{"id":13775,"date":"2026-09-25T00:46:53","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T04:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/a-field-guide-to-enlightened-enchantment-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T00:46:53","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T04:46:53","slug":"a-field-guide-to-enlightened-enchantment-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/a-field-guide-to-enlightened-enchantment-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"A Field Guide to Enlightened Enchantment \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

Enchantment, J.R.R. Tolkien believed, is \u201cas necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life.\u201d<\/a> But enchantment is a story we tell ourselves that tells us back to ourselves, and like every story, it can be true or false. <\/p>\n

Love is the most powerful enchantment we know, the most transformative if true and the most dangerous if false.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we are falsely enchanted, we desire either to possess the enchanting being or be possessed by it,\u201d W.H. Auden observed in one of the most insightful things I have ever read<\/a>, adding the haunting admonition: \u201cAll true enchantments fade in time\u2026 A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n

False enchantments are those we cast upon ourselves \u2014 by confusing love and longing, by mistaking the myths of our culture for our own truths, by replaying the patterns that keep breaking our hearts<\/a>. True enchantments come unbidden, take us by surprise, defy wish and will. True love, then, is a kind of enlightened enchantment \u2014 haunted, yes, by the fundament of loss<\/a>, but redeemed by how it sharpens and magnifies our contact with life, how it allows us, paradoxically, to touch the bare skin of reality and tremble with bewilderment that such a wonder is possible.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art from Reweaving the Rainbow<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Art and Enchantment: How Wonder Works<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), anthropologist and ecological philosopher Patrick Curry offers a field guide to the difficult discernment of the true from the false, treating love as both a special case of and a fulcrum for our arts, both love and art being a way of \u201cadding to, while partaking of, the creative processes of life itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a sentiment that conjures up that lovely line from The Velveteen Rabbit<\/em> \u2014 \u201cReal isn\u2019t how you are made\u2026 It\u2019s a thing that happens to you.\u201d \u2014 he writes:<\/p>\n

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Enchantment is not something you do; it\u2019s something that happens to you. Its opposite is thus will and all its relations\u2026 When and where you are trying to make something happen, or make someone (including yourself) do something \u2014 or when you are the object of those desires \u2014 enchantment is absent.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is absent because then you are in projection, in a transactional paradigm, exerting an effort in order to be repaid by a desired end. Curry writes:<\/p>\n

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Enchantment is fundamentally relational. It is wonder at, or enchantment by, another\u2026 Apprehending the enchanting other, one is apprehended by them.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

The other party in this process can be anyone or anything: a human being, another animal, a plant, a place, a sight, sound, smell, taste, texture, or even an idea. But we are a particular kind of being \u2014 not random, infinitely variable or, in that self-flattering delusion, universal \u2013 so enchantment tends to happen in certain domains: principally love, art, religion, food and drink, learning, sport, humour, and nature.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Paradoxically, the engine of enchantment is not similarity but complementarity, which implies difference. It is the hand that touches another across the abyss between us<\/a>. A generation after Mary Oliver contemplated how differences bring couples closer together<\/a>, Curry observes:<\/p>\n

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Enchanted relationship takes place as an encounter, typically across a gap of difference. The boundaries remain, but in being bridged they cease to matter\u2026 transcended in connection. When that happens, you are in enchantment\u2019s realm: the more-than-human, which includes but also exceeds the human. However, friendship \u2014 less showy than erotic love \u2014 can run just as deep, and is often more enduring.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With an eye to Wallace Stevens\u2019s koan-like pronouncement that \u201cin the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of reality,\u201d Curry reflects:<\/p>\n

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William James<\/a> once asked of a scenario where Jack is deeply in love with Jill, whom everyone else sees as perfectly ordinary: who sees her more as she truly is? He answered, surely it is Jack; he apprehends a truth about Jill which is inaccessible to the rest of us. That is why enchantment doesn\u2019t have the qualities of a dream, or a spell, but rather of reality. Indeed, enchanted reality is more real than either ordinary reality or dreams, which are daylight reason\u2019s inversion but not its opposite. In this sense, enchantment is our baseline natural condition while, as Stevens says, so-called realism \u201cis a corruption of reality.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This dreamlike quality also means that enchantment is impervious to the workings of the will, untouchable by the commands and petitions of our ordinary waking consciousness:<\/p>\n

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Because no one is in charge, enchantment is wild, unbiddable. That inconvenient truth means that although it can be invited, it cannot be created, commanded, or managed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting the Audubon Society.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This aspect of enchantment may be the supreme reminder that we are children of chance, a felicitous accident of atoms. We may have the illusion of choice \u2014 an illusion Adrienne Rich so poignantly ventriloquized in her insistence that \u201cno one\u2019s fated or doomed to love anyone\u201d<\/a> \u2014 but it is only ever an illusion, one James Baldwin so poignantly annihilated when he observed that \u201cpeople can\u2019t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.\u201d<\/a> Unable to bear that something as indifferent as chance may steer the course of our lives, we give it a valence and call it fate. But the feeling of fatedness is simply a measure of our hunger for meaning. Curry writes:<\/p>\n

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In the sharpest possible contrast with the boredom, despair and ultimately nihilism of serious disenchantment\u2026 experiences of enchantment are intensely meaningful. On that account, they are also fateful\u2026 Even refusing the enchantment \u2014 difficult, but possible \u2014 is fateful, because you always do it too late; you have already been affected, so the refusal too will prove momentous\u2026 When one is enchanted, and the world therefore overflows with fateful meaning, we could say that one is living mythically.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is where Amy Lowell\u2019s taxonomy of myths, facts, and poetic truth<\/a> is useful \u2014 because in enchantment, while living mythically, one is also living more truthfully; in enchanted love \u2014 which Curry defines as \u201cthe unpossessive love of another\u201d \u2014 one is loving more truly. <\/p>\n

In such love, \u201cthe movement starts with delight but exceeds it\u201d \u2014 something it shares with music. The parallel is apt, for the etymology of the word itself \u2014 from the Latin, then Old French en chantment<\/em> \u2014 means \u201cto be in a song.\u201d This may be why a musician\u2019s relationship to the music offers the finest field guide to the unpossessive love at the heart of true enchantment. Curry quotes the virtuosic Irish fiddler Martin Hayes:<\/p>\n

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To get to the essence of music, I more often spend time talking about it and hoping for it than achieving it\u2026 It\u2019s when I finally accept that I\u2019ve completely missed the point, and that I don\u2019t really get it, that I have this moment when I get it. And of course I want to put my arms around it, I want to put it in a bottle, I want to keep it, I want to store it, I love it, and I can\u2019t. And I have to let go of it again.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Nick Cave \u2014 whose three-decade relationship with his wife Susie may be the truest love I know \u2014 echoes this in his breathtaking book-length love letter to her<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Through the countless words I have written about Susie, in song and prose\u2026 Susie remains as much a mystery to me now as when I first saw her.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

All true enchantment may be just this \u2014 an ongoing encounter with the mystery of the other, which can never be possessed in words or ideas, only held in wonder.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Enchantment, J.R.R. Tolkien believed, is \u201cas necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life.\u201d But enchantment is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6982,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}