A Glossary of Enchantment

Or, Wonder Is an Essential Survival Skill

Goldeline, by Jimmy Cajoleas

This is how you do magic, I realize.

You read the stories in everything,

You speak the stories of the world.

I have recently been enchanted by the book Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane. Here's what I wrote about it:

We have become experts in analysing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to evoke what it can do to us.

Words for snow. An extensive vocabulary for describing a myriad phenomenon. That's the common example connecting language and meaning, right? Northern peoples experience the world differently because their words allow them a greater understanding of the subtle differences in types of snow. Language shapes meaning.

Combine that concept with the following one from Ralph Waldo Emerson and you will have the essence of Landmarks:

The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other.

Or, as Macfarlane himself writes, As an ordinary-looking pebble could be sliced and polished to reveal dazzling patterns, so could a word.

This book is what Macfarlane calls a "word-hoard." It is his attempt to preserve the many, particular, local words the inhabitants of the British Isles have used to name their environment. It is his attempt to preserve a deep knowing of that environment through the power of language. It is his attempt to personalize nature, to give it a face with poetry, so we might better have meaningful, tangible relationships with it.

The core of the book is a collection of glossaries of British words that have been used to describe the natural world, divided into various topics: Flatlands, Uplands, Waterlands, Coastlands, Underlands, Northlands, Edgelands, Earthlands, and Woodlands. Each is further subdivided into categories, like words for "flowing water," for "mists, fogs, shadows," for "peat, turf and earth," and so on. These lists are fascinating in and of themselves. I'm quite excited to know there is a name for something I've observed on the Kansas plains, that of "shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day" (rionnach maoim - Gaelic), for instance. They can be enough on their own.

Preceding each glossary is a related essay. The introductory ones lay forth his purpose. A final one concludes with the language of children at play in nature. The bulk are a mixture of personal experience, reflection, and analysis of other nature writers that have inspired Macfarlane's nature thoughts, language, and experiences--source material for the glossaries, if you will. It was these that I found the least enthralling aspect of the book; while glad to know of the writers and their works, I itched for the immediacy of interacting with them directly rather than channeled through Macfarlane. It was his use of language, the result of their influence, that was most fully a joy to read. Between his ability to experience the natural world and his ability to write about it, I think I want to be him.

This is a most unusual, beautiful, and extraordinary book.

Because Macfarlance's eloquence is the point, here are some of his words about the book and why it exists:

It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are disappearing; rather that there are fewer people able to name them, and that once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we further deplete our ability to name, describe and figure particular aspects of our places, our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted. The ethno-linguist K. David Harrison bleakly declares that language death means the loss of 'long-cultivated knowledge that has guided human-environment interaction for millennia . . . accumulated wisdom and observations of generations of people about the natural world, plants, animals, weather, soil. The loss [is] incalculable, the knowledge mostly unrecoverable.' Or as Tim Dee neatly puts is, 'Without a name made in our mouths, an animal or a place struggles to find purchase in our minds or our hearts.' . . .

We need now, urgently, a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook that would comprehend the world--a glossary of enchantment for the whole earth, which would allow nature to talk back and would help us to listen. A work of words that would encourage responsible place-making, that would keep us from slipping off into abstract space, and keep us from all that would follow such a slip.

And here are simply some passages that I enjoyed for their writing:

I had a strong sense of darkness rising, of the winter solstice not far distant, and of the world as disturbed. Cows with pale hides galloped behind barbed-wire fences, tossing their heads uneasily, and trembling in the gold light when they stopped. Water was rife from a fortnight of steady rain and a night of torrent. The asphalt showed silver, and in towns the drains bubbled over. A tall monkey-puzzle tree shivered in the wind.

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Binocular vision is a peculiarly exclusive form of looking. It draws a circle around the focused-on object and shuts out the world's generous remainder. What binoculars grant you in focus and reach, they deny you in periphery. To view an object through them is to see it in crisp isolation, encircled by blackness--as though at the end of a tunnel. They permit a lucidity of view but enforce a denial of context.

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Becoming a father altered my focal length and adjusted my depth of field. Children are generally uninterested in grandeur, and rapt by the miniature and the close at hand (a teeming ants' nest, a chalk pit, moss jungles, lichen continents, a low-branched climbing tree). From them--among countless other lessons--I have learnt that magnitude of scale is no metric by which to judge natural spectacle, and that wonder is now, more than ever, an essential survival skill.

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The glossary reveals the moor to be a terrain of immense intricacy. A slow capillary creep of knowledge has occurred on Lewis, up out of landscape's details and into language's. The result is a lexis so supplely suited to the place being described that it fits like a skin. Precision and poetry co-exist: the denotative and the figurative are paired as accomplices rather than as antagonists.

"Words exist only in theory. And then one ordinary day you run into a word that exists only in theory. And you meet it face to face. And then that word becomes someone you know. That word becomes someone you hate. And you take that word with you wherever you go. And you can't pretend it isn't there."

― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

"Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.' He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, 'I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being."

― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

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If you are believing in beauty you are obviously a cyborg

This next bit is a bit of a tangent from the rest of the post, but it is fascinating and peripherally related. I'm interested in both the details of all the ways we use our land and that the largest portion by far goes to cows.

Here's How America Uses Its Land

Agricultural land takes up about a fifth of the country.

Yet the actual land area used to grow the food Americans eat is much smaller . . . Most cropland is used for livestock feed . . .

More than one-third of U.S. land is used for pasture—by far the largest land-use type in the contiguous 48 states. . . .

There’s a single, major occupant on all this land: cows. Between pastures and cropland used to produce feed, 41 percent of U.S. land in the contiguous states revolves around livestock.

Click, obviously, on the image for a larger version of it and on the title of the article for other images and additional information.

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Cows are obsessed with public perception

Less enchanting and more puzzling in an enticing way is another that uses land as a metaphor for lacking a strong meaning. (In my interpretation, at least.) The Land, by Gerald Murnane. Here is a basic description borrowed from Goodreads:

On their vast estates, the landowning families of the plains have preserved a rich and distinctive culture. Obsessed with their own habitat and history, they hire artisans, writers and historians to record in minute detail every aspect of their lives, and the nature of their land. A young film-maker arrives on the plains, hoping to make his own contribution to the elaboration of this history. In a private library he begins to take notes for a film, and chooses the daughter of his patron for a leading role.

Twenty years later, he begins to tell his haunting story of life on the plains. As his story unfolds, the novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, 'a mirage of landscape, memory, love and literature itself'.

And here is what I wrote about it:

Hmm. Hmmm. This is a hard one to talk about. Hard to describe. Hard to digest. Hard, in some ways, to understand. By design. The book is intentionally hazy because its form reflects its ideas, the primary one being that any artistic undertaking necessarily produces nebulous results.

It brings to mind something Ann Patchett writes in her essay "The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life," collected in her book This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage:

I’m figuring things out, and all the while the book makes a breeze around my head like an oversize butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. This book, of which I have not yet written one word, is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight is the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.

And so I do, even though I dread it. When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach into the air and pluck the butterfly up. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done, I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing—all the color, the light and movement—is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s the book.

When I tell this story in front of an audience, it tends to get a laugh. People think I’m being charmingly self-deprecating, when really it is the closest thing to the truth about my writing process that I know.

This book is vaguely a novel with the impression of a story, though the plot mainly serves as vehicle for the narrator's ruminations. It is the tale of the twenty years he spent not making a film. Not taking that butterfly from his head and pinning it to the page, instead pondering the impossibility of doing so in any way that might convey what he imagines. And researching others who have felt the same. Ruminating on ruminations.

The titular plains--of inner Australia--serve as an allegory for the inevitable failure of artistic expression. How their very plainness allows the beauty of small, mundane details to stand out at the same time that their vastness implies an intangible, distant, unknown something more. Meaning is both exquisitely perceived and simultaneously impossible to perceive. The book dwells at their murky meeting, in the process venturing into thoughts of philosophy, communication, identity, boundaries, and much, much more.

And it subtly critiques the habit of fixating on individual impenetrability as a romantic tragedy that leads to passivity and inaction. The protagonist is not an exemplar.

Certainly Murnane's descriptions of plains resonated with this Kansan. I'm not convinced from one reading of his literary genius that some reviewers have expounded, but it was undeniably unique and interesting.

Some passages that captured me:

Listening to the plainsmen, I had a bewildering sense that they wanted no common belief to fall back on: that each of them became uncomfortable if another seemed to take as understood something he himself claimed for the plains as a whole. It was as though each plainsman chose to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain. And even when a man spoke of his particular plain, he seemed to choose his words as though the simplest of them came from no common stock but took its meaning from the speaker's peculiar usage of it.

On that first afternoon I saw that what had sometimes been described as the arrogance of the plainsmen was no more than their reluctance to recognise any common ground between themselves and others. This was the very opposite (as the plainsmen themselves well knew) of the common urge among Australians of those days to emphasise whatever they seemed to share with other cultures. A plainsman would not only claim to be ignorant of the ways of other regions but willingly appear to be misinformed about them. Most irritating of all to outsiders, he would affect to be without any distinguishing culture rather than allow his land and his ways to be judged part of some larger community of contagious tastes or fashions.

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How might a man reorder his conduct if he could be assured that the worth of a perception, a memory, a supposition, was enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others? And what could a man not accomplish, freed from any obligation to search for so-called truths apart from those demonstrated by his search for a truth peculiar to him?

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I know enough of the habits of thought of plainsmen to expect them usually to prefer those theories that fall short of a complete explanation for the problem at hand.

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I knew that plainsmen commonly consider all art to be the scant visible evidence of immense processes in a landscape that even the artist scarcely perceives, so that they confront the most obdurate or the most ingenuous work utterly receptive and willing to be led into bewildering vistas of vistas.

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Since none of these men has ever spoken or written a word to explain his preferring to live unobserved and untroubled by ambition in some modestly furnished rear suite of his unremarkable house, I can only say that I sense about each of them a quiet dedication to proving that the plains are not what many plainsmen take them for. They are not, that is, a vast theatre that adds significance to the events enacted within it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.

"Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences."

― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

"People in my town would laugh at the idea of calling books and music work. . . . How is it some men break their backs farming a dead land, whereas others sit in comfort and ruminate on stars and poetry?"

― Julie C. Dao, Forest of a Thousand Lanterns

Words are enchantment. I just finished the middle part of a trilogy with that idea at its heart. The third doesn't come out until later this year, unfortunately, so including them may be a bit premature except they fit so well. Each of them has had an "Easter egg" poem hidden in the page numbers. I'm anxious to see the final one since the book's title is The Storyteller; the first two are below.

A portion of what I wrote about The Reader:

Simultaneously pursued and pursuing, she gradually learns the item is a book. Hers is a world without the written word, except for this most valuable treasure revered by a secret society of "readers." It's a treasure they will do anything to recover. The Book is magical and Readers can do magic. As Sefia teaches herself things the society passes down--all while in the midst of a very bloody adventure--she begins to meet characters she's read about in the book and even discovers that she herself is in it.

This is a book,
and a book is a world,
and words are the seeds
in which meanings are curled.

Pages of oceans
and margins of land
are civilizations you hold
in the palm of your hand.

But look at your world
and your life seems to shrink
to cities of paper
and seas made of ink.

Do you know who you are,
or have you been misled?
Are you the Reader,
or are you the Read?

And a portion of what I wrote about The Speaker:

The two groups are hunting each other, with the stakes being the ability to write the story of what will come. The ability to determine their own fates.

This is a word,
and a word is a spell–
a promise to keep
or a secret to tell.

Controlling the word
means the power to frame
how the ages of history
remember your name.

Are you hero or villain?
A savior or spy?
Some titles are lovely.
Some titles are lies.

You can claim who you are
now that you’ve found your voice.
But those who are chosen
will not have a choice.

More than the poems, I want to share a story from the second book that is background information for the tale's setting.

The Last Scribe

Once there was, but it would not always be. This is the ending of every story.

Once there was a world called Kelanna, a wonderful and terrible world of water and ships and magic. The people of Kelanna were unremarkable in many ways--they spoke and worked and loved and died--but they were different in one very important respect: for them, reading and writing were magic.

They practiced spells for creating light without flint and tinder, for peering into the future, for turning salt into gold. They recorded their histories in immense tomes--their mathematics and philosophies, all their secrets and discoveries--amassing so much knowledge so quickly their halls overflowed with books, and when they slept they curled under sheets of paper inked with incantations, dreaming of inventions yet to be invented, breakthroughs yet to be broken.

Most exalted among the literate were those who belonged to an elite society of readers known as the Guard, which possessed the First Book.

Guardians toiled over it generation after generation, poring over its pages and copying them down, harvesting knowledge like sheaves of wheat. For years, they circulated their findings, teaching the people, feeding their desire for more knowledge, more power. Their magic proliferated so quickly that Kelanna was overrun with it, as a beach is overrun by the tide.

And as with the tide, some drowned.

Kingdoms fought. Orchards burned. Cities crumbled. The very geography of the Five Islands was transformed by the violence of their conflicts.

Five of the Guard's divisions--Librarians, Politicians, Soldiers, Assassins, and Administrators--struggled in vain to control the explosion of magic, but Kelanna was already glutted with it, sick and corrupt with the power of the written word.

So the Guardians turned to their sixth and last division: the Scribes, who made their home in an abbey deep in the frozen Northern Reach.

Scribes were more powerful than any of the other Guardians, for they knew how to rewrite the world. With the stroke of a quill, they could erase a man from history, inscribe new stars into the firmament, alter the currents in the vast blue sea.

When the Master Scribe learned of the disorder in the Islands, she knew she had a choice before her--the most difficult choice any Guardian would ever have to make.

The word was beautiful, precious, capable of molding the very fabric of the world into exquisite, transcendent forms.

It was also dangerous, insidious, capable of corrupting even the most honorable with an insatiable desire for knowledge and power.

The Master Scribe gathered together her servants and Apprentices and put this choice before them:

Destroy the word and preserve the world?

Or preserve the word, and in so doing, destroy the world?

The Scribes deliberated for many months, and at the end of the deliberation, they all took up their quills.

Using a deep and ancient magic, they revised the Illuminated world itself, in inks of gold and light. They eradicated literacy from Kelanna, erasing alphabets, books, enchantments, libraries, universities, all the institutions built upon foundations of reading and writing and magic. They took it all--spelling songs, storybooks, folios of poetry, scientific dissertations, blueprints of architectural innovations, even the events of the past themselves--leaving only empty husks behind: nonsense rhymes, irreproducible inventions, citadels so complex that without records to show how they were constructed, no one could figure out how to replicate them.

Under the direction of the Master Scribe, they gutted history of every trace of reading and writing--except the Guard. Someone needed to protect the written word, to preserve the memory of what had happened when it went unchecked, and to ensure that it would never run rampant over the world again.

But there was one bastion of literacy still to be eliminated, a place dedicated to the most perilous magic of all, a place too dangerous to exist.

The abbey of the Scribes.

To prevent anyone from ever finding them, the Scribes erected towering walls of ice around the entirety of the Northern Reach, so steep and formidable they obscured even the memory of the white lands beyond.

Then the Scribes laid down their quills, or whatever arcane instruments they used for their craft, for the last time. They would rewrite the world no more.

Alone in her office, the Master Scribe continued the work. Her quill raced across the lands of the Northern Reach, blotting out roads and isolated villages, snowshoers and sled dogs and infants lying asleep in their baskets.

And when her magic reached her own abbey, she destroyed that too.

She brought down the pointed roofs and frosted eaves. She caved in the chimneys and roaring fireplaces, the walls, the windows, the tiled ceilings. The furniture splintered. The floors split.

As the Master Scribe worked, she could hear the noise of her own quill striking out every room in the abbey, from the cellars to the attics, snuffing out the lives of all her Apprentices, all the men and women and children who served the abbey.

In a world without literacy, there could be no Scribes, who wielded the most powerful magic of all--the power to rewrite the Illuminated world. So she sacrificed them.

She could hear the approach of her own ruin, could hear it come thundering down the hall in explosions of rock and powder, and when it reached her, she severed the line of her own life with one last flourish.

All was still.

Kelanna had been stripped of the written word. Only five divisions of the Guard remained, protectors of the First Book, a last line of defense between the word and the world.

Words. Words. Words?

What If . . .

by Samantha Berger

With a pencil and paper, I write and draw art
to create many stories that come from my heart.

But what if that pencil one day disappeared?
I'd fold up the paper till stories appeared.

And what if that paper was no longer there?
I'd chisel the table and then carve the chair.

And what if there wasn't a chair here at all?
I'd chip and I'd peel at the paint on the wall.

And what if there wasn't a wall anymore?
I might build a story from boards in the floor.

Without any floor, I could still use the land
and sketch out a tale in the dirt with my hand.

I could still shape the leaves. I could still sculpt the snow.
I could still plant the flowers and make kingdoms grow.

Without any land, I would still use the light--
invent shadow stories the sun would ignite.

If there was no light, I would still use my voice
to sing out my stories--to chant and rejoice!

I'd still have my body to twist and to bend--
to dance out my stories, beginning to end.

If I had nothing, but still had my mind . . .
There'd always be stories to seek and to find.

If I know nothing but one bit of fate . . .
As long as I live, I will always create.

As long as I live . . .
I will always create.

Finally, a science fiction story that shares some common features with others though is largely unique, about people striving to create lives after a flu epidemic and societal collapse. It centers around a nomadic group of actors who are a part of the Traveling Symphony.

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. My brief review:

A brilliantly written, intricately plotted story about human connection--both connections that occur regardless of intent and the active pursuit of companionship--a story that just happens to take place during and after a global pandemic that wipes out the vast majority of humans. It beautifully captures everyday life, regardless of whether circumstances are mundane or extraordinary. In many ways, I found this to be an encouraging counterpoint to the bleakness of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a more hopeful consideration of the human condition in the face of societal collapse. Survival is insufficient.

Kitty

Survival Is Insufficient