Enchantment. I hope the word sends a thrill up your spine! When was the last time your conversation turned to enchantment? Who talks about enchantment these days? That may be one of the reasons it interests me. As a writer, I’m interested in what isn’t being said in the public sphere—the unsaid and the unspoken.
The German philosopher Wittgenstein explored the subject of enchantment. According to him, enchantment transports us beyond our finite selves. To be enchanted, he wrote, was “to show the fly the way out of the bottle.” To show the fly the way out of the bottle! The French poet Paul Eluard said, “There is another world, but it is in this one.” I agree. Enchantment is with us here, now.
And yet we seem so attracted to enchantment’s opposites—cynicism, irony, mistrust—qualities that show up in lots of contemporary fictional characters who reflect our twenty-first century discouraged and disenchanted point of view. Enchantment, instead, would have us stand in the place of wonder and consider ourselves apprentices in the mystery of Being.
I’ll share a recent discovery—the role enchantment has played in my writing—and how the enchanted state in a writer, in this case me, seeps into the work itself. Another way of saying this is that what’s in the psyche of the writer shows up transmuted on the page. Transmuted is key because sometimes only the slightest aroma of the original idea is evident in the final written form. Think of it this way: The rapture expressed in Mozart’s The Magic Flute is directly related to the rapture Mozart presumably felt while composing it. If Mozart was filled with rapture, rapture will be in his music.
What a lovely post, Dale. I never heard that Eluard quote before, but have already jotted down for my journal. I agree that we don’t talk about, or celebrate, enchantment enough. It is a force too many writers have forgotten.
HI Mary,
Great to hear from you. Thanks for stopping by here!
I can well imagine you are a writer interested in enchantment. How does enchantment figure in your work? Other authors that interest you?
What a lovely post, Dale. I never heard that Eluard quote before, but have already jotted down for my journal. I agree that we don’t talk about, or celebrate, enchantment enough. It is a force too many writers have forgotten.
HI Mary,
Great to hear from you. Thanks for stopping by here!
I can well imagine you are a writer interested in enchantment. How does enchantment figure in your work? Other authors that interest you?