six word short story for Smith Magazine

Think you're pretty.

Think you're neat.

[on Smith Magazine]

the ethics of magic

Zuhra Bahman's New Internationalist article on the sorcerers of Kabul makes a compelling case against their modes of operation. Bahman argues that, by selling women charms such as taweez and showest, these sorcerers con women not only out of their money but out of their ability to combat social inequality:

The loss... is not only monetary. This con pushes women into an irrational space, away from the rational world of science, expression, politics and social activism.

Of course, the rational world - or at least, that which claims to be the rational world - can be equally oppressive, which is why irrational space can be so appealing and, I hope, genuinely liberating. Bahman hints at this in her closing paragraph:

If women started trampling over these taweez and showest, and were vocal about their irrelevance to the modern world, these conmen would have to close up shop. Alternatively, maybe I should start a new movement where I shold speak with the djinn of human rights and the ghost of rationality, and advise women to question their situation a bit more deeply; and see the evil in germs, in viruses and in the society run by men.

As much as Bahman is being purposefully ironic, this alternative magic is pretty appealing to anyone who wishes to combine their spirituality with their political idealism. George Santayana sees it in Dante:

...how can the unchanging, the ideal, the eventual, initiate anything or determine the disposition and tendency of what actually lives and moves? The answer, or rather the impossibility of giving an answer, may be expressed in a single world: magic. It is magic when a good or interesting result, because it would prove good or interesting, is credited with marshalling the conditions and evoking the beings that are to realise it.[1]

This, for Santayana, is the essence of Dante's supernaturalism. This is irrational thought, but it's powerful because it lets us value our ideals in their own right: they don't just make things happen, they happen. We don't make them or let them happen, we recognise and our thus part of their happening; this is the same thing as resisting the things that stop them from happening.

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[1] George Santayana. Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe. New York: Doubleday, 1910. p. 94

What is broader than the way?

What is louder than an horn,
And what is sharper than a thorn?

Thunder is louder than an horn,
And hunger is sharper than a thorn.

What is broader than the way,
And what is deeper than the sea?

Love is broader than the way,
And hell is deeper than the sea.

These are the four questions asked by the Riddling Knight in the medieval ballad of the same name. At least, in my source – Poets of the English Language, vol. 1 (edited by W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson), which is currently disguised as A Guide to Pigeon Fancying by Humphrey Johnston (it was a prop in the preview of The Fever Chart for the Warwick Arts Festival) – the knight asks these four questions and each is answered immediately by the maid. This is slightly baffling, considering that he proposes to ask her three questions ('And if you can answer questions three, / O then, fair maid, I will marry with thee'). Other versions of the ballad, such as the one appropriated by brilliantly named sixties folk band The 3Ds on their Poetry Album, has the knight propose to ask three but actually ask six questions (in their version the maid answers all six together, after he’s finished asking). Considering the six questions fit into three two-part questions, this makes a little more sense – though it’s still strange; also, the language in their version is quite different, making the meaning shift a bit. Particularly relevant for what I’m talking about here is the final question, which in this other version is given as

What is longer than the way,
And what is deeper than the sea?

[...]

The wind is longer than the way,
And love is deeper than the sea.

In this version, the poem is more obviously leading towards love: a love deeper than the sea. This feels a little more clichéd than a love ‘broader than the way’: it lacks the connotations of generosity and variety that broadness implies, giving a more convention idea of love having ‘depth.’ In other words, The 3Ds’ version talks about emotion in terms of volume (depth), which is likely to feel familiar, while Auden’s version talks about emotion in terms of scope (breadth), which is more complex.

For the sake of this discussion, I’ll put the two final riddles next to each other:

What is broader than the way, What is longer than the way,
And what is deeper than the sea? And what is deeper than the sea?
[...]
Love is broader than the way, The wind is longer than the way,
And hell is deeper than the sea. And love is deeper than the sea.

There is only one constant between the two versions: the sea, agreed to be symbolic of depth. In both cases, it can only be exceed by a transcendent idea – that is, one that is both physical and metaphysical: love, or hell. These are both understandable on their own terms: the ocean gives earthly depth, love has an emotional or spiritual depth, hell is both subterranean and a place of ‘lowness’ – cunning, evil, sin, selfishness etc. But then there’s ‘the way.’ What is the way? It’s a bit like love, and it’s a bit like the wind. It provides an archetype for both length and breadth, equal to the sea’s archetypal physical depth.

Along with Dave Devanny, I’m hoping to come to an understanding of what ‘the way’ is, how and why it comes up in so many different places, at so many different times; whether it can be perceived and controlled; whether it is a means of perception or control; or whether, as I somewhat hope, it is a subversion-through-excess of all notions of restriction, of set paths or goals, of limitations.

I’m calling my end of this project Roadmap, for the time being.