Offering: June 2025

The mourning magician / "Now I see them—now I do not!"

“There’s something strangely sacred about discontent. The itch that pines for a soothing balm. The broken heart that mourns a lost love…In discontent, we meet the intriguing premise that home could be different than it is at the moment, and that reality is not as resolute or as stable as it appears…”

—Bayo Akomolafe, “Coming down to Earth”

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

This week I started reading the twelfth century poem Vita Merlini, or The Life of Merlin by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Merlin is interesting to me for a bunch of reasons, one of which is that he’s considered a tragic figure who can foresee trouble but is ultimately powerless to change it.

Part of his intrigue for me is that, despite knowing that what he loves is destined to fail, Merlin remains committed regardless. And as I’ve been leaning into the deep-lateral listening of field recording, I’ve also been curious about the mythological magician’s relationship with more-than-human worlds, and his withdrawal from humans to live in the woods. What I’m learning through Vita Merlini is that Merlin’s repeated retreats to the forest were a part of his grieving.

Before he went to the woods, Merlin was a king and a prophet. He gave laws, and told the future. He was deeply invested in society and its projects. When a war arose that killed many innocent civilians including several close friends, Merlin wailed and lamented. It was not just the possibilities of certain friendships he’d lost, but also faith in a world that he once took for granted.

In his 1915 essay, “Mourning and melancholia,” psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote that mourning occurs not only in response to bereavements but also losses of abstractions, including ideas about the future and world views. At that time, Freud was grappling with what he described as “shattered” pride in the early days of World War I, which had “robbed the world of its beauties.” The war fragmented not only Freud’s pride, but also his faith in what came to feel like an illusion of progress.

Merlin was a powerful person and respected by many, but his relentless mourning did nothing to stop the “miserable slaughter.” He “did not cease to pour out laments, refusing all efforts to comfort him or alleviate his great sorrow. This tracks with what Freud described as an “exclusive devotion to mourning” that occurs for a mourner, who similarly loses both interest in the outside world and capacity to attach to a new object after a significant one has been lost.

According to Freud, what happens in mourning is that the libido has been removed from its attachment to a lost object. As mentioned, the object could be a person but could also be an abstraction—like an ideal, belief, or anticipated outcome—and in any case, the detachment “arouses understandable opposition.”

This opposition can be incredibly intense; Freud argues that “people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them.” He also argues that the demand for the libido to withdraw from its attachments entails a set of orders that “cannot be obeyed at once.” Which is another way of saying that mourning is a thing that takes time.

Merlin, like so many grievers, was not given time to adjust to his losses. Against the urges of his remaining loved ones, he wept and stopped eating for days. Once those first days passed, he was overtaken with fury. With his anger, he fled to the forest. There, though he was certainly still in acute grief, he rejoiced in his separation from humans. He spent the summer “hidden like a wild animal…buried in the woods, found by no one and forgetful of himself and of his kindred.”

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Withdrawal can be a way of taking care of oneself and perhaps, in turn, of the world. Cultural theorists Pepita Hesselberth and Joost de Bloois describe philosopher Michel Foucault’s idea that withdrawing from a political situation may be “the prerequisite for action of a different type: an ethos based on a deeper understanding of the true nature of the world through a deeper understanding of the true nature of ourselves.¹”

Winter came on Merlin eventually, and with the shift of the seasons he found himself in that familiar landscape of unbearable sorrow again. He wondered where in the world he might possibly stay that could ever truly sustain him. He thought he had been there and then, as if overnight, all the grass and the acorns and the apples were gone. As he sorrowfully wonders about the absence of apples, Merlin struggles again with love and loss:

“Who has taken them away from me? Whither have they gone all of a sudden? Now I see them—now I do not! Thus the fates fight against me and for me, since they both permit and forbid me to see. Now I lack the apples and everything else.” Even his wild surroundings no longer offer a respite from loss. His wolf friend is so weak from hunger he can barely cross over a field, and howling is all he can do.

Back in town, Merlin’s gifts are sorely missed. People come looking for him, but even as desperate and hungry as he is he still flees whenever he sees them, “moved by the lot of the fugitive.” As philosopher Bayo Akomolafe writes, “the fugitive rejects the promise of repair and refuses the hope of the established order…lives in open spaces, with rogue planets and stars astride a curious sky, in the tense betweenness of things.”

“God, surprisingly in love with the fugitive, often meets the fugitive in that space between stories to break him open, to show him a burning bush, to rename him, to gobble him up with mouth as wide as a whale’s, and then perhaps to spit him out again.”

What is of interest to me is the way loss operates in this story, driving Merlin to the forest where it continues to stalk him. There, he endures more breaking open and rearranging. And though I’d heard years ago that Merlin lived in a star-gazing house in the woods at one point, I did not know it was bereavement and loss of faith in society that led him to flee to the woods more than once.

Eventually, to a remote observatory with seventy doors and seventy windows, so that he could “watch fire-breathing Pheobus and Venus and the stars gliding by the heavens by night,” quietly exposing the future. From the star place, Merlin continued to prophecy terrible fates.

Back home, grief claimed all those who endured his predictions. Mourning the death of her husband, Merlin’s sister cried, “That which excels is of brief duration, what it has does not endure; like running water everything that is of service passes away.” And then she, too, decided to flee to the woods in perpetual mourning, “clothed in a black mantle.”

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To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

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1. This is from the introduction to Hesselberth and de Bloois’ edited volume, The Politics of Withdrawal.