In a world filled with doubt and overwhelmed by hurtful news, finding joy in yourself and sparking it in others, finding hope in yourself and sparking in others, is a countercultural act of courage and resistance. This is not a matter of denying the truth – it is a matter of finding a common truth where joy and hope are equal ways of being. To live there is to live enchanted by the underlying wonder of reality, beneath the scary stories we tell ourselves and are told about.
After losing his mother to suicide, after surviving two World Wars, the Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte (November 21, 1898–August 15, 1967) devoted his life and his art to creating a similar world of magic.
In a 1947 interview included in his Selected Writings (public library) – the first release of Magritte's manifestos, dialogues, and other prose in English, thanks to the heroic efforts of scholar Kathleen Rooney – shows:
The experience of conflict and the burden of suffering has taught me that the most important thing is to celebrate the joy of the eyes and the mind. It is much easier to scare than to attract… I live in a world that is not pleasant because of its common evil. That is why my painting is a fight, or rather an opposition.
Magritte revisits the topic in his manifesto Surrealism in the Sunshinewhich imposes the cultural violence of pessimism and fear – a world view that has been sold under the toxic premise that if we focus on the worst of reality, we will see it clearly and we will be ready to defend ourselves against its destruction. A quarter century before the famous philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm insisted that “despair [is] a kind of despair,” wrote Magritte:
We think that when life is seen in a sad light it is clearly seen, and that we are in touch with the mystery of existence. We also believe that we can reach the goal because of this revelation. The greater the fear, the greater the consideration.
This idea is the result of philosophers (materialists or thinkers), who say that the real world is known, that matter is the same essence as the mind, since the perfect mind could no longer be different from the matter that explains it and thus deny it. The man in the street unconsciously agrees with this idea: he thinks there is a mystery, he thinks he has to live and suffer and that the purpose of life is to be a nightmare.
Through his art and the worldview from which it emerges, Magritte presents an antidote to this twisted thinking – a backdrop that emerges from our self-chosen suffering. An era before we began to understand the neurophysiology of enchantment, he echoed contemporary Egon Schiele's exhortation to “envy those who see beauty in everything in the world,” and writes:
Our mental universe (which contains everything we know, feel or fear in the real world we live in) can be fun, happy, sad, funny, etc.
We can transform it and give it the charm that makes life so precious. It is very important as life becomes more fun, because of the incredible effort required to create this charm.
Life is wasted when we make it too scary, because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because mentally lazy people are convinced that this sad fear is “true”, that this fear is the knowledge of the “excessive” world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a strange description of the world as scary.
Creating magic is an effective way to combat this oppressive, forbidden habit.
[…]
We should go in search of magic.
Rehearse Viktor Frankl's “yes” to life in spite of everything and Walt Whitman's optimism as a force of resistance, then revisit Rebecca Solnit's hope in dark times.
