The Wetness of Magic

Notes on Enchantment Part One

Transparent building. Magritte. Exposure and deception. Photographed from the office of a wealth manager with several trillion AUM. Liquidity. Does that matter?

Greetings, fellow inhabitants,

Perhaps you would enjoy a break from the news?

I have been thinking about enchantment. By “enchantment,” I mean experiencing our world, even this world, even our times, as magic. Wondrous.

Magic is not necessarily good, or moral, or beautiful, though it might be. I’m not talking about Disney. What I am talking about is a sense of meanings, significances, connections, truths, that often begin in but extend beyond our ability to articulate, certainly to articulate without both contradiction and incompleteness, and therefore beyond our rationality.

I find such magic all the time. These images, from the last few weeks, are just recent examples. It’s tempting to search out photographs, formally sound and obviously magical, but part of my point is that magic is commonplace if you know how to see, how to feel. So, these are recent images. As always, the images are much better on Substack (as opposed to your email) and on a real screen (as opposed to your phone).

Thunderstorms, tornadoes, and lots of fires. Note air quality. Hellish. Over thirty people died across several states. Here is a cartoon, fantastic colors, which captures something but almost nothing. But note Cherokee writing over Oklahoma, thanks Sequoyah. Ah yes, we were talking about rationality, like the Trail of Tears.

Weber famously said that the “fate of our times” is “the disenchantment of the world.” This is usually understood as an expression of sadness about historically inevitable rationalization, bureaucratization, science, modernization in general.

And yet “fate of our times” is itself a rather dramatic, mystical thing to say, no? And then there is “disenchantment,” in German Entzauberung. Draining the magic out, a vital fluid flowing from a wound.

If magic is a liquid, I mean feeling wet.

[Breezy erudition redacted.]

One might say that magic must be intentional, must accomplish something. Indeed, and we see incantation, cursing, blessing, all the time. Things are said, peoples come together, build cathedrals of one or another sort, entire cities, trade their fictions, go to war, all under spells. And when times change, whether for a people or an individual, sorrows and triumphs, it feels like waking up, and what was recently real now seems only a dream. A sure sign that the dream has changed.

Walk in fireplace, Seattle. Thousand year old giant trees were everywhere, until they weren’t. Some survive. There are parks. That is my beer. It was very good.

Seattle, early evening, uncomfortable flight. The airport is dingy, with low ceilings, and under some sort of construction, though it is hard to see progress or even design. Why is it so dark? I’ve never seen such a shadowy airport. I’m locked in a Le Carre novel, in a dreary land, trying to meet somebody somewhere in order to do something. It takes me a while to find the taxi queue, which is hidden in a parking deck across the road. On the heels of a very hard week, recovering, and coming from New York, my body feels the lateness of my hour. And it’s drizzling, of course.

The cab driver puts on some light jazz. The city glows in the mist. I’m warm, heading to a good dinner, cozy in the dark back. The music is nice, with the rain and the light, which I tell the driver. He made the mix, he says. Everyone loves it. I will give it to you. He was born in Ethiopia, and came to Seattle via Ohio. We talk about D.C., where there are many Ethiopians. And when we arrive, he hands me the CD. I give him $10 dollars, anyway – gifts should be reciprocated. We wish each other good night; I turn into my historic hotel; he drives off.

5th Year Anniversary, NYC

My students, some not as old as some of my children, want. Their youthful ambitions are welcome – I worry more about lack of desire. Old folks have always relied on youthful desire of one or another sort. Lusty kids breed, hungry youth can be coached, young minds fostered.

“Can be” also means “maybe not.” My students’ desires may or may not be fulfilled. They are in their twenties, a few later, and their problems are existential: a good job is important, but stands for a spouse, a family, the ability to support others, a sense that it all means something, that they mean something. There is pathos here. I feel protective, but what can I say, much less do?

Nobody told me teaching would become so emotional. It wasn’t, or not so much, when I started, young and ambitious. Nobody said that here, as elsewhere, I would be relatively successful yet remain relatively powerless, would not have the agency that I youthfully supposed would come to me by right, due to my undoubted merit. Right. Turning the knife, I remember my own teachers, and now am capable of feeling for them. I see that they did what they could, and in my turn, so do I. But the honor has arrived after the humbling. Abrazos, hugs all round, I say.

Cliff dwellings. Fear and beauty, same as it ever was.

I know all this sounds a little mystical, and it is, for those who believe they stand on solid ground. Bless your sweet heart. I once wrote some modestly scholarly things on the magic entailed in contract law. The basic idea isn’t mine. At least in the North Atlantic, for a while it was genuinely believed that society could be constructed and operated through the expert manipulation of facts, understood to be solid and even inhuman (technocracy, the end of ideology, usw.). Why this was a good thing, well, maybe better than strife, was never very clear. At any rate, technocracy was a delusion widely held in those fat and happy days, at least by my class of folks. Fools, mostly, dreamers who did not know they were dreaming. But most people are not lucid dreamers. Besides, conflict, and so perspective, had been exported to the periphery, and things in the Capital could be portrayed as calm, sensible, even rational. Future historians will wonder, like we wonder at the Civil War or the Italian Renaissance. How could there have been such times?

Sometimes the eye catches before the mind articulates. Projection/reflection. Inside/outside devices. Spring. Erotic forms I only saw later. Suburbia. The tradition of the garden. I’ll stop here.

Yesterday, late afternoon into early evening. I’ve got a chicken on the grill, spatchcocked, spiced, basically French, going slow. I’m trying to write letters, a few important. Drinking high test beer. A hawk is crying, repeatedly, moving around in the tangled wood beyond the backyard fence. I keep looking, but can't see him. If experience is any guide, it’s a male Cooper’s hawk, an accipiter, built for flying through trees rather than soaring. He wants to establish a territory, suitable for mating, nesting. It’s happened before, and I hope it happens again. You go, young man. A Cooper’s hawk in flight is a thing of rare beauty, though there is a pang when one has killed a cardinal, the splash of red hanging low. Life.

The Chrysler Building (1930).

Perhaps the prettiest of all skyscrapers. Photographed from a conference room in One Vanderbilt (2020), named afterCornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877). The view is over Grand Central Terminal (1913, on site of older stations). So we have centuries of capitalism, aspirations, vanities, sins, security of various sorts, and even generosities, and astonishing amounts of cumulative collective work. A synechdoche for a civilization. Perhaps one has to have been a corporate lawyer or the like, but the raindrops and the reflections are as important to me as the subject. I also really like the masses, though it’s weird to take a reflection of a light to balance a building. I’m kind of in love with this image, as you can tell. Mostly luck.

Photography, which is usually understood in mechanical terms (at least vis-a-vis painting) can compress and suggest. Images thereby escape rationality.

I am not sure what means, Max, but we should think about it some more.

Safe travels.

— David A. Westbrook

P.S. Social Thought from the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party should be coming out soon. Watch this space.

P.P.S. A thousand thanks to my paid subscribers. If you don’t feel like or are unable to pay, would you consider forwarding, restacking, or liking this text? Thanks/cheers.