Magic

I’m teaching The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling to a section of Sophomore English. They are considering magic as an agency, a different set of natural laws. It is, perhaps, a new/old form of belief, an exhilarating alternative to this, relatively, pallid world. You can get there through the door through which Dorothy walks and into Munchkinland and have what Salman Rushdie calls “the moment of colour.”

Rowling doesn’t come up with anything new really. I’ve known what a wand is, I think, for all my life. Witches use brooms, even Shakespeare knew about cauldrons and the prescient stews that bubbled in them. What was science to Ben Franklin would be magic to Socrates and DaVinci would have lost himself in the blue glow of a monitor, googling as he surely would have into the uncharacteristically quiet Roman night.

Magic is maybe just about making things easier: cutting out the middlemen or going to directly to enlightenment without the drag of scholasticism or the various slings and arrows of even the most banal of fortunes.

We Muggles are forever waiting for the other shoe to drop while wizards can often describe the arc of the wingtip’s flight as it comes to earth predictably for them and shockingly for us.

Transformation or transfiguration is the nuclear unit of magic. A college degree, a new lover, botox treatments, revolutionary diets or a house well past the fault line will deliver us into a new and enviable state. Magic is filled with mirrors that do all sorts of thing beside what mirrors were meant to do.

American literature is crammed with the Transfiguration Fantasy: the Wild West, Jay Gatz becomes the Great Gatsby to woo the bored and hopeless Daisy; The Joads look to California like the Irish looked to America. A driver’s license, the loss of virginity, our first job, the new apartment - all this will make us someone else who is then, magically, free.

For those of us who are sadly without belief in magic or divine intervention ,those of us who are experiencing transfiguration and know it to be only age and the first significant step toward the tomb, we have the bizarre and desperate port in the storm called hope. When Pandora’s box was, seemingly, empty and the horizon just above The Land of Nod irredeemably darkened by Man’s Fate, the poor sap of a hapless girl, bred to fail, digs deeper in the belief that a box could never be filled with only bad news and there discovers, stuck on the lining or snagged on a hinge, hope.