I want to sit down at my desk without having to grapple with doubt. I want to put my fingers to the keyboard without having to drudge through what memories I still have of the thirty-five years I’ve spent on this earth. I want books to appear credited to my name by virtue of the half-formed thoughts of those books my mind contains. I want those books to pierce my heart as readily as they’d pierce yours—but no more than that. In short, I want gratification without the requisite formation.
I’ve known this about myself without having had to name it. I suspect many of you could say the same. We live in a world that facilitates gratification. Yet none of us are gratified. Each generation is further freed from some drudgery that would have absorbed our time, yet our schedules have gained little (if any) more room to breathe.
Nevertheless, I still find myself seeking out magical devices that will grant my deepest desires without my having done a damn thing to earn them. All of this begs the question: Is gratification even possible without formation?
Magical Thinking
I recently pulled the covers off a mindset that had bedded down in my subconscious. An insidious thought lurked in the shadow of my psyche each time I sat down with a book:
If I just read the right thing, if I accumulate the perfect mixture of literary influences, my writing will contain utterances bordering on divine.
I saw it there in all its grotesqueness—my brand of magical thinking. A kind of gnostic strain of intellectualism hellbent on obtaining secret knowledge that would unravel the universe, whose form I could then manipulate into all the tales the world needs brought into existence—if I could bring myself to speak them.
Perhaps secret combinations of influences have been responsible for literary genius. Granting that, I doubt those influences could exert their force merely from being gazed upon. No, their wielder would need to grasp them in hand, feel their substance, and test their efficacy in disparate situations before mastery would come.
Formation: A Longer Metaphor
The mind is an ever-expanding instrument containing taut strings that wind around our experiences and around the ideas we choose to engage. No set of strings are exactly alike, and neither are their tonal patterns predictable. As we begin to let our mental fingers drift over them, we discover many of the notes are discordant.
The instrument’s a bit of a mess if we’re being honest. Something that might be better off packed up and forgotten about were a lesser creator seated before it. But rather than abandon this complex instrument, we first simplify it. For the sake of beginning, we choose one note. We try another note and another until a rightful successor is found. From there we repeat the process. It’s a series of starts and stops vacillating between ugliness and beauty.
These formative moments are painstaking, but they’re necessary. We learn which notes to avoid, which notes seem to work every time. We become adept at making a type of rudimentary mental music. As our facility grows, we experiment with note combinations, seeing how one exposes or pulls at another. With time, we discover those jarring notes that never harmonized at the start aren’t totally unusable. In fact, by an incremental heightening or relieving of tension—with a subtle bend, a partial muting, a ghost of a harmonic that floats into the aether—the notes can be made to resonate quite nicely amid the more readily palatable notes.
Ah. Now we’ve discovered how to direct toward the purposes of beauty even those parts of ourselves that have ‘til now so shamed us.
The ghostly harmonics may be the most important. Along each string, the slightest touch at an unmarked interval reveals a hidden note that calls out in higher register. They form melodies none but ourselves could reveal. Who knows but that the right touch could transform great dissonance into beauty?
One, who does not understand the invisible order of things, might protest, “Why, that’s not how that string is supposed to sound at all. How dare you lie about reality so brazenly!” And if they plug their ears to the loveliness you’ve discovered in that string, so be it. The truth is, we’ve labored to uncover these things—we’ve formed ourselves into the types of artists the complex instrument demands—and that in itself is gratifying.
We see now that formation is the path to gratification.
Useful Magical Thinking
If I continue to scour life’s grimoires of convenience in hopes some passage will transform me into the person (or writer) I want to be, I will waste my life. Thinking isn’t enough. A thought is just a seed unless it grows. Even faith is best proved not through its confession or by its mode of thinking but through its action.
The useful magical thinking is this: If I sit down at my desk and grapple with doubt and if I put my fingers to the keyboard and call to mind both the joy and the pain of my life, then the half-formed thoughts will become whole, books will be brought into existence and credited to my name, and hearts (mine and my readers’) will be changed through revelations of beauty and truth.
a lot of this resonates for me. have you come across Matt Cardin's work yet? his whole model of daemonic creativity seems like another form of useful magical thinking.
This one’s so good. 🙌