magic talking to itself, noisy and alone

colloquia with mythologists, some new writing and a first podcast episode

Hello, I’m back to writing, though it still feels like squeezing blood out of a stone. I wrote a review of Tara Isabella Burton’s HERE IN AVALON for

Cracks in Postmodernity

— read it here. Stephen has kindly offered a discount rate for my subscribers with this link (available for the next three days).

It was a weird, emotional piece to write, and you can probably tell from reading it that it comes out of a period of confusion and reflection. I’m usually quite quiet about my upbringing and hate the shades of melodrama that are unavoidable when talking about one’s childhood. Beneath that, there’s embarrassment, resentment and a desire to fit into the normal world. When I was a teenager I would look up boarding schools with codes of discipline and imagine children well-formed into successful, healthy, balanced adults. My personality, my familial context, has always been chaos.

I think that’s why I latched so furiously onto the idea of marriage, raising children with two parents, a community around them which would model virtue and discipline and teach them things that mattered. But in that desire, the countercultural refusal of schools and mass culture, I’ve horseshoed my way back around to how I grew up—learning the old names of trees and the stories of the woodland, the world thick with enchantment. I’ve bounced between chaos and order and found them unnervingly near to each other. I’ve always felt like I don’t fit—strange, then, to find myself reviewing a book by someone who doesn’t fit in precisely the same ways.

Last week I was at a colloquium at Exeter College where there was lots of talk of enchantment and myth and magic. I smoked a cigarette outside the chapel while a mythologist told me he always associated beauty with danger. But in his paper he said that when we see beautiful things we fall in love with them and when we fall in love we make different decisions. He said that modern culture is only three days deep and you need to find ways to stop defending yourself against beauty.

Sometimes I feel insane for caring about how ugly everything is. When I go into London it’s an onslaught of noise and light and colour and none of it is coherent. I’m spending a lot of time in the offices of various agencies of the state and it’s all designed to crush the soul a little. The paperwork is always wrong and nobody knows how to do their jobs and it’s just interminable waiting, misinformation, outright lies, all to keep you coming back to a room where they ask you the same questions and say there’s nothing they can do.

I understand, now, why my mother’s project was so successful—she worked with kids who were on probation or in PRUs, in environments like this, and suddenly a minibus would drop them off on this hill with a woodland full of dragons and bright sensory gardens. Someone would hand them a chisel or an axe. I get it now.

I guess I never wanted to be in the dull, colourless rooms, either. I wanted to be at Oxford. I wanted sunlit limestone and libraries full of old editions and lit with gentle yellow light. I wanted to put myself in a concentrated centre of beauty. I had an instinct that if I could do that, I’d be able to survive.

This isn’t just shallow aestheticism. Beauty is a profound need of the soul. On the simplest level, it’s the desire of the human organism to be in an environment which supports its physiological processes. A discordant, chaotic environment will keep the body in a high stress state, leading to inflammation and a range of mental and physical ailments. A harmonious environment promotes hormones which lower stress and support healing.

When I lived in London—I didn’t talk about this in the review, but there are again lots of parallels—I had this overwhelming feeling that something was wrong. I felt like I was going insane because it felt so unlivable and anti-human but everyone else was telling me it was fine, they liked living here.

It’s not just a lack of beauty. It’s a destruction of everything that gave place its significance. Trees are just landscaping. Even the hills are artificial and surrounded by fences, charging a fee to climb. I feel nauseous around it for too long.

At the colloquium, one speaker discussed demoralisation as an aspect of disenchantment, leading to a denial of human nature. ‘Enchantment is necessary to the continuation of an authentically human life,’ he said. One of the most important things to realise is that remaining authentically human is becoming increasingly difficult.

To re-enchant—impossible, beyond human capability. To rediscover enchantment—possible, not so hard. This means resisting marketisation, managerialism, bureaucracy in all its forms—anything designed to loose the ties that bind person to person in relationships of reciprocity and trust. It means resisting cults, lifestyles, brands, the most counter-cultural of which are still playing the dis-enchanting game of modernity, selling you a better sort of life.

Rediscovering enchantment probably means talking to people a lot without judgement. Stop defending yourself against beauty. Reveal something of the wild, afflicted ground of your being. Say something true.

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The first episode of IN OUR END TIMES is up on Patreon! I spoke to Caroline Calloway about addiction, sex parties, memoir and whether she ever did any work at Cambridge. Next week I’ll be releasing the second episode with Professor Levi Roach, an early medieval historian, to talk about charters and diplomatic, early medieval eschatology, becoming a catholic and the contemporary university. As you can tell, my remit is broad, but I’m going to describe it for now as ‘interesting conversations with historians, writers, theologians... etc.’ You can also listen on Spotify.

Happy Shrove Tuesday — I’m going with my great list of sins to get shriven. I’ll also be off social media for lent but I’ll be continuing to write here and publishing new episodes on Patreon. If you’d like to get in touch, you can email me at rose.lyddon@theology.ox.ac.uk.

Rose

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