Magical Thinking
by Rev. Colin Bossen, August 23, 2009
The sign in the windowpane of Kristin Baybar's toyshop in London reads "We do not exist but if you think we do, and would like to visit... please knock." Knock I have. In truth, I have more than knocked I have entered the sanctum of the toyshop itself. It is a strange and magical place, filled with curios, doll house furniture and hand carved toys. Every surface is covered, the cupboard display cases stacked high, with miniature flowers, snapping tin alligators, painted puzzles that move, penny whistles and cheap magic tricks. Several signs proclaiming "Do Not Touch" suggest that this might not be a shop for small children.
Yet some of my fondest childhood memories are of Kristin Baybar's. For three summers, while my father taught a study abroad course, my family rented a flat around the corner. Every chance I got I would wander over to the toy shop. The shop owner--Kristin Baybar herself--seemed to delight in entertaining small children. There were magic tricks, toys that made noises and puzzles. Within the walls of the shop the world seemed just a little more wonderful than outside.
The shop and its owner did much to teach me about the power of the imagination. Creative play, the ability to dream and discover new things helps make us human. Without them there would be no culture, no religion, no art and no science. They help us to define and redefine the world for, as William Shakespeare wrote, "We are such stuff / As dreams are made."
Let us talk this morning then of dreams and magic, the possible and impossible and those places and moments in our lives when they all jumble together. The world is filled with wonder. Perhaps nothing is more wonderful than our human capacity to create.
My friend Richard once defined magic as the act of imagining something and then creating it. "I think, 'I'm hungry. I want a sandwich,'" he would say, "I imagine it and then I create it. That's magic!" Open yourself to the marvelous that surrounds you, seek it out if only for a moment, and you never know what sort of magic you might create. So much of the world first began as a dream. So much of the world has yet to be dreamed.
There are some places where dreams and magic seem more present than others: a shop like Kristin Baybar's where delicate miniature furniture--fit for fairies--hovers elegantly on the edge of the possible; an old bookstore where you always find exactly what you are looking for, even if you weren't looking for it; a surprising urban garden hidden amid dumpsters and bright with sunflowers; a grove of elder trees--wide canopied oaks and maples; the cliff before the water's edge; the quiet brook that gladly bubbles...
"To this gravel-bottomed stream, to this little woods on the riverbank where, on summer nights, ivory shafts of moonlight make the oak trunks glow like pillars in a temple...whenever I've returned to the river, it has redirected my life in ways that...seem providential," writes Michigan naturalist Tom Springer about such a place, the Portage River, and its ability to transform his life.
Magic places where dreams seem more possible are all around us. Walk out the door, turn right and there, before you even touch the street, is our community garden. Careful rows of tomatoes, marigolds, bushy purple basil, blossoming squash and bean vines were imagined before they were planted. In the winter there was only the dream of the garden. In the late August heat the soil and sun fruit richly. Standing, kneeling, touching the earth in such a place I always find my own imagination sparked.
As an adolescent it was the author Daniel Pinkwater who helped me be cognizant of the wonders that surround us in everyday city life. In novels like "The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death" and "Alan Mendelsohn, Boy From Mars" Pinkwater's characters explore back alleys, city buses, dank comic stores, second run movie theaters, abandoned theme parks and donut shops searching for adventure and the unexpected.
Pinkwater's texts are children's stories. Most of them center around a fairly normal boy and the eclectic group of friends he discovers when he strays from the beaten path. At their core the books all have a similar message: if you turn off the tube, get off your duff and wander out into the world you never know exactly what you will find.
In the novel "Borgel"--the adventures of a boy, his eccentric uncle and their talking dog through "time-space-and-the-other"--Pinkwater sums up a philosophy of life:
"'So what do you do when you're a time tourist?' I [the boy] asked.
'Well, the first thing you need is a vehicle. This Dorbzeldge [that's the car the uncle drives] is a first rate time-space-and-the-other machine. The next thing, if you really know what you're doing, is to have some good traveling companions. You and Fafner [the dog] have the makings of the very best fellow tourists.'
'So I'm a time tourist, too.'
'You are now.'
'What else do we need?'
'Just the willingness for it happen, that's all.'
'The willingness for what to happen?'
'The willingness to leave one time-space-and-the-other continuum and enter into another. Are you willing for that to happen?'
'Sure.'"
Some friends and willingness to let it happen, what better recipe for adventure, and for life, can one find? Along the way remember that the world is a more wonderful place when you use your imagination and keep your eyes sharp. You are bound to end up somewhere interesting.
Many of Pinkwater's characters and the places they visit are based upon his own experiences. The Snark theater, a central feature in the "Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death" is modeled after the old Clark theater in Chicago. Dusty books shops like Samuel Klugarsh—Occult and Oriental Books refer to obscure stores that Pinkwater visited as a young man. Even some of the oddest characters, like Captain Shep Nesterman, owner of Dharmawati the performing chicken, are based on real people--in this case the Maxwell Street Chicken Man, a street performer from the 1950s and the 1960s in Chicago who played an accordion while balancing a chicken on his head.
As adults we easily forget that the world can be a magical place. When we are beaten down by life it can be hard to remember that we all have the power to imagine something and then create it--even if only a sandwich--and that there's marvelous world out there waiting to be found.
I think that our Unitarian Universalist faith encourages us to find that world. The first source our tradition draws upon is "Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life." I take that statement as a, rather wordy, suggestion that we should never cease in seeking experiences that provoke our dreams and cause us to work creative magic.
Certainly most members of our congregation never cease to seek such experiences. Many of you take regular pilgrimages to places or communities that draw you closer into communion with nature, elicit your imagination and rejuvenate your psyches.
We do not have to leave the neighborhood to find such places. There is Jenny's Garden over on Wilton St., a combination sculpture and plant garden carefully created by I know not who. It interrupts the expected with handmade ceramic figures, a wooden bicycle, a trellis, a small foot path and a bench. Then there is the brick alley just on the other side of Euclid Heights Boulevard. It quietly cuts through a series of beautiful early 20th century mansions before arriving at Cedar transformed into asphalt. For those inclined to wander there is Hessler Street, a improbable residential street that, once a year, metamorphoses into a bohemian enclave.
Walking through and by such places I always find my imagination sparked, my sense of wonder re-engaged and the world's possibilities enlarged. For many neo-pagans, magic is the "the art of changing consciousness at will." When I choose to observe what surrounds me I always find my consciousness changed. Paying attention is a magical act.
And now, as I circle around the connection between place, magic and the imagination I find myself thinking of the Calthrope Project. It is one of London's more unconventional parks. A scant acre in the dense heart of the city, it began twenty five years ago when local residents fought back an effort to develop offices on a vacant green space. They won and along the way created a ramshackle maze of complete with an outdoor performance area, rundown soccer field, inward directed looping footpaths and community gardens. The park is open to all. Upon entering it I experience an almost complete disassociation with the surrounding city. I am not transported to the countryside. Instead, I feel like I enter a timeless place beyond the pale of the surrounding offices and outside the bustle of the city. The experience reminds me of stories about entering fairy realms. They are supposed to be right there beyond a door in the wall.
In its own way the Calthrope Project illustrates the connection between thinking magically and social justice. It started when a group of people saw a different possibility for land. Instead of yet more office buildings the area could be a green space for the whole community to share. And now it serves to nurture other dreams. When we work for social justice we are actively trying to re-shape the world according to some vision, some dream, of righteousness we hold. It easily fits Richard's definition of magic, we think of something and then try to create it.
"We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute," said the Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti. Or, as Subcommandante Marcos, spokesman of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, writes: "In our dreams we have seen another world, an honest world, a world decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live."
Most of the successful social justice movements of my life time have significantly tapped into the power of the imagination. The Zapatistas through their art and the writings of Marcos, the colorful street theater and giant puppets at protests in Washington, DC, Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere, and the songs and poetry of the labor movement all evoke the world that they are trying to create. Anthropologist David Graeber calls this "prefigurative politics." The art and the actions that they accompany are "meant to prefigure the genuinely free society one wishes to create." They change the consciousness and suggest that something beyond our consumerist corporate culture--with its troubled relationship with the environment and immoral distribution of wealth--is not only possible but immanent.
Before many of the social justice convergences and protests of the last decade the police have staged preemptive raids on activist spaces to destroy protest art and puppets. "Cops hate puppets," Graeber writes in one of his essays. They hate them because, as another writer notes, they inject "humor and celebration into a grim situation," that of protesters facing riot police. During mass protests art can break down "the imaginative wall" between protester and police. It can serve as a reminder that all parties in the engagement are human and share the ability to laugh and revel. None involved are "isolated passive spectators" and all have the agency, the power to act out a new narrative, one prefigured and illustrated by the puppets.
In such situations art becomes a type of magic. It changes people's consciousness. Its practitioners begin with an idea and try to bring that idea into being. Graeber shares a story, similar to something witnessed by many who have participated in recent mass demonstrations, of how during the protests against the 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia art transformed a tense situation between the police and the protesters. A large group of protesters was trapped by the police when:
"four performance artists on bicycles with paper-mache goat heads, carrying a little sign saying "Goats With A Vote," began wading through police lines to perform an a capella rap song...
The Goats, as it turned out, were just the first wave. They were followed, ten minutes later, by a kind of 'puppet intervention.' Not with real puppets--the puppets had all been destroyed, and the musicians arrested, at the warehouse earlier that morning. Instead, the Revolutionary Anarchist Clown Bloc appeared; led by two figures on high bicycles, blowing horns and kazoos, spreading streamers and confetti everywhere... There were probably not more than thirty or forty of them in all but...they immediately changed the tenor of the whole event... Unicycles appeared, and fire jugglers. In the ensuing confusion, cracks appeared in the police lines and just about everyone on the Plaza took advantage to...burst out...to safety..."
Art, in such situations, points to those places beyond, in the words of Shel Silverstein, "where the sidewalk ends." It suggests that there are other social arrangements possible, one in which people are not divided into the categories of protester and police. It prefigures the society that people struggle for, one in which human divisors have been erased.
Art is something that we can all create. It is not a matter of talent. It is a question of whether we will open ourselves to the wonder that surrounds us. Do we seek the hidden magical places about us? Do we envision something and then strive to create it? Do we change our consciousnesses? We have the opportunity to do so everyday. All it takes, in the words of Daniel Pinkwater, is "the willingness for it happen." The world is rich with possibility. Perhaps those possiblities are a little like the sign on Kristin Braber's. They do not exist but if you think they do and want to find them please knock.
And so, my wish for all of you this grey tinted Sunday, is you will go beyond where the sidewalk ends. Engage with the magic around and inside of you and, in doing so, you will find the world a little more wonderful and a little transformed.
May it be so.
Amen.