Passages Leading Deeper Within

A few half-forgotten lines from a novel can be both a means of transporting us as well as the destination itself. 

That's how it feels sometimes - that the more I immerse myself in the strangeness of where I live and travel now, the closer I get to something I left behind, buried. Like a sudden epiphany that the secret coded message I've been searching for was written in my own genetic sequence all along. And that is the path down which I wish us to travel here.

I mentioned in an earlier post that looking up old adages and sayings had been leading me deeper into the uncharted parts of my own dream gallery / mind palace - to that place where the unlabeled things have been kept since long before I went through the mental effort of visualizing a structure in which to house them. I'm rediscovering passages from books and snippets of stories that once spoke to me - and I'm finding that while some have lost their luster, others now impact me even more powerfully than they did when first I encountered them. Truly, it seems, one cannot step twice into the same river.

One passage in particular, from the book Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon, which I must have read when I was fourteen or so, apparently resonated so strongly with me at the time that all these years later, in some ways, I've been inadvertently recreating it.

To be clear, I'm not talking about any conscious or malicious act of plagiarism. I'm in no way intentionally rewriting the work of another in order to claim credit for it. It's more like following in the footsteps of someone much more skilled and experienced - the literary equivalent of discovering the remains of Chester Copperpot as a sign that you're on the right path. And whereas McCammon's story was a fictional novel with a fixed destination, this blog is not. But he and I are quite clearly trying to describe the same phenomenon, with similar language - about the ways we lose and (attempt to) reclaim those faint and fleeting traces of childhood wonder. 

Here it is, in his own words:

“You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.

After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.

That’s what I believe.

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.

These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.”