Tomorrow is Halloween. All Hallows Eve. Shamain. Dios Del La Muertos. Around the world you will find hundreds of instances where people acknowledge the unknown and the other side. The time when we tell children that the veil between the two worlds is at its most open point, and it’s best to dress as a ghoul or a ghost so you are not mistaken for the living.
All of this at the turns of the season, at the cusp of a new moon. All of this is the human anxiety that happens at the conflict between the known and the not known. The real and the imagined. The conscious and the subconscious. For millennia humans have smoothed over this rift with the magical combination of stories and symbols connecting the collective unconscious to the world at large – religion, fairy tales and folklore, and magic.
This may be a personal challenge, but I don’t feel the pull of the magic of this season. Samhain snuck up on me and I’ve missed all of my usual cues – hours bagging leaves, my lighting of candles, the introduction of porters and stouts and bourbons into my evenings – and now I feel as though the unknown is larger, more looming, far more sinister.
Stepping back, I realize this may be bigger. I’m not just missing the feeling of this season – this may be a year without magic. Without magical thinking or awe or wonder, the year without fantastic thinking around our reality and the imagination of what could be. From the start of this year everything has the carried the kind of reality that is too real, the kind that has too much texture and is too dangerous to handle without a very particular pair of gloves. And so it wears on you, a death of a million and one and counting cuts, one thing after another until every feature is worn and eroded down to the stub of nothingness.
Forgive me, I’m on about two hours of sleep. A new moon is but a day away, and the data shows I rarely sleep well during this phase.
It is easy to want to color the year in the shade of current events. Helene wrecked the region and the people in it. We’ve faded from the headlines, left with the feeling of OK, how is anyone supposed to go back to normal after all of…that? The perspective has shifted, no one around here is looking at life through the same lens anymore. The urgencies of August are trivial.
But the year has been this color – devoid of magic and wonder and I’m sure there is no one to blame but myself. I tried to shut out the poison of politics, but it never seems to leave us. No, the political cycle has replaced the world-building fables that used to inspire generations. Your life may not change by those who are elected, until it does. Until they are but the giant rock splashed into the calm pond – the ripples of influence and rhetoric disturbing everything. It has been a distraction – how can I think about what I need when the world is going to hell?
Or, is it?
Every one of us gets to that point where we say “fuck this” and shut ourselves out of the turbulence of social media. For it is the thing that pushes up the anxiety around the falsities of a world falling apart. Yes, things are bad for a lot of people. Every one of us has something we’re struggling with. The bad gets worse when all you see is the terribleness of it. This is the quandary of the Black Box of Doom – we immediately assume it contains the worst possible outcome.
The world is going to hell. But people are living longer, healthier lives thanks to the development of food tech and medicines. Everything is going to hell, but the literacy rates are the highest they’ve ever been thanks to public education and the proliferation of the BicStic (even if this literacy isn’t supported by the much-needed, often-starved critical thinking). Everything is shit, but you can communicate with just about anyone in the world at a moment’s notice.
The weather is getting wilder and rougher, but we have the data that tells us why. We have the technology to help us prepare for what’s coming. The only thing worse than a hurricane is a hurricane that turns up out of nowhere.
I suppose this, the technology, is the one modern magic I know I have long since neglected. What is data but a manifestation of what happens around us and to us and between us? What is a graph but a symbol of your select world from 30,000 feet?
If it were a decade ago, I would say something about how technology works both ways – it can spread good news as quickly as the bad. And if the tech stood alone, maybe it could. There is a ghost in the machine – the nuance of humanity, the bias of our experience, the outside influence of money (more symbols, more derived meaning) – which keeps it from doing so. The outrage machine churns on. A lie makes it halfway across the world before the truth has a chance to put its shoes on.
Dear reader, dear friend, what is it I wanted to tell you in all of this?
The world is too big and we’re individually expected to serve all elements of it. This drains us and leaves a bleak residue. Yet, without the too-big world would Appalachia have received the volume of help it needed with the speed it arrived? It’s almost magical how it happened, how the community came together again and again.
Our lives are too big for any one of us to handle. Perhaps it’s time we spun ourselves a different story.