Exist.

Ari Weinzweig on being aware of the invisible ...

Last week, I was fortunate enough to see a photocopy of a letter a local 10-year-old boy wrote to his cousin. This was not just an ordinary message from one young cousin to another who’s a year or two older and struggling, as so many are in the world today. This wonderful kid told his cousin how much she matters and how much he loves her in such a lovely way. I had tears in my eyes the whole time I was reading his letter. When 10-year-olds can write letters like that, then I know for sure that, regardless of what you might find in the financial pages of the Wall Street Journal, magic really does exist in the world. The problem is that most people miss it.

Magician.

You see, in The Syndics, Rembrandt is true to life, although even there he still goes into the higher — into the very highest — infinite. But yet — Rembrandt could do something else — when he didn’t have to be true in the literal sense, as he did in a portrait — when he could — make poetry — be a poet, that’s to say Creator. That’s what he is in The Jewish Bride. Oh, how Delacroix would have understood that very painting! What a noble sentiment, fathomlessly deep. One must have died many times to paint like this — is certainly applicable here. Still — one can speak about the paintings by Frans Hals, he always remains — on Earth. Rembrandt goes so deep into the mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.  It is with justice that they call Rembrandt — magician — that’s no easy occupation.

Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother, Theo, 10 October 1885

Heard.

We are all wound up in lies and illusions and as soon as we begin to think and talk, the machinery of falsity operates automatically.  No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and peace that is “heard” when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests. But what can the wind say when there is no hearer? There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer. That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.

Thomas Merton, from Thoughts in Solitude

Synthesis.

There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention.  Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water's surface.  Pay attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world.  An acorn.  The geometry of a beehive.  The complexity of whale song.  The perfect slowness of a heron.

Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize.  Of course it does.  The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shadows to entrance the bluegills.  Not unless you do your part.  You must choose to meet her halfway.  And when you do, you may find that magic isn't a dismissal of what's real.  It's a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.

Jarod K. Anderson

Thank you, Steve.  That's good.  The sixth-graders'll get a taste of this tomorrow.

Convoluted.

Mr. Honeyfoot and Mr. Segundus meet Mr. Norrell in his library in a scene from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell ...

Watch your step, gentlemen.  The way is ... convoluted ...

Magic.

Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, from The Secret Garden

Liquidated.

Wyeth (Jamie), The Raven, 1980

Some witches are said to kill people with graveyard dirt, which is dust scraped from a grave with the left forefinger at midnight. This is mixed with the blood of a black bird; a raven or crow is best, but a black chicken will do in a pinch. The witch ties this mixture up in a rag which has touched a corpse and buries it under the doorstep of the person who is to be liquidated.

Vance Randolph, from Ozark Magic and Folklore

Important.

The music comes first.

There is an importance of serendipity, the faculty of making happy, chance discoveries.  

I was lucky enough to find poetry lying around and I picked it up and explored it for myself, while the rest of my family were and remain indifferent about it.  It's profoundly important for teachers and parents to leave things lying around, without pestering the child for a response.  Fill the background with wonderful things ... music, paintings, stories, books about science ... and then get out of the way and say nothing.

We can do that at home, but we can't do that in school these days. Every encounter has to be planned in advance and have a measurable outcome, and fit into a prescribed scheme of work.  It's almost a tragedy.

Philip Pullman

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Be.

I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don't want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.

Charles de Lint

Thanks, Quinn! Read on!

Magic.

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Baptizes

The life of an apple when it is a delicate flower to the moment when, golden russet, it drops from the tree to the grass, is as mysterious and as great as the perpetual rhythm of the tides. And a poet must know this. The magic virtue of a poem consists in always being daemon-ridden so that it baptizes with dark water those who look at it.

The daemon? Where is the daemon?

Federico Garcia Lorca

Combination.

Attentiveness.

My definition of magic in the human personality, in fiction and in poetry, is the ultimate level of attentiveness. Nearly everyone goes through life with the same potential perceptions and baggage, whether it’s marriage, children, education, or unhappy childhoods, whatever; and when I say attentiveness I don’t mean just to reality, but to what’s exponentially possible in reality.   Go into the jungle and take a look around. This old Chippewa I know—he’s about seventy-five years old—said to me, “Did you know that there are people who don’t know that every tree is different from every other tree?” This amazed him. Or don’t know that a nation has a soul as well as a history, or that the ground has ghosts that stay in one area. All this is true, but why are people incapable of ascribing to the natural world the kind of mystery that they think they are somehow deserving of but have never reached? This attentiveness is your main tool in life, and in fiction, or else you’re going to be boring.

Jim Harrison 

Beyond.

All my life I've wanted to be the kid who gets to cross over into the magical kingdom. I devoured those books by C.S. Lewis and William Dunthorn, Ellen Wentworth, Susan Cooper, and Alan Garner. When I could get them from the library, I read them out of order as I found them, and then in order, and then reread them all again, many times over. Because even when I was a child I knew it wasn't simply escape that lay on the far side of the borders of fairyland. Instinctively I knew crossing over would mean more than fleeing the constant terror and shame that was mine at that time of my life. There was a knowledge – an understanding hidden in the marrow of my bones that only I can access ― telling me that by crossing over, I'd be coming home.

That's the reason I’ve yearned so desperately to experience the wonder, the mystery, the beauty of that world beyond the World As It Is. It's because I know that somewhere across the border there's a place for me. A place of safety and strength and learning, where I can become who I'm supposed to be. I've tried forever to be that person here, but whatever I manage to accomplish in the World As It Is only seems to be an echo of what I could be in that other place that lies hidden somewhere beyond the borders.

Charles de Lint

Recipe.

Isaac Newton didn’t believe in magic, but he did believe in the philosopher’s stone, a legendary concoction that could turn lead to gold.

In Newton’s time, chemistry had not been developed, and alchemy was a perfectly respectable pursuit for a scientist. Newton was a devotee and studied the combination of strange substances as avidly as he did physics.

Recently, the Chemical Heritage Foundation acquired a document that showed just how deep he got into alchemy. The document includes Newton’s handwritten copy of a recipe for sophick mercury, the key ingredient to the philosopher’s stone.

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Choose.

Not only do we all have magic, it's all around us as well. We just don't pay attention to it. Every time we make something out of nothing, that's an act of magic. It doesn't matter if it's a painting or a garden, or an abuelo telling his grandchildren some tall tale. Every time we fix something that's broken, whether it's a car engine or a broken heart, that's an act of magic.

And what makes it magic is that we choose to create or help, just as we can choose to harm. But it's so easy to destroy and so much harder to make things better. That's why doing the right thing makes you stronger.

If we can only remember what we are and what we can do, nobody can bind us or control us.

Charles de Lint

Fascinating.

"Fascinating!" he would say, as Harry talked him through using a telephone. "Ingenious, really how many ways Muggles have found of getting along without magic."

J.K. Rowling, from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets