that we use to keep ourselves ‘busy’ that we forget to search for the door. Let’s just take a few minutes from our busy schedule to get our bearings so that we may continue the journey.

My son, attend to my words; consent and submit to my sayings. Let them not depart from your sight; keep them in the center of your heart. For they are life to those who find them, healing and health to all their flesh. Keep and guard your heart with all vigilance and above all that you guard, for out of it flows the springs of life. – Proverbs 4: 20 -23