Everything is still.
Still.
I look over a landscape so familiar I can read it’s dusk silhouette like brail.
I can stick my tongue in the air to find my way home.
To the far left is a gentle hill. If I hold my hand up it has the same silhouette as my thumbnail.
When I was a kid my eyes would always draw there first.
Back then I could only see it by climbing a fence.
Back then I needed to know if it had changed or moved since the last time I saw it.
Now, I don’t need to climb a fence to see it.
Now, I’m clocking the weather first.
Back then I thought it was a giant sleeping turtle - so old a forest had grown over its’ shell.
It was my own mythology, one of the many constellations within my childhood’s landscape.
Now, I still call it Turtle Hill.
I know we’re going gently here but for this entry my subject requires a little hush and a little patience perhaps? It requires an openness to possibilities, maybe even slightly heightened senses. It’s something more invested than curiosity but more tender than anticipation. Do we wait for something beautiful? Captivating? Disturbing? Strange? Don’t worry, I got you kiddo - this rabbit hole leads to a gift.
There's someone who will read the next quote and understand it to be one of the greatest passages ever written about rain. There’s someone who'll read it and never experience rain in the same way again.
Over to you Thomas . . . .
The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.
I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the place where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen."
by Thomas Merton, "Rain and the Rhinoceros," Raids on the Unspeakable, 1960
What we’re talking about here is enchantment. It’s quiet and holds an intimacy that’s usually only wide enough for you and the object, subject or mystery that you’re dealing with. It’s the charm or invitation that caught your eye or dropped some breadcrumbs. Literally, enchantment means; a spell, incantation or song that uses magic to mesmerise you. What I’m talking about is the figurative form of enchantment, that soft fascination, glint or whisper that inches you forward to find out more.
I’ve recently been thinking about enchantment after noticing its presence had waned within my own life. Maybe it's because the culture around me has become too loud or perhaps I'm just getting older. Something about it feels nostalgic, as if its’ subtlety may no longer spark our attention in a world so grossly full of spectacle. Unlike spectacle, enchantment seems to require something from us. It needs patience, openness and our ability to interact with it beyond the split-second, swipe-right reaction to things that we've become accustomed to.
In 1918 German sociologist, Max Weber talked about this on a global scale. He noticed that with the onset of industrialisation and the rise of a more secular society, we effectively lost a level of magic and mystery that had been present within pre-industrial culture. There was a time when enchantment was part of our everyday experience, like a golden thread intertwined through the mundane. We had a proximity, a personal relationship with phenomena that were enigmatic or otherworldly. That sense of mystery and uncertainty became obsolete under science and rational thinking. Weber called this Entzaberung der Welt, the Disenchantment of the World. Weber himself was largely neutral about it and argued for the many ways that logic and rational had enhanced our lives. He believed that whilst much was lost he didn't go as far as arguing for a re-enchantment of our lives. Nevertheless, I find his phrase more poignant than ever and wonder what he’d think about it within the world we inhabit now. Jung was more adamant and linked it to an existential loss of meaning in our world. In my own life, I feel it as a deference of authority to something outside of myself. I find myself dealing with unusual phenomena quickly and just googling anything that holds a question mark. My mind has become lazy as I hand over my ability to analyse, think or tell stories about the world I live in.
The thing that separates enchantment from wonder, curiosity, or even spectacle is that it requires us to listen first. It doesn't approach us unless we're open to it. It doesn't offer us answers. It’s the listening of Thomas Merton in his forest cabin at night. He doesn’t understand the language of rain but deeply feels the virginal myth it speaks of. It's the type of listening that Sydney Long paints, the kind that leans you into the bush and edges you forward into something uncharted. Enchantment offers us things unnamed so that we can experience it for what it is in that moment; alive, vibrant, rubbing up against us for attention and story. Maybe it’s like falling in love where there’s that reciprocal getting-to-know-you, a back-and-forth. The horizon that spoke to me as a child caught me and after some questioning, some time, a big beautiful turtle lay at the feet of the sun.
Perhaps the reason I love art so much is that it is one of the few areas left where there is room for enchantment in both its making and its reception. There are those cliches about how an artists' job is to find the sculpture within the marble or like Michelangelo who had said that he carved everything away that wasn't David. I can’t help but think there is an animism that seems to be just as magic as finding a shinto spirit within a tree, a pagan goddess within a stone, or even a giant turtle within a landscape. I can see the way an artist must listen, take time, be open with their medium. There’s a push-pull between the spirit of the artist and that of the material. Barbara Hepworth, a 20th Century British Modernist artist shows this very obvious dialogue between her and her medium. Something is exchanged and somewhere along the way a symbol arises from the friction between the story of the clay and Hepworth's ability to uncover it. She believed in the maxim, “truth to materials”. Rather than using plans or models, she worked directly with her materials allowing the forms to evolve organically overtime. It was tentative and also a dialogue. Again I think of that falling-in-love feeling of gradually getting to know someone. Her forms hold a fluid vitality despite the heft of their substance. They become a charm in themselves, asking to to be touched.
Chagall might be the most literal embodiment of enchantment and also of falling in love. Look at any Chagall piece and you'll see through the eyes of someone deeply enchanted by this world. I don’t believe he’s an escapist. In my reading of him, it’s as if he’s removed the word “love” and found it again in paint and colour. What you see in Birthday (1915) is his domestic space but now with the swirling mystery of all that he feels within it, redescribed as weightlessness, enrapture, and red. In our disenchanted world he has written his own folklore all over the mundane.
In the late 1950s, the French artist Yves Klein was captivated by a particular shade of blue, which he believed conveyed a pure form of energy. He experimented with pigments and mediums and finally came up with the very scientific solution of adding a polymer to ultramarine blue to maintain its vitality over time. In 1960 he patented it and named it Yves Klein Blue. In his short life, he painted over 200 monochrome blue paintings. In 1957 he painted two identical monochrome canvases and priced them differently due to the unique spirit inherent in each one. We've entered the land of myth here and it straddles both art and commerce. There’s no denying a certain level of marketing at the edges of his enchantment but I think the mix of the rational and the symbolic here is interesting. Our ancestors knew - on a very practical level - what plants were poisonous, what wood was good for building or burning and which hill led to which stream. At the same time, their world was imbued with story. We can see the intertwining of story and rationale within our contemporary society when it comes to advertising and marketing. In this case, we're aware of the logic and science behind things as well as the story and status imbued upon them, but quite simply - we're not the storytellers. The thing about enchantment is that it requires intimacy. We need to engage enough to express the story. The world may ask us to see with eyes like a scalpel, to dissect and analyse and defer our judgment to certainty and authority but perhaps there is still room to sit with mystery and converse with it. I see this as akin to wearing 3D glasses. Our right eye is rational and understands the science behind rain. Our left eye is symbollic and understands the value of things unnamed. If we could learn to see with both our world might be all the richer for it. Thomas Merton needed to be in solitude in a cabin in the woods to be comfortable with all that unknown language raining down on him. He took the time to get to know its tempo, its rhythm and then opened himself to a story much more idiosyncratic than the one we are told. Within that mystery, I think he found nothing less than modern magic.
I realise, looking at the very same landscape from my childhood that the stories of turtles may not have left me entirely. Over to the right of that horizon is a walk I do many times a week. If I took you with me I’d introduce you to a few landmarks along the way. There’s the Peace Tree whose arms are open wide to yellow leaves and a bright blue sky. There’s the Love Tree, Lady Charlotte and The Crying Tree. (Yes - I discovered The Crying Tree's name when I found that it's trunk was perfectly curved to my spine when needing to lean on something while crying. It's also a young enough gum tree to not take things too seriously). At the end of the trail stands the wondrous exuberance of an enormous pine. I don’t know what genus he is but from underneath, if you look up to the sky, he feels like a cathedral. His name is El Chappo. I look out and into this landscape and feel the slightest hint that it’s longing to be heard in new ways.
This month may you experience Beauty in her quietest of whispers. xxx
Improbable Doorways;
Rain. (The comments under this video are beautifully eye opening - what we take for granted right?).
Invitations:
When was the last time you fell in love with something that wasn’t human?
Where in your life is there room for mystery? For uncertainty? For exploration?
If you patented a colour under your name, what would it be?
You can find me on instagram at @inez.joakim
If you think someone you know could use a little more Beauty in their life feel free to share.
Would love to know what Beauty is to you or how you’ve experienced it recently. Leave a comment or drop me a line.
Melissa was here today, and she directed me to this essay. Wow!
In almost every paragraph, I wanted to comment.
One of my favourite words is petrichor, which is the amazing smell that arises when the first raindrops hit the dry ground at the beginning of rain after a heat wave.
I have so many stories about rain.
Veronica, since her departure, messages me with rain. I have documented three events in a video, which I now have to update as there is a fourth event. https://youtu.be/qlDs0emuhPM