What Magic Realism Means to Me

I am running a magic realism bloghop again this year. Some twenty blogs are signed up to take part and if last year's bloghop is anything to go by, there will be some fascinating posts.

Over on the Magic Realism Books blog I have scheduled posts about magic realist fiction available free from the web, about useful magic realism resources and a review of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, which features on all the magic realism lists as one of the most important magic realist books ever written and is one of my all-time favourite books. Despite having written three posts for my other blog I want to write a more personal post here on my personal blog about what magic realism means to me.

Of course there is good and bad magic realism, magic realist books that last for ever in your mind and others that are easily forgotten. But as a general rule I find that the magic realist approach to portraying the world is one that I respond to and I recognize that it reflects my own experience. That is not to say that I have seen people ascend to heaven, been followed by crowds of butterflies when I fell in love or watched a relative turn into an item of furniture. But rather that I believe in allegory and metaphor, in imagery, in archetypes and in a heightened awareness that extends beyond "physical" reality.

For me, realism is overestimated. It excludes the profound. It does not allow my soul to soar. Nor does it take me to the depths beyond pain. I am and have always been a poet and a bit of a mystic. For a while, as a student, I neglected that side of my personality in favour of the rational and the academic. I stopped writing. It didn't last. The subconscious has a way of hitting back and my health suffered. Unable to think straight because of the pain, my reason dropped away and I was left with only instinct and intuition to fall back on - magic one might say. The poetry came flooding back. Here is part of the concluding section of a long poem I wrote at that time:

With pain falls silence.Words fail reason,Take on the form of danceOn unseen feet to unseen rhythms.The silence of snowFalls crystalline, smoothing out edges,Curving the landscape into circles -Roundel and bergomask.But these dancers do not beat sticks,Wear bells on ankles, shout "Hoy"Or bow, kiss fingersAnd place hands on whale-boned waists.This is an older dance.Its steps are preconditionedBy greater things than reason.We return to an earlier silence,A silence that is in the centre Of the hurricane.We return to the windThat has rung hollow in our bonesAnd gone unheededLike the calling of ghosts.