The Kingdom Is Asleep: Stories & Spells (Part II)
Stories and Spells
We could begin by imagining that spells are temporary and stories are forever.
Spells come and go. But story? That’s here to stay. A stone house that’s built on the plains only lasts so long. But the plains it is built upon last much longer. Story is enduring and trustworthy. Spells happen inside of story, not the other way around.
Stories tell it how it is but, like things our parents and grandparents told us as teenagers, you’ll only learn that later when their words turn out to be reliable over and over.
We might also begin with the observation that the spellbound mind is incapable of seeing life as it is — with all the deep grief and overwhelming appreciation that life entails and demands of us. The spellbound mind is full of grievance and sees the world as a stone on which to grind its axes of how things ought to be.
Spells blind us to the world as it is. And, if you are blind to the world, if you don’t understand its way, you’ll trip all over the place and struggle to make your way in it. “That stump shouldn’t have been there! What was that tree thinking? That tree was trying to trick me!” says the spellbound mind. Stories articulate the architecture of how it is. Spells conceal that. This leads to constant feelings of being let down and surprised and being caught flat footed.
The spellbound mind, feeling betrayed by a world it has never worked to understand, feels constantly stabbed in the back. Grievance galore.
Stories can lead to beautifully broken hearts. Spells only to bitterness.
Stories can carry the elixir of remorse. Spells lay the groundwork for resentment.
Stories help us see the world more clearly and so we trip less often and, even when we do, we can grudgingly see that tripping is a part of the story too that we forgot, or never heard.
Story & Memory:
The spellbound mind seems to be a fascist mind. Rigid and intolerant of that which it doesn’t understand.
The world, thankfully, seems to be itself unfailingly. It doesn’t change its ways because we don’t like it. It is consistent even in what we see as its inconsistencies.
Also thankfully for us, some of our old timers, a long, long time ago, paid attention to this all long enough and deeply enough to notice how things were. And, with the capacity for language entrusted to them, they developed a capacity to pay homage to what they saw — the beauty and the horrors of it. The world was not a blank slate for them to project their own ideas but a place to learn. The poets tried to have the mountain appear in the poems not to use the mountains as a place to project their own confusion and pain onto. The poet’s skill is not in evaluating the world but in observing the world.
Spells seems to argue with the world. Stories try to be the voice of the world not exactly responding but always remembering.
I once heard from Linda Williamson, widow of Scottish traveler and storyteller Duncan Williamson,
You’ll find in stories from indigenous people not only the affirmation of scientific discoveries, but the profound truth and beauty of our cosmos. Working among the Inuit of Greenland’s polar north a hundred years ago, ethnologist Knud Rasmussen, published these words from his informant Osarqaq, ‘Our tales are narratives of human experience, and therefore they do not always tell of beautiful things. But one cannot both embellish a tale to please the hearer and at the same time keep to the truth. The tongue should be the echo of that which must be told, and it cannot be adapted according to the moods and the tastes of man. The word of the new-born is not to be trusted, but the experiences of the ancients contain truth.’
Stephen Jenkinson echoes these words too,
“Wise people are not looking to be comforted in what you say but to recognize the world in what you say. It’s a relief that the grotesqueries are finally lucid.”
It is worth noting that the word story comes from the same root as the word ‘storage’. Story could be understood as ‘the storehouse of memory’. It is how memory is passed along.
That’s story.
Spells are a different sort of creature.
If stories help us to see the world more clearly, then spells are what stop us from seeing the world clearly.
Spells are beliefs. One possible rendering of the etymology of the word ‘belief’ is this: the ‘be’ is an Anglo Saxon, Germanic prefix could be understood to have a function of intensifying, putting one on the receiving end of. The ‘lieve’ suffix comes from the same roots as the German ‘liebe’ meaning ‘love’. And so, the first order of business of a belief is to make you fall in love with them. You are set upon by a love for the thought that has come to you. Spells seem to whisper that they will keep you safe and that you need them and so, in strange Stolkholm Syndrome fashion, we often fall in love with the spells we’ve been put under. When it is threatened we protect them like the thick, briar hedge that grows around the castle when the kingdom has fallen asleep.
Spells are the religion of Scientism while the scientific method itself is a storied approach to the world. Any of the ‘isms’ could be considered fertile ground for spells and spellcasters.
In my August, 2018 interview with Stephen on Elderhood, Stephen said this. It feels relevant,
“What I was lucky enough to be in on from probably a very early age is stories, of all things, and stories are not just ‘one thing after another’. Stories have a very particular arc or you could say only stories have arc.
Arguments don’t. Diatribes don’t. They have intentions. They have sometimes diabolical strategies but there’s nothing strategic about a story. A story has a kind of arc that’s somewhat user friendly but absolutely world friendly. There’s something about the arc of a story that is as naturally occurring as snowfall or the rain that’s falling just outside the door as I’m talking to you now.
Naturally occurring doesn’t mean without consequence, by the way. It doesn’t mean benign but it certainly means that it’s in the order of things, that stories virtually seem to tell themselves although God knows they need a good teller, and they need a good hearer to appear as a story. I was exposed to the arc and the lilt of storyness or storydom, or something from a very early age.
Of this I’m fairly certain because I’ve never not heard that way. It’s in my ear, not a particular story, but storyness is in my ear and everything is available to me that way. I’ve found that people credit me with a certain capacity for memory but it’s not a factual memory.
The memory that I have is a kind of nuanced Geiger counter of ‘story movement’. That’s how I remember things, because the story suggests in almost a serpentine fashion what preceded the moment that you’re enquiring after right now, and with enough attention to that, the story begins to suggest to you something about the moment that you have not quite arrived at yet.”
And, in his Interview with the It’s Hot in Here Podcast (50 minutes in or so) Stephen said this,
“The beautiful thing about stories is… there’s no argument in them. There’s no ideology in them. Stories are an ideology free zone where you get to recognize the comings and goings of life that are apparent there regardless of how you feel about them which is a more important realization to have I think. By the same token, there are no stories in arguments which what the news is all about now. It’s all about arguments and no story. I think people are withering for lack of stories wherein their own lives become recognizable to them. I think there’s something in [stories] that can make their own people’s lives slightly more available to them than anything that they can hear in the popular media.
It could be this: spells are way humans have of arguing with the Big Story. Stories are a way we cooperate.
Spells & Power
And yet, spells are not exactly the opposite of story. Opposite suggests two equal things side by side. Spells seem to be an imposite on story; they impose on it — like the old stone house on the prairies.
Spells describe how things should have been or should be now or in the days to come and impose reality. Stories describe how they were, are and might yet be and invite memory, presence and possibility.
A child told, “You can’t sing,” or “you’re ugly” or “you’re too needy” may make a silent vow to not sing, to be prettier or to be less needy but, if it goes on long enough, that vow can become a spell. That thought imposes itself on the reality that the child can sing, is beautiful and that their needs are worthy and belong.
I can imagine Merlin running away from the battle and, at some level making the vow to never trust humans again. I can imagine that vow turning quickly into a spell.
I can imagine Taliesin finding him still in thrall to and sustained by that voice of the spell whispering to him, “Trust me. Humans are vile. Humans are murderers. Humans are evil. There’s no beauty to be found amongst them that you can trust. But you can trust me. I won’t let you down. I will keep you safe.”
And maybe, for a while, that spell kept him alive. Maybe spells can do that too.
Culturally, we are under so many spells as well. The Spell of the Universal — that what is true for us here must also be true for them over there which blinds us to the mandatory diversity of the world. The Spell of the Inevitable — that I will see you again tomorrow or even wake up tomorrow — when no such thing is promised to us. The Spell of Single Causes — that things have only one source or origin when it seems to be true that it takes at least two to create one.
My friend Dawn Dancing Otter, having read an earlier version of this essay, wrote me these words,
The first time I was awake to religious spell casting was at age 6 when our priest declared, with palpable emotional density, that ‘woman leads man to sin through her body’. The spell — my body was the devils tool to seduce men to sin — toxified and scarred every soft place within me. Ironically, it was Tantra, the sacred art of intimacy through conscious sensual meditation, that broke the spell. And in all of that willful binding of not just my mind, but how I show and receive Love, I was in a madness very like your description of Merlin. The first time I became aware of political spell casting was hearing George HW Bush give his New World Order speech. He described America as ‘a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky’. This was a ‘vision’, he asserted, not a poem, or a story. And, I could see what he was spelling. Layers upon layers of control, forceful invasion of peace in the peaceful sky. We are surrounded by the dark arts. And it’s not us witches, who, like Merlin, are immediately aware of those who might civilize us. It’s the dark arts of empire.
There are hundreds of spells we swim in every day, or that swim around inside of us, clouding our capacity to see the world clearly.
Spells are paved roads. They say, “We can get you there faster, regardless of the consequences to the world that these roads have,” (and paved roads are full of nothing but consequence for the world). Stories are trails, made by foot, hoof and paw, which follow the contours of the world as it is.
Spells have their basis in power. Stories have their basis in the land.
Spells always seem to have an agenda that serves someone who wants to be in control. Stories serve life.
Stories come to us from the world and are entrusted to us. Spells seem to come from humans.
Spells seem to have a goal to have something happen regardless of the circumstances. Consequences be damned. Stories are attesting to the circumstances and the consequences, a way of saying, “Something has happened.”