Magical thinking

"Has the world ever been changed by anything
save by thought and its magic vehicle the Word?"
~ Thomas Mann

 

 

 

 

The Fool is numbered 0; he is nothing, a blank slate, a tabula rasa, ignorant even of his own ignorance. The Magician, second of the Major Arcana, and numbered 1, is the Fool within the Abyss, knowing himself and his ignorance and the transformative power of that ignorance. The Magician is the Fool enabled, energized, created; he is the Trickster God made manifest.

 

Where the Fool represents the seeker after wisdom, the Magician represents the awareness of things unseen. He is not the apotheosis of wisdom - that comes later - but he is on the path, because he is no longer seeking. What we are seeking, we cannot have found, or else we would not be seeking it. The Magician understands that it is more efficient to stop looking and instead focus on seeing. In Rider-Waite, the Magician is crowned with infinity, and girdled with Ourobouros: all things begin and end in this moment of awareness, this consciousness, this satori. The staff of the Fool has transformed into the wand of the Magician; the wand is raised to the heavens, while his other hand points to the earth.

 

The Magician is the bridge between the subjectively real and the transcendentally surreal; he is the Gateless Gate. He is the potential in Man, the aptitude, the capacity. Self-aware, self-possessed, self-sufficient, he is the catalyst: unchanging himself, he changes all. This is the mystery beyond reason. This is the maker and unmaker of mountains and rivers. This is the beguiler of the senses, the deceiver of the mind, the keyholder to the doors of perception. Should we trust him? That doubt is the manifestation of the Unknown; fear of the Abyss keeps us from him, but acceptance of the Abyss - Foolishness - encourages us to take the leap of faith. We take nothing in there with us; we are only ourselves, but fortunately ourselves are more than our selves, since we are parasimplices. The Magician knows this, knows us, intimately; the Magician is us, any of us, when we accept all of what we are - fearlessly, foolishly, fully.

 

The Magician represents, above all, the mystical process by which the unknowable objective is transcended to become subjectively real. This most crucial mystery is the beginning of all magic: it is the creatio ex nihilo, the divine spark without which the world remains meaningless and void.

Mountains and Rivers

"Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.
During enlightenment, mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers.
After enlightenment, mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers."

~ Zen Koan

 

I have a fondness for Zen koans. Cynics will suggest that this is the foolishness of the man who mistakes his own failure to find meaning for the presence of profundity; or perhaps that it is the foolishness of the man who professes profundity in the exhibition of his own emptiness. To these, I remark that there are worse things than being a Fool; and they, I'm sure, shake their heads in disgust and go on. They do not want to be taught by me.

It is very important to understand, before we go further, that I do not wish to teach, either. I wish to express, and it is possible that what you gain from your willed interaction with that expression manifests to you as learning, but that is not my purpose. More: it is not within my power. I cannot teach you, because the tao that can be taught is not the Tao. I can only be.

I'm sure this sounds very pretentious. It's difficult to find the right place to start with this... expression. There is what the late Douglas Adams, through the able mouthpiece of Dirk Gently, referred to as the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things (which I abbreviate to FIAT; Latinists or Liverpudlians among you may appreciate the happy accident of the acronym) - we'll be returning to this, insofar as we ever really leave it, which, when you come to consider it, is difficult to do without abdicating the Dasein - that both reassures and confounds one in the effort to find a starting place. The temptation to evoke a Joycean solution is strong, and the slew of references that will, I suspect, flavor if not pepper this treatise and the ones that follow is perhaps evidence that this temptation was not wholly resisted.

If you're confused, please take that as an indication that I haven't begun to properly express myself yet. Imagine this series of writings as a Seurat painting in progress - at present, the dots are disconnected, and you are still too close. But the day will dawn when there is a sufficient proliferation of them, and you are sufficiently distant, when you can look upon them with older and newer eyes, and see what has been made. Persevere, I urge you.