Believing in Magic

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art, science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science, art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.

-Raymond Chandler, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler

I wrote a while back that, in the modern world, art is the last refuge of magic. And when I wrote it, I wasn’t trying to make a point. It was one of those things that sneak up on you: you’ll be talking or writing to someone, and you’ll say something, and immediately after saying it, you’ll realize how true it really is. They’re called epiphanies. They don’t happen often, but more often than you’d think. But that was my epiphany at that particular moment, art and magic. Art as magic. Or the other way around, maybe.

Magic is something that I’ve always harbored a sort of not-quite-secret passion for. It intrigues me-- not in practice, but as an idea. Magic is change. Not like science. Science-- which I also love-- is about understanding, the accumulation of knowledge. Magic is more about what we can’t know, what we can never understand (though like all opposing forces or ideas, they have more in common than either side would ever admit). Here’s the world, going about its business, and then you step in and you do something-- you don’t know what, exactly-- and now it’s different. That’s magic. You don’t know how it works, but it does, and that’s what’s important.

Art is like that. Hell, that’s all art is. You’ve got a canvas in front of you, there’s a paintbrush in your hand and an idea in your head, and you go at it. Most of the time, nothing happens, nothing worth mentioning anyway. But every now and then, you step back afterwards, and you’ve made a piece of art. And you don’t know, if someone asks you later on, how you did it. You can’t explain it; it wouldn’t make sense if you saw footage. It’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s magic.

I’ve got a Rothko print on my wall. It’s nice, but nothing special. Just pretty shapes and colors. You see a Rothko in person, it’s not like that. You see a Rothko in person, it’s like someone came and slapped you in the face, that’s what it’s like. It’s like remembering something you never knew. It’s beautiful. It’s like touching the divine.

Of course, it’s still just pretty shapes and colors. Paint on canvas. But it’s more than that. Somehow, there in the thing itself, is something greater than the materials it’s made of or the process behind it. Who’s to say that that’s not a magic every bit as powerful as Merlin himself might have done?

Art is magic, artist magicians. The terms have changed, but the act is the same.

Before I started writing, I looked up “magic” in the dictionary, just to see what it said. About what you’d expect. But then, on a whim, I looked up “magick”. That’s how Crowley spelled it. Aleister Crowley-- bit of a self-important tool, but one of the great underappreciated minds of the 20th Century. He was, among other things, a magician. Or as he might have put it, a practitioner of the art. (That’s what they call it, you know. The art.) He added the k to the end of the word. And like you might imagine, when you change the spelling a little, you change the definition a little, too. So when I looked farther down the page at magick, what I found was this:

“An action or effort undertaken because of a personal need to effect change”.

Needless to say, I was a little bit excited. That’s what art is, too. Art is an action undertaken because of a need, a personal, deep-seated need, to effect change. That desire is in all of us, somewhere. Crowley knew it, knew it maybe better than anyone. We want to make the world like we think it should be. How? We don’t know. Magick.

Now once upon a time, magic was all we had. Our ancestors understood even less about the world than we do, impossible as that seems sometimes. They believed in magic and superstition because they had no reason not to. Then came the Ionic civilizations. The Renaissance. The Enlightenment. It took 3,000 years to catch on for real, but eventually we picked up a new tool: reason. Next thing you know, we’ve got philosophy, math, logic. Science. And eventually, magic went away. Magic and reason don’t mix well; the supernatural breaks down in the presence of the rational. People may not be all that bright, and they’re nothing if not resistant to change, but they can’t stay ignorant forever. Science is real, the supernatural is not, and that’s all there is to it. On a long enough timeline, the crowd’ll always vote for the one that works.

But just because we’ve chosen to live our lives by science, doesn’t mean that we can give up the supernatural altogether. It doesn’t work like that. Our brains aren’t wired for it. We can’t just ignore a part of ourselves. We need that which reason can never understand, that which is beyond reason, or thought. We need magic. There has to be a balance.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change states. Ideas work much the same way. The Greeks and Romans? The Renaissance and Enlightenment? The 20th Century? Those were the big leaps forward. Science did pretty well there. And at the same time, so did art. Every major step forward in science and rational thought has brought forth a similar growth in art world. It’s not a result of reason, it’s a response to it. It’s the balance. We need both.

As the world grew up, magic grew up with it. Magic is change. The art became just art. What’s great, though, is that we still remember what magic used to be, and that can help us appreciate what it has become.

This is incredibly valuable, especially now. At the tail end of the 20th Century, the period of greatest scientific advancement in the history of our species, we began to see a backlash, a large-scale resentment and rejection of science and rational thinking. This is understandable, and acceptable (within reason). The sense is that science presents a threat to spirituality. And if your idea of spirituality is religion, it does. In an advanced, evolved society, religion has no place. But spirituality is always important. We may not always be ignorant, but we’ll always have certain needs.

Spirituality cannot stay constant. Everything evolves, everything changes. What we need is an idea of the divine that cannot be touched by science, that transcends it and yet is still connected to it. It’s the balance. Every coin has two sides, just ask anyone. Process, study, alchemy-- magic birthed science. Magic became art. The two are inextricably linked. They’re a yin and a yang, revolving around each other, part of each other, forever. That’s an important idea.

Science, logic, rationality-- they offer us truth. Art, spirituality, irrationality-- magic-- offer us truth as well. We cannot lead whole lives unless we have both components operating in equilibrium. Most people, in the developed world at least, have a regular element (though not necessarily appreciation) of science in their lives. What’s missing is art. The art. We have to make art-- real, honest art-- a bigger part of our lives. We need a greater appreciation for it. Finding that, I think, will be one of the big challenges of our new century. Without it... well, we probably don’t need to fear becoming too rational. But we might need to worry about becoming inhuman.