MAGICAL REALISM AND THE COYOTE

MAGICAL REALISM AND THE COYOTE

… sometimes called fabulism, confused with surrealism, found mostly in literature, blends the real world with elements of magic and the supernatural.

And for clarity, this is not surrealism. Surrealism deals with the unconscious. Magical realism addresses mythology “from the standpoint” of reality. Surrealism deals with the imagination, the mind, and doesn’t care at all about the mundane world. – I am personally anchored to the magic inside reality while nearing surreal waters. And I’m having trouble seeing where one leaves off and the other begins.

Magical realism originated in the 1950s in Latin America, its first exponent being Jorges Luis Borges. When described as irrational “leaps” in time and context, erasures, redundancy, discontinuity, dissolution of character and narrative, it bumps into yet another relatively new and broader phenomenon – postmodernism. Insofar as “leaping” happens in multiple mediums, the two are often confused or referenced interchangeably.

Okay. Definitions made and a short history imparted, I find myself reconnoitering “art” as another Borges, a Tolkien, a Castaneda, or anyone else who can’t see the world without its distortions. The lens quickly warps by the simple truth of its achromatic hardness – which only cracks with time. I’m thinking of James Hillman’s old book, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg.

And with that I challenge the notion that the purpose of art is simply to produce “understanding” and then “enjoyment.” These are two completely unrelated concepts, but they share the same invalid idea. It’s true that art must have social relevance, but it must also push envelopes and challenge rules. It doesn’t simply serve as “an index” of the times. It pushes us uncomfortably into dimensions not yet understood. This is what transcendence means, going below surfaces. And to go above necessitates going below.

“Enjoyment” is so shallow a definition that it’s ludicrous. Unless it’s offered up as an oxymoron – to include suffering and pain – which shouldn’t sound strange in a sadomasochistic culture like ours. Reaching transcendence means sharing a space belonging to the timeless. One floats in a vacuum of unknowns where we’re confused and challenged. And to the degree that one must “control” that confusion, he suffers. Minus that need, we create the “possibility” for enjoyment.

In my experience this explained why, back “in the day,” one either had an intensely “good” or “bad” trip with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). If you held on to your armchair with white knuckles, you were doomed. Many unfortunately did just that. It also reminds me of people who inexplicably drink coffee and alcohol at the same time (from separate glasses). “Let’s let go, but not really.”

The greatest art, to me, involves inexplicable contradictions, a kind of “painful highness.” To understand (and enjoy it) requires a different sensibility. And combining understanding with the unintelligible is the supreme achievement. An example: an infant’s babbling – sounds we don’t understand but we know what they mean. To recognize the unrecognizable, to sense meaning inside the irrational, is understanding it at a higher level.

Another myth: that the greatest art is “subjective.” If it were true, it wouldn’t be “great.” The transcendent function transcends subjectivity. It reaches a universality experienced and shared by all. It becomes archetypal. And this applies no less to the unintelligible – like the child’s babbling. Magical realists reach for both objectivity and universality. Greatness is measured by going so “subjectively deep” as to tap into some universal current. It follows an old axiom: To transcend something, one must go into it, through it, and almost become it.

And for myself, I must say, though magical realism is not surrealism, it’s understandable why they are so often confused. The differences are subtle, if not negligible. Inside a certain depth, what is “real” versus “unconscious” (or just imagined) overlaps like imbricated scales. The mirror of one to the other makes each mutually relative. Surrealism again concerns itself with psychoanalysis and the unconscious, while magical realism is inextricably linked to the “outside.” This makes even “Marx versus Freud” a good analogy: Marx dealt with the material world, Freud with the personal unconscious. Their lines crossed when both dealt with creative unknowns – “unintelligible” dynamics in society-at-large and in the personal psyche.

All that said, how is it that most of us miss life’s primary function? Is it because similar dynamics mess things up? Are we led along more by the distortions than reality itself without knowing it? How strange when at the same time we deny the distortions. There is however an awareness of both existing side-by-side, and to that extent I suppose we’re on a higher path to “somewhere” together. As Wyndham Lewis said: “Today everybody without any exception is revolutionary. Some know they are, and some do not; that is the only difference.”

Edward Rothschild put it this way: Maybe “we are too deep to be intuitive and not deep enough to be profound…. It is better to cover less ground and to understand and enjoy what you are seeing…. The smaller the area covered, the deeper the penetration; the narrower the pipe, the faster the flow.” – When penetrated rightly, art is life’s “most eloquent expression.”

We approach life too much in a quantitative manner. And quantities cannot measure qualities. Having recently read the essays of Emma Goldman, and in light of the discomfort art brings with transcendence, it seems fitting to use “anarchy” as another analogy. And indeed the unintelligible implies a kind of mental anarchy (to which even Marx would agree): “The history of human growth and development is at the same time the history of the terrible struggle of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn. In its tenacious hold on tradition, the Old has never hesitated to make use of the foulest and cruelest means to stay the advent of the New, in whatever form or period the latter may have asserted itself” (Goldman).

“Progress” is a problematic term. We are in fact still “primitives” despite our progress. We’re still in the primal forest, barely walking upright, dealing with the unintelligible every single day. We’re just as confused and scared as our knuckle-dragging cousins. Each morning we start right “at the beginning,” and along with the morning coffee and newspaper we sense the rumblings of a tribal DNA. We’re still in survival mode. We are, as the yogis say, in “1^st chakra consciousness” – self-preservation, staying alive – our most dominant instinct. “Progress” may mean having more and going farther, but we become less and less as we still feel the earth under our knuckles. As I witness the urban scene and cars in endless gridlock, I see desperation on a postmodern Serengeti, people assessing where they are on that continuum between truth and progress, suffering and surrendering – just like with LSD (white knuckles on steering wheels).

To embrace the journey is the essence of magical realism. The “magic” (in the real world) isn’t readily seen or explained. To borrow Kant’s term, it is numinous – “it cannot be explained but is known to exist.” But one can dance it, paint it, sculpt it, and sing it – and leave it at that. The choreography is so subtle and delicate that it’s dancing on the head of a pin (with angels), on a magical “still point,” said T.S. Eliot.

Hence with spiritual release and emancipation art pushes us into unknowns. As for art’s responsibility to society, to be socially “relevant,” nothing could be more relevant than instructing us on how to extricate ourselves from the mundane. All the while reminding us that though each person does it his own way, everyone is striving for the same thing – some supreme “top-to-bottom” denominator.

We are beautifully unintelligible to one another. And it’s our effort to reverse this, to find common ground, that actually gets us in trouble. Our preferred relationships – groups, memberships, belongings – are our undoing. Our only real commonality is in our opaqueness to one another, our differences. We just prefer to not see it, or accept it as we search for patterns and meanings that simply aren’t there. As Rothschild said, we work too hard, dig too deeply, cover too much ground, in that fool’s errand.

Hence, again, my personal “rooms” and their inhabitants – and all the subtle but palpable vignettes and montages that wallpaper those rooms. The concierge at the door is the first one to tell you, “If any of this makes sense, then we’re all failures.” If everyone agrees on the same thing, then “it must be wrong,” said Oscar Wilde. We’re here to “push things along” – like envelopes.

They say life is more important than art, but art is, again, its “most eloquent expression.” So what’s the difference between them? Art becomes the expression of man when it is expressible – but also inexpressible. And maybe it’s more the latter than the former. The deeper we go in trying to understand ourselves, the more unintelligible we are to each other.

And this is (always) my launch point. — A cobble street veering into the mind of the unsuspecting flaneur on his way home from nowhere. Is he shadowed by something? Does he have a past? Does he suspect things? Is there a guiding intuition leading him down this road? While trying to find words to his own question, he flounders for paper and pencil from the pockets of an over-sized heavy overcoat. He sports the requisite dark-brimmed fedora as well. “The hat makes the man” – pitched into a sculpture, no feathers, angled artfully to obscure the face, making him abstract, mature, weathered.

The road leads inward and makes the eye veer upwards. In front of him is an immense poly-chromatic landscape – virgin mountains and valleys. The road winds through a vast wilderness of trees and thickets. The path detours around various natural obstacles and takes on a circuitous plan. This is a map of the

imagination. Our compass is our own incomprehensibility. Ignorance frees us of expectations and desires. We are free to wander according to our own rhythms and tempos. This is magical realism.

The weather is warm and humid. Buildings are sterile and cold, characters are fugitive from tragic decisions and unspoken histories. Everyone’s desperate but never romantic enough. Friendships are lukewarm, mere sources of information to places unknown. In the darkness and away from city lights neighborhoods are upscale but derelict of humanity. Inside the city they become their inhabitants – gloomy and torpid.

Then, in the darkest moment, just before dawn, our hero makes a rippling gesture. The moment seizes him causing him to disrupt the night, like ripples on water. He awakens to himself. He senses his own “being.” He realizes he exists, he is alive. And instantly he’s horribly alone. He watches people watching themselves and approaches, saying, “hey, that’s you in there, and this is me in here.” He just gets startled stares and quick departures. His isolation intensifies, the moment compresses into a nightmare.

He finds himself standing outside a neon-lit bordello. The moon is full. In his mind there is no connective tissue to anything. He is alone. He lights a cigarette and puzzles over the enigma of this “membrane” he’s just passed through. He’s “awake” for the first time yet more isolated than ever. He loses himself in the moonlight and catches the movement of a stray animal making its way across the road. The coyote knows where it’s going. He doesn’t.

This is the story we read every day, on the road, in traffic, on the maps of human faces. Our hero feels like an echo returning from dark and ancient crevasses in the earth. The pain of remembering is even worse than being alone. Somehow he must reassemble himself. He knows that there is only one of him, but he also sees himself in the shadow of his species. There is always the two inside the One, the One inside the two. Suddenly he’s conscious of being unconscious, and he doesn’t know on which side he’s standing. The coyote does. He’s pledged to something special and exquisitely, inexplicably ordinary. He just doesn’t remember what it is … but the coyote does.

As he floats in his vacuum, a no man’s land, he summons the vision of an animal spirit. It is both inside of him and outside facing him. He remembers it now – an old companion. He stumbles into a mental space reminding him of “life’s most eloquent expression.” “This is it!”, he shouts. The ultimate conundrum, and it’s beautiful.

Life becomes art, and art is an end unto itself. It has no purpose other than itself. It expresses whatever one happens to see or sense at any moment. Art is not passive and reflective, nor is it merely subjective. It is direct and experiential. It is the void one needs to either fix and control or vanish into with a thanatological wisdom imparted by coyote.

My writing is oneiric, hopelessly lost in surreality and other dimensions – mental phantasmagoria, most often degenerating into absurdity. But also strikingly original in the way that various tangents dilate and veer off into their own dark but illuminating corners. A story-line takes on just enough exoticism for me to encounter myself in the present tense. I become the fabulist and myth-maker of my own saga. I’m an author, but I’m always too difficult to gain any public interest. And this suits me. I hate crowds. I see myself too much.

My home is language, and my language is on paper. Hence my world is conveyed by the pressing of keys and pushing pens across pages. It’s home, but home is frequently foreign. Someone once said “When the homeland becomes foreign, the foreign becomes the homeland.”

I always start with a room. From there it’s like making love – no discipline, no direction, no rules, frequent betrayals, unrequited returns.

Here I am in my later years, preferring to live at home, at a computer surrounded by books, a dog and a cat, peace and quiet, simple food, no rules (the only rule). My wardrobe consists of worn thrift store hand-me-downs – my “rags.” All my footwear are worn out tennis shoes. I am exquisitely “alone.”

My room is crowded with ghosts and make-believe guests. In an instance I have a salon filled with cigar smoke, piano jazz, lilting conversations in French and English, heeltapped glasses, the ionized breath of warm summer air combined with gin. My house fills with luminaries and artists. Almost all from the golden age of film and the war years. They all show up here. And as they are mostly refugees and fugitives, they are, as someone once said, “Hitler’s gift to America.” Hitler indeed enriched the American salon, thank you very much. I’m the only one here who is anonymous.

Many make their entrees in those familiar thick black coats, fedoras, smoking Turkish tobacco – Gitanes, Fatimas, and Gauloises. Some, including the women, wear their own fedoras in order to stay in the shadows, unseen and probing. Instantly and in every room it’s magical theatre enacted with the props of home and the mundane.

This is a world of (ruled by) a genuinely unhealed, unruly imagination. It makes art (and life) intelligent, accessible, and eternally enigmatic. It is also unintelligible and unquantifiable. A language is born which one dares not speak – but it dances, sculpts, and sings. And it goes well with gin.

© 2020 Richard Hiatt