Many years ago I was having a conversation with a friend who happened to be a psychiatrist. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I do remember that something I said prompted him to say, “That’s magical thinking.” I don’t think I had ever heard the phrase “magical thinking” before, and I wasn’t sure what it meant. But I thought for a moment, and replied, “Probably. So what? That can probably be just as good as any other kind.”
I’m still not exactly sure what magical thinking is. It seems to range from simple superstitions, like tossing salt over your left shoulder to keep the Devil at bay, to Jung’s notion of synchronicity, which refers, as I understand it, to coincidences thought for one reason or another to be meaningful. I suppose it can also include the delusions of the certifiably deranged.
Shortly before his death, J.R.R. Tolkien took his private secretary, Joy Hill, for a walk, during which he introduced her to all his favorite trees, and even showed her how he communicated with them (if memory serves, he did this by placing his hands on them and leaning forward until his brow touched their bark, after which some sort of silent colloquy ensued).
I have mentioned before in this column that I have certain stones that I feel especially attached to and have from the moment I first laid eyes on them. I feel similarly attached to my house plants. I think of them as persons. I feel certain they have a sense of who I am.
Is this magical thinking? Maybe. But if so, it is only because there is something fundamentally magical about thinking to begin with, and the kind of thinking I have just described may well be nearer to what thinking was like originally than what passes for such now. After all, the notion that clear and distinct ideas are the gold standard for mentation is a rather late entry into the game of thought.
Man’s primal engagement with the world was probably anything but clear and distinct. It was likely something more along the lines of what Jung — borrowing from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl [1] — called participation mystique [2], more a matter of encounter than of “objective” observation. I feel pretty certain that this manner of apprehending reality survives in quite of few of us, and I would submit that it is, in some ways, a more valid way of encountering the world than the merely rational, simply because it does not so radically detach the knower from the known. (Though the laws of perspective were known by the Romans, they were not widely employed by artists until the Renaissance. Owen Barfield [3] has suggested that this was because a shift in consciousness occurred around that time. Before that, people just didn’t see things in perspective as we now do.)
The problem with a purely rational approach to things is that it tends to downplay, and in some cases completely ignore, the role imagination plays in thought. I am not, by the way, advocating any sort of neo-primitivism. I have no wish to visit a sweat lodge, or partake in any healing rituals. One of the most embarrassing experiences of my life happened when I visited a Catholic charismatic group. The presiding padre at one point launched into what was purported to be a speaking in tongues. Whatever it was, I found it repellent, and took the first opportunity thereafter to get up and leave.
No, all that I am suggesting is that we ought to feel free to think more imaginatively than we are taught to nowadays. Above all, we need to discover how we ourselves actually think and feel about things
John Cowper Powys — that “eccentric novelist of genius,” as J.B. Priestley called him, put it quite well:
Not the wretchedest man or woman but has a deep secretive mythology with which to wrestle with the material world and to overcome it and pass beyond it. Not the wretchedest human being but has his share in the creative energy that builds the world. We are all creators. We all create a mythological world of our own out of certain shapeless materials.
Unfortunately, we tend to run from our own mythologies, or to bury them away, afraid that if others learn of them they will think us eccentric at best or else flat-out nuts. But such a personal mythology is actually the record of our profoundest self’s encounter with the world. My own, of course, is grounded in my Catholic faith. But one’s faith needs to be lived as a musical score is played — not with metronomic monotony, but with a generous dash of rubato [4]. As Jesus said, the law was made for man, not man for the law.
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Frank Wilson [7]
Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [9])
- An illusion of precision [10] - September 9, 2015
- Watching the passing scene [11] - October 28, 2013
- To see like a child [12] - June 26, 2013
- Riffing and digressions [13] - January 21, 2013
- Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another [14] - September 13, 2012