Myth and Magic
I've just finished reading The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht. I've had to fight hard with myself not to rush and finish this book too quickly. It is breathtakingly well written. I've been repeatedly going back and re-reading passages to enjoy again the sublime beauty of the prose. The stories within the main story are layered and folded into each other in the cleverest way, myth and magic interwoven with the brutal realities of war. It's a story very much about storytelling, but also about the aspects of stories that cannot be told, perhaps the most important aspects of all - those that are rightly left to the imagination. Great stories linger in the mind more through what is left untold. They leave us open to wonder.
And The Tiger's Wife is indeed a wondrous story. It took me out of myself like no other book has for a very long while, transporting me to a whole different world. I feel like I want to thrust copies into the hands of complete strangers - to simply share the joy I've experienced reading it. In my opinion, it really is that good ... so if you've not read it yet go and buy yourself a copy and let me know what you think. Trust me!!
After my last blog post on Serendipity it seems appropriate to relate the route by which I came to read this book. It was firstly on the back of a review that I read in the Metro, the free daily paper which I occasionally read on the train into work. And it is very occasionally now, for if I'm not biking in, my head is straight into a book. This was possibly the only time I've picked up the paper in the last month. I think it was because I had just finished a chapter and was almost home so didn't want to start another. That night, without any intention to read it anytime soon, I added it to my To-Read shelf. A few days later, browsing Goodreads, I stumbled across it again and read a few reviews. Despite already having a number of books on the go, I felt this almost irresistible impulse to get a copy. I almost always wait until a book comes out in paperback, but this compulsion overrode that. A couple of clicks, and a few hours later I get an e-mail telling me it's been dispatched from Amazon. It's waiting for me when I arrive home from the office the next evening.
I can easily rationalise how I come to have a copy of The Tiger's Wife here in my hands. There is a strong buzz around the book at the moment which I was almost bound to pick up on, and I've always been drawn toward Magical Realism as a genre. There was an immediate appeal to me, especially at this stage of my new journey. That's all very logical, but there is still this part of me that wants to believe there is more to it. I want this magical book to have been brought to me in a magical way. And this, in a way, is a central theme of the book. The main character, Natalia, is a modern doctor with a rational world view, trying to fight superstition with reason, yet she still wants magic in her life and cannot let go of the possibility. We never really discover whether she finds it or not. And that is the main point really. We are left wondering in the story, just as we are in life.
If I was brought to this book in space and time for a reason then it must have been to remind me of how important this theme is within Earthdream. We live in a world that seems at one level to have been abstracted away completely from our animalistic origins, but not far beneath the surface superstition still holds significant sway. Magic will not go away because at some fundamental level we need it. It seems to find ways of seeping into our lives. The trouble, as I see it, is that we have no agreed framework for understanding the magical dimension of our lives. It inevitably gets interpreted in all manner of irrational ways. Earthdream can be looked upon as a synthesis of ideas which might help us to embrace myth and magic in a rational, more authentic way. It is also argues for why this is actually important in the first place. It's not about explantion, but about mystery and the imagination, and opening our eyes to wonder.
And The Tiger's Wife is indeed a wondrous story. It took me out of myself like no other book has for a very long while, transporting me to a whole different world. I feel like I want to thrust copies into the hands of complete strangers - to simply share the joy I've experienced reading it. In my opinion, it really is that good ... so if you've not read it yet go and buy yourself a copy and let me know what you think. Trust me!!
After my last blog post on Serendipity it seems appropriate to relate the route by which I came to read this book. It was firstly on the back of a review that I read in the Metro, the free daily paper which I occasionally read on the train into work. And it is very occasionally now, for if I'm not biking in, my head is straight into a book. This was possibly the only time I've picked up the paper in the last month. I think it was because I had just finished a chapter and was almost home so didn't want to start another. That night, without any intention to read it anytime soon, I added it to my To-Read shelf. A few days later, browsing Goodreads, I stumbled across it again and read a few reviews. Despite already having a number of books on the go, I felt this almost irresistible impulse to get a copy. I almost always wait until a book comes out in paperback, but this compulsion overrode that. A couple of clicks, and a few hours later I get an e-mail telling me it's been dispatched from Amazon. It's waiting for me when I arrive home from the office the next evening.
I can easily rationalise how I come to have a copy of The Tiger's Wife here in my hands. There is a strong buzz around the book at the moment which I was almost bound to pick up on, and I've always been drawn toward Magical Realism as a genre. There was an immediate appeal to me, especially at this stage of my new journey. That's all very logical, but there is still this part of me that wants to believe there is more to it. I want this magical book to have been brought to me in a magical way. And this, in a way, is a central theme of the book. The main character, Natalia, is a modern doctor with a rational world view, trying to fight superstition with reason, yet she still wants magic in her life and cannot let go of the possibility. We never really discover whether she finds it or not. And that is the main point really. We are left wondering in the story, just as we are in life.
If I was brought to this book in space and time for a reason then it must have been to remind me of how important this theme is within Earthdream. We live in a world that seems at one level to have been abstracted away completely from our animalistic origins, but not far beneath the surface superstition still holds significant sway. Magic will not go away because at some fundamental level we need it. It seems to find ways of seeping into our lives. The trouble, as I see it, is that we have no agreed framework for understanding the magical dimension of our lives. It inevitably gets interpreted in all manner of irrational ways. Earthdream can be looked upon as a synthesis of ideas which might help us to embrace myth and magic in a rational, more authentic way. It is also argues for why this is actually important in the first place. It's not about explantion, but about mystery and the imagination, and opening our eyes to wonder.
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I think you've just provided a wonderful statement here of the essential paradox of existence! If you pursue a rational perspective too far it actually becomes irrational. Reason ends up consuming itself.I like the word essence, and its Aristotelian origins, but I have problems with it too. It's not the way you've used it, but the connotation of essence is too much on the material side. To talk of the essence of our humanity is to imply that there is indeed some fundamental substance or inner nature underpinning our human identity. But our essence is better looked upon as a process rather then a substance. Our essence lies in the interplay of the material and the magical. We cannot be human by ourselves. Our essence lies in our interactions with the whole world, both at a physical level and an emotional level. For Sartre, existence precedes essence, and I'm drawn toward Existentialism more than any other kind of -ism, the idea that we have to create, individually, our own value and meaning through the actual living of our life, but it's still not the whole story. The paradox is that the opposite is true at one and the same time. Essence also precedes existence.
To quote myself from Earthdream, "Wholes cannot be defined simply in terms of their parts because those parts, in turn, can only be defined in terms of the whole". But language is breaking down at this point. We don't have the words, or metaphors even, to embrace these paradoxes. We've taken a strange route to arrive here from a review of a novel, but perhaps I can finish by quoting further from Earthdream:
"In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous than the last. Every time the final box appears to have been reached, a key has been found which has opened up another, revealing a new universe even more breathtakingly improbable in its conception. We are now forced to suspect that, for human reason, there is no last box, that in some deeply mysterious, virtually unfathomable, self-reflective way, every time we open a still smaller box, we are actually being brought closer to the box with which we started, the box which contains our own conscious experience of the world. This is why no theory of knowledge, no epistemology, can ever escape being consumed by its own self-generated paradoxes. And this is why we must consider the universe to be irredeemably mystical."
Earthdreaming
To have no dream is to have no vision. And to have no vision is to have no future.
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Throughout centuries, magic and mystery, have inundated society with their promise of the paranormal. People around the world pay to watch magicians disappear and re-appear. The world stands in awe while they observe people like Harry Houdini and David Copperfield perform substantial illusions of survival. Shows and books that deal in the paranormal are among the most top selling in the world.
Paranormal by definition is the term that designates experiences that lie outside “the range of normal experience or scientific explanation,” according to Wikipedia. Human kind is so mystified by these things it can’t explain is has been actually termed “popular culture.”
If society is so open to the “rational” things they can’t understand, is the leap really that far to the “ideological” things that they can’t understand? Under the definition of paranormal according to Wikipedia I can see that Intuition falls well within these guidelines and yet intuition is all too often dismissed as illogical emotion and dropped.
In your book on page 161 you talked of the world “burying the delicate magic of life.” Through the repression of our imagination by reason, our intuition suffers. We get caught up so much in the logistic concreteness of life we forget those things that were always meant to be abstract (magical). By definition according to Webster, Abstract as a noun is, “something that concentrates in itself the essential qualities of anything more extensive or more general; essence.” Essence in turn is “the inward nature, true substance, or constitution of anything, as opposed to what is accidental, phenomenal, illusory, etc.” So in a world where abstraction of view (imagination) is essential, it would seem that by being rational/concrete in our views we have in turn forgotten our own essence “magic,” however the only way to come to this conclusion is through reason/logic itself.
Earthdream in one chapter touches on Yin and Yang energy. How opposites only exist in relation to each other. Yin-Yang energy is a dramatically dynamic relationship of opposition and therein lays the root to Wonder, Imagination, and probably the very basis of your book.
I fear to feel balance in the opposition of forces in this world weighted by reason and logic one has to allow for additional mystery (mysticism, imagination, magic, serendipity) which seems irrational, but is in fact the truest form of rationality one can allow the mind. It is as one might say, “of the essence.”