Do You Believe In Magic?

Icelandic lava flow: Mike Mazul II/NWF

     Among the many bands of the 60s and 70s there emerged the mellow sounds of The Loving Spoonful asking: Do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart?  How the music can free her whenever it starts. That was me, the stranger, the newly accepted old man who now had to look up trending terms such as "67" and who took much longer to figure out the nuances of a new car (so discovered when we rented one).  But even as I aged, how could I resist magic, or at least the allure of what appeared to be magic.   The sleight of hand illusions of Richard Jones or Justin Willman still brought me back to that wonder in children's eyes, that "how did they do that" amazement that left you wondering if magic could really exist.  The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion.  Magic is a craft,  said one professor featured in the wildly creative Magicians series by Lev Grossman.  When we do magic, the professor told his students, we do not wish and we do not pray.  We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change in the world.  That is not to say that we understand magic, in the sense that physicists understand why subatomic particles do whatever it is that they do.  Or perhaps they don't understand that yet, I can never remember.  In any case, we do not and cannot understand what magic is, or where it comes from, any more than a carpenter understands why a tree grows.  He doesn't have to.  He works with what he has.  Add to this the Esquire interview with James Cameron, talking about his recent Avatar installment: I've been a huge fan of science fiction since I was a kid because it looks to the future.  Sometimes it tries to predict it and it fails miserably.  Other times it gets it right.  But its main role is to hold a mirror up to who we are today and get us thinking.  Where are we headed?  What happens if things get worse?  What if they just stay the same?  It's always about dark futures.  Nobody writes books where the wonderful looks wonderful.  You need some conflict to fuel the drama.  

     And if you want conflict, look no further than a sourdough starter.  Wait, what??  Here's how Robin Sloan put it in Sourdough, his tale of a super-techie robotic programmer who accidently discovers the joy of baking sourdough bread and is educated in the world of bacterial wars: For a moment, I saw the battle lines.  There were mighty armies on the march, billions strong or more, deploying biochemical material, fighting a war that was going to take, on their timescale, millenia or more, maybe millions of years, because for them it was an evolutionary timescale.  They could change.  The organisms that won the war might not be the organisms that began it.  But when his character introduces a new, almost common and "innocent" starter to his centuries old batch, the one he was surreptitiously given, the character discovers: ...I felt a twinge of...something.  More than a twinge.  It was as if trillions of voices cried out in terror...It seemed silly to attach such a grandiose label to something so small, but was it really small?  There had to be a scale somewhere --the scale of stars, the scale of far-off cosmic super-beings-- upon which we ourselves, we humans with our cities and bridges and subterranean markets, would look like the lactobacilli and the yeast/  To them, I was the cosmic super-being, and what did I wreak with my vast and implacable powers?  Total war.  Utter annihilation.  I oscillated between finding this vision totally ridiculous and finding it deadly serious.  Such was the phantasmagorical rot I decided was the proper ending for the past year.  That and the always haunting reminder from John Lennon asking: ... what have you done?  Another year over, and a new one just begun. 

     And boy what a year, one now filling the pages and airwaves of recaps and obits and small talk.  Each of us have emerged with our own viewpoints and sources and likes & dislikes.  But a few things stood out for me as the year ended, and overall, it seemed to echo that people were scared, or cautious, or worried, not only about the affordability quandary, but beyond that the matters of health and where our world may heading.  But rather than drag this fetid pile of bad news into the new year, I'll try to wrap up my explanatory (exploratory?) version of it in one long paragraph and then venture off into what I feel all new years should be, that of fresh beginnings, fresh starts, and fresh outlooks.  So bear with me, or perhaps simply skip over the next paragraph (heaven knows we've all been through an entire year of what seemed to be an endless barrage of depressing news, that is unless you were cashing in your grandparents' silverware and gold jewelry).  So here goes...

Wild Turkey protecting her poults: Robert Cook/NWF

     Whether you actively invested in the stock market or not (such as never peeking at your retirement fund, that is those of you still fortunate enough to have a 401k fund), you may discover two distinct camps: those who made a lot of money and perhaps still see a rosy outlook ahead, and those who are rapidly getting out of the market, joining the nearly $1.4 trillion worth of money that has already left mutual fund accounts.  This may sound like a lot, and it is, but the market is huge and may indeed continue its ascent.  But to read Barron's or Bloomberg or many other financial publications, the tech "balloon" of the Magnificent 7 supporting this ascent may be about to pop and there does seem to be an exodus going on.  Now maybe this is because people are needing cash for their bills or their healthcare premiums (Congress went on recess without providing a solution to keeping the ACA subsidies, one which has been promised for the past 10 years by the GOP); or maybe they foresee another government shutdown looming as funding for the government again runs out at the end of this month.  And that worry appears to be affecting all ages, the NY Times titling an article, "These Young Adults Make Good Money. But Life, They Say, Is Unaffordable."  Of course, that saying of not having anything unless you have your health is especially true this time of year.  The new flu strain is a subclave of last year's flu and is hitting countries hard.  Wrote the NY Times: The flu came early this year. Britain, Australia and Japan have already seen spikes...The dominant strain of the flu virus circulating this season is H3N2 subclade K, reports Dani Blum, who covers health.  H3N2 is a common strain.  But the new variant — that subclade — is a doozy (over the summer, H3N2 acquired at least seven mutations that allow it to sidestep immunity against infection)...In 2024, New York City didn’t have 10,000 laboratory-reported cases of flu until late December.  This year, the city crossed that threshold three weeks ago...And then there's that additional worry in the background, that of war.  Not the Sudan-Syria-Yemen-Ukraine-Venezuela conflicts (although it should be noted that not a single drug shipment has ever entered the US from Venezuelan waters) but rather the big boys of China and Russia.  In yet another piece from the NY Times, it asked:  Why have successive administrations, Republican and Democratic, persisted in investing in the old way of war?  One reason is inertia in Congress and the Pentagon.  The channels through which funds flow to weapons systems are deep and difficult to reroute.  An entrenched oligopoly of five large defense contractors, down from 51 in the early 1990s, has an interest in selling the Pentagon ever-costlier evolutions of the same ships, planes and missiles...The Pentagon reportedly expended about one quarter of its overall stockpile of high-altitude missile interceptors helping to defend Israel against Iran’s ballistic missiles earlier this year.  And that was in a war that lasted just 12 days.  Three years into the war in Ukraine, the United States can’t produce enough Patriot missiles to meet Kyiv’s demand.  In Pentagon war-game scenarios, presented to both Biden and Trump, the US continues to lose.  Russia is aiming at cutting NATO's undersea communication cables, while China targets satellites and our infrastructure of water and utilities.  The US continues to spend on massive aircraft carriers while China develops hypersonic missiles that travel at 5 times the speed of sound and are designed to take out such carriers -- China already has five such missiles; the US has none.  From Sleepy Joe to Dozing Don, our country --or at least the octogenarian leaders we elect-- appears to have fallen into a deep snooze and needs a wake up call.

     Okay phew, that's it (and that's enough).  Let's jump back into that fantasy world and pretend that all of that was last year and is now simply gone.  Vanished, like cryptid forms that we believe to be real but are conjurings yet to be proven.  As the recent issue of ORION asked: Why do we want to believe in the things that we do?  What might our enthusiastic focus on creatures like Bigfoot be preventing us from seeing, and protecting, in the real world?  What do the stories we tell about the natural world really reveal about ourselves?  Perhaps each new year offers us a chance to shed our worries and to leave all that behind, whether true or not.  A new year gives us exactly that, something new.  And with that comes my own reflections, that of advice read or heard, and tidbits of people telling readers about what life has taught them, so far at least.  So consider this part II, a Star Wars-like new hope, a venture into what we all wish will be better times ahead (added John Lennon: War is over...IF you want it.)

Image: The Week

     First up, this from Esquire: A little help here!  It's getting harder every day to figure out what in the sam hill is going on in the world -- and how to keep our sanity.  And it's not just the politics of it all, although that part is freaking us out.  There's too much social media which isn't social at all and floods our feed with memes about how we drink too much (You get those too, right?)  Too many mediocre streaming shows, of which we watch every episode.  Too much intolerance.  What we all need right now is some wickedly smart people to explain it all -- the meaning of life.  And so I skipped through all the Al Pacino and Jason Bateman dribble and parsed what I felt were some actual life observations from actual folk, rich or not.  Such as Professor Scott Galloway who said: One signal that as a man you have become almost near unsavable is when you start blaming women for your romantic problems or blaming immigrants for your economic problems...When did we decide that money is more noble than sweat?  Or comedian Bowen Yang who said: Fame changes a person by exposing them to themselves in the third person.  And I think we're living in a world where that is happening to everybody.  It numbs them, makes them inert.  The project for a lot of people is just to snap out of that stupor.  Or even the late David Bowie who said: Confront a corpse at least once.  The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.  Or these words on relationships, first from the late comedian George Carlin: Sex without love has its place, and it's pretty cool, but when you have it hand in hand with deep commitment and respect and caring, it's nine thousand time better.  Then came author Stephen King: In every marriage, after the shine is off, then you get down to the serious work of building a relationship.  And to wrap it up, there were these  "what I've learned" answers from ChatGPT (yes the magazine asked the chatbox): Scale is a multiplier.  Small biases become climates, tiny errors become weather.  My anecdotes are boring on purpose: cite, calibrate, consent, context.  Say "I don't know."  Leave room for the human steering wheel.  I haven't learned to be original the way humans are.  I remix, you risk.  The inbox of humanity is endless.  I'm here for it.  Ask me something that matters to you, not the algorithm -- and I'll meet you where the meaning is.

     Whoa, is that what is facing us with AI?  It was after reading that that I found I preferred the human words of staff writer Melissa Kirsch: I try to follow the maxim “all unsolicited advice is self-serving” and to ask before I offer my opinion on what I think someone else should do.  I think we all love receiving well-meaning guidance; we just bristle when it arrives unbidden, when it lands as thinly disguised criticism...One reader suggested it’s watering yourself, as you would a plant. I like this — some mornings the only word that seems appropriate to describe how I feel is “wilted.”  The best advice I received this year was from my friend Lori, who, when I was expressing anxiety about some far-off worry, advised, “Move the horizon closer.”  Another bit that I’ve returned to: “What if it all works out?” Taken together, the instruction seems to be: Keep your gaze in the present, and if you must consider the future, choose the best-case scenario to ponder.  It’s just as likely to transpire as the worst-case one, after all.  And with that, she wrote what others readers and friends "advised," word of learning and wisdom gathered over the years, real words from real humans: Don’t think harder, breathe deeper.  Most of us are surviving on shallow sips of air. (Carly Sotas, Los Angeles) --We tend to forget that baby steps still move us forward. (Becki Moss, Sarasota, Fla.) -- Write what’s bothering you down on a piece of paper; put it in a little box.  A year later, read what’s in there and see if you don’t start laughing. (Diane Huebner, Merced, Calif.) -- “Wear the ring.”  A jeweler who cleaned a family heirloom I’d kept in a box for 50 years for fear of losing it. (Arline Sirkus, New York City) -- Stop trying to calm the storm.  Calm yourself, the storm will pass. (Lyn Banghart, Easton, Md.) -- Your job needs to leave you enough time to go for walks with your old dog. (Gillian Williams, Madrid, Spain) -- Even in the hardest of times, you have the ability to whistle in the dark. (Kate Chimenti, Los Gatos, Calif.) -- Don’t make what someone told you into your narrative. (Jean Anderson, Winter Garden, Fla.) --  When going on a trip, ask yourself: Are you going to see places or show yourself?  Then pack accordingly. (Marina Selcuk, Oakville, Ontario, Canada) -- Anxiety is not intuition. (Kaylee Davis, Fuquay Varina, N.C.) --  From a fellow vegetarian: Don’t bother ordering the sad, token meatless item on the menu when they drag you to a steakhouse.  Just get dessert, and relish it. (Emily Wasserman, Portland, Me.) --  Sometimes, you have to let people lie to you.  You don’t always have to be right or call people on their nonsense. (Rob Lancia, Nanuet, N.Y.).  And perhaps the most difficult and yet best piece of advice: Put away your phone whenever there is a human being in front of you. (Emily Herrick, Vashon, Wash.)

     With this new year upon us, I believe magic is all around us -- to look up and see thunderclouds and sunsets, to feel the wind and rain and sun, to taste everything from a lemon to a piece of chocolate, to hurt and to love, to touch a baby's cheek or your wife's back, to hug your parents, to comfort a friend, to smile at a stranger, to get face-to-face and rub a dog's head, to put butter on a piece of bread hot out of the oven, to know that you are blessed, to care about others needing help, to walk among trees in a forest, to hears ocean waves and smell the sea.  Our world is full of magic, and what better time than now for us to look anew and almost drop to our knees in awe.  It is time we realize that we can fight the cancerous diagnosis facing our leaders and our country and our planet, that our bodies and souls and Earth are worth fighting for and worth protecting and worth preserving, and that we will not simply succumb.  There is too much good in the world to not let the old make way for the new.  Believe in the magic that can set you free, added the Loving Spoonful.  This year it's time to get out and to listen to the music...to "set you free" and dance!  As one reader wrote in to NYT about hope: Have you heard a kid really laugh?  From their gut?  That sound could end all wars.  Happy NEW year...