At the beginning of this year I gave a talk for paying subscribers called The Magician, participation, and uncertain times. It was a way to say thank you to those who’ve supported the weeklies and a space to share what I was thinking about at the time on magic, responsiveness, and rupture.
One of the central ideas was that the magicians I’ve encountered in old stories from western Europe—like Merlin, Tuan Mac Cairill, and the wizard with the balsam vial—depict an understanding of the self as highly relational and responsive, “existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences.1” Each of these are magicians in the sense that eco-philosopher David Abram describes a magician, as a skilled negotiator in "dealings with Others.2”
I imagined the term “other” to be inclusive of any experience involving uncertainty; an arrival, rupture, accident, loss, mishap, or even traumatic experience that upends the familiar. And I didn’t know it at the time but in considering the experience of rupture, I was also considering grief.
I considered the ways western European magicians from old stories practice a different way of knowing than the way of Pamela Colman Smith’s magician. Smith’s magician shows a human with one hand to the sky and the other to earth, suggesting humans can attain spiritual knowledge by connecting with a higher power presumed to be dwelling elsewhere, like heaven.
In their stories, we see how Merlin, Tuan, and the wizard with the balsam vial make their way toward knowledge differently, by projecting their awareness laterally, sensing into relationship with the beings of Earth, human and non.
I thought about how these magicians’ practices of making knowledge through participation—rather than receiving it passively from an imposing force from on high—could offer an adaptive strategy in uncertain times.
And if these magicians could teach us anything, I imagined it might have something to do with the capacity to be responsive to the cacophony of new meanings in rupturous times. Rather than deny, turn away, or try to get back to “normal” as soon as possible.
When I gave that talk eleven months ago I didn’t fully appreciate the degree to which rupture involve loss, and thus grieving. I’ve considered grief a lot since then. In her recently published article on meaningfulness and grief, professor Jennifer Matey connects grief with professor L.A. Paul’s idea of transformative experiences (which I wrote about last year in an Offering called “Making tough choices when the stakes are your self.”)
A transformative experience, according to Paul, is “both radically new to the agent and changes her in a deep and fundamental way.3” Such experiences are transformative in part because when we have them we gain knowledge that’s significant enough to change us.
But for Matey there’s an important distinction between grief and other kinds of transformative experiences. Typical transformative experiences—like having a kid or moving to a new country—are productive in that they involve “the creation of new values, new goals, and new preferences.4” In such cases, things that didn’t matter before might start to matter a lot, or matter differently.
Grief on the other hand has a destructive effect on values, goals and preferences. It yields a sense of meaninglessness around what was at one time precious or important. Loss of meaning can be a terrifying experience, but it’s one I think can eventually be generative if we can learn to bear it, which is a big if.
For instance, bearing witness to the ongoing U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza could undermine values around power, consumption, and individual freedom as well as beliefs that we’re living in a democracy. While the onslaught of horrific images and stories coming out of Gaza has rendered many of my typical considerations bereft of meaning, that meaninglessness is a space in which taken-for-granted habits and stories can be exposed, deconstructed, and radically reconfigured.
I’m remembering the words of philosopher Thom van Dooren as quoted by theologian Catherine Keller in her book Facing Apocalypse: “Mourning is about dwelling with a loss and so coming to appreciate what it means, how the world has changed, and how we must ourselves change and renew our relationships if we are to move forward from here.5” A near-perfect testimony on the transformative experience of grief.