Our Crises Call for Re-enchantment

The invitation here is to let this equinox be a turn towards listening, towards being called, towards being in relationship with the more-than-human in ways that exceed or transgress what modernity has allowed.

So to that end, I'm going to start us off with a question:

Do elves exist?

I hitchhiked around Iceland asking this question when I was 20 years old. I'd read a NYT article about elves blocking road construction in Iceland and needed to know how. How can magic limit human development? How can a modern European country literally preserve space for elves?

I got a grant to go do fieldwork and try to find out, which ended up leading to a long-term, ongoing engagement with how our crises ask us to hold our world amongst others, and how elves might help.

All around the world, stories tell of "hidden beings" that mystically mediate between the human and more-than. From the huldufólk of Iceland, to the aos sídhe of Ireland, the patupaiarehe of Aotearoa's misty forests, Cree mannegishi between rapids and rocks, Japanese kami where wonder is felt in nature, to shape-shifting Arabic jinn, they're threshold beings that belong to a betweenness modernity erases. They contextualize our worlds amidst others, drawing us into participatory relationships with a wider world beyond what we can claim to "know."

They remind us that our world isn't the only one.

In stories across diverse traditions, they hold us accountable for ecological transgressions with forces that exceed our understanding. Icelandic builders who move the wrong stone are punished by the huldufólk; Irish farmers who cut the wrong tree face the wrath of aos sí; a Hawaiian chief who kills birds just for fun is violently reprimanded by the menehune.

These unseen worlds command reciprocity, respect, humility, and mutual obligation with what exceeds human bounds. In a world shared with hidden beings, there can be no "natural resource."

But of course, modernity renders them "not real," in processes entangled with those that separate lands from humans and humans from each other to create cities like this one, where we story our landscape very differently: with billboards and buildings, consumption and consumerism, leaving us with very little space for other possibility, for worlds beyond our own.

Which brings us to the equinox. Happy equinox. Today, our day is as long as our night. And as we tip from our long, light days of summer into the darkness of what's to come, it's an opportunity to reflect on balance.

We're a society out of balance.

Civilizationally speaking, maybe we've been in a very long summer, of constant production and consumption, activity and action, acting upon the land, speaking as though ours is the only voice, as though the whole world, if we could just light it up enough, could be entirely ours to see and know and dominate.

What if the metacrisis asks us to come into balance with an opposing darkness, with the wisdom the night knows when it's dark enough to see just tiny pinpricks of other worlds in the stars far beyond our reach.

What if the invitation is to come into a balance with a darkness, to not be so certain, to not assume that we can see everything or know everything, and instead to shut our eyes and learn how to listen to an earth that might be speaking back, returning with re-enchantment to a participatory relationship with a world of many worlds, not just ours.

Before this place was New York City, it was the unceded Lenape territory of Manhatta, often translated to mean "land of many hills," reflecting a sacred landscape of rolling topography, extensive forests, and rich marshlands.

This makes me wonder about the reality just beyond what we've paved over, the sacred that still might speak if we can only loosen enough from what we have deemed "real" in a capitalist/colonialist project of smothering all other worlds with just one, of closing ourselves off from a relational, living cosmos, a world of many worlds.

How can re-enchantment help?

I am just coming out of a retreat in Nova Scotia, and it sounds like we are doing the same thing here; I feel like I have not left. Part of what we were doing was bringing together poets and scientists and philosophers, and as a practice from that retreat I will open with a poem.

I think a lot of us are interested in having more of a relationship with place, with the hidden and obscured stories and histories that are here even in the concrete and the pavement. Part of adopting an animist worldview, a relational worldview, is this practice of acting as if the world is in communication with us, even here in New York City, even in the subway. What beings are reaching out for us to notice? Can every it, every object, also potentially be a thou, with agency? And what is the appropriate attitude, or daily practice, to help us begin to notice those invitations?

I think cracks and gaps and edges are very helpful. I think of the world as a middle, an ongoing ecotone. We inhabit it everywhere, because we inhabit a certain relationship with the more-than-human even if that relationship is a posture of severing or obscuring or disidentifying, a posture of abstraction, which modernity is very good at. So our ecotone here is an interesting place, in that it is not very aesthetically pleasing, but the practice of poeticizing the space is a good example of how we can begin to engage in a different way.

The only way we will heal or restore our relationship with place might be to change our encounter with it in the dark: to go into the cave. As I write, we must go to the places where we would risk meeting, there to be altered by, these other beings. This is the genuine place of meeting: the clearing in the forest, the moment of contact between one being and another, without the armature of colonization or the buffer of Cartesian abstraction. We must enter these places as best we can, vulnerable to them, because those abstractions do us no good in the cave. Realities become flipped, and we cannot obscure the spiritual implications of that.

So I don't know where else to go from here except with an invitation to fellowship and friendship, to meeting these beings and meeting each other, in this great commonwealth of life.

I spend most of my days dealing with financial technology, so I appreciate the opportunity to return to my pagan antecedents and to court the fae and the jinn in our midst. Climate Week is typically centered on folks wearing badges who sit in halls, but I tend to think it is in motley crews like this that the real catalytic forces come about.

I have been thinking about our topic, re-enchantment and crisis, and I always think it is nice to look at etymology. I won't dip into any false etymology, but I was thinking about words related to enchantment in Spanish. We say encantado, enchanted to meet you. Encantar, to sing, implying a different state of consciousness, a different state of connection. These words are obliquely and subliminally threaded through our worldview, so even reconnecting to those linguistic tidbits of memory can begin to re-enchant our way of being and seeing. I was also chatting with friends visiting from the Ecuadorian Amazon and we used the word asombroso, which means amazing. Sombra is shade: to be beneath the shade, implying a relationship between darkness and amazement.

So what I would like to invite in this panel is a little courtship with the darkness that is implied not only in the equinox we are celebrating today but in eclipses. A friend of mine, Frank Salzano, has been studying the oldest cuneiform tablets exhumed from the Tigris and Euphrates. In those texts, the oldest written language has three things to say: counting, who owns how many chickens, how many slaves, how many ducks, how many cows; the lines of kings, who is related to whom; and eclipses. While we go about New York on our phones, we do not realize the monumental force these cosmic bodies have on us. Donald Trump, for instance, was born on an eclipse. Do what you will with that. I want to entertain this edge, this ecotone Jeremy mentioned, of courting the darkness, and understanding that there is a direct relationship between danger, liminality, uncertainty, and the ability to be enchanted. You can look at Max Weber and Rudolf Otto, the German sociologist and theologian, making their commentaries about the maw of bureaucracy beginning to disenchant our world, and the direct correlation between the rise of bureaucratic civilization and the diminishment of the Garden of Eden. I think each of us came here today feeling that remembering of the Garden of Eden within us. So in a sober but also delirious way, I am excited to court this topic with you all.

Jeremy, you brought up in your poem the cave, and the mysteriousness of going in. It reminds me of something Thomas Berry once said: we do not need transcendence at this moment, we do not need to escape our situation through spirituality. We need inscendence, which is to go deep within, not into ourselves but into the cave, into the earth, into this thing that is holding all of us. That is the movement our spirituality might take if we want to heal the relationship to the more-than-human: not up, but down and in and deeper.

When it comes to enchantment, re-enchantment and disenchantment, something I think about a lot is metaphor. Metaphors are the tools we use to fight imaginal battles. Diane di Prima writes that the only war that matters is the war against the imagination; all other wars are subsumed in it. And Jan Zwicky, in her book Wisdom and Metaphor, says that those who think metaphorically are enabled to think truly, because the shape of their thinking echoes the shape of the world. So the wound is the first metaphor I will introduce for disenchantment, and one of the wounds that disenchants us is the separation of, and the disrespect we have toward, metaphorical truth. Literal comes from littera, the letter, the letter of the law. I also love thinking about the etymology of enchantment as a singing into, but literal comes out of written language, the idea that you check the truth of something against what is written. What is written is always derivative of what actually is, and what actually is, the stuff of life, is what metaphor deals with: poetry rather than prose. There is good reason to think poetry is older than prose, if we look at the evolution of human language, that prose and discursive speech are offshoots of an older poetic speech or song. The difference is that discursive speech separates you from things. That is that, and not that. Song and poetry bring you into experience, into the shared life-world we all inhabit.

A second metaphor is the wall. We are all feeling this: a sense of a wall, the alienation, the separation between ourselves and the more-than-human, between ourselves and our deeper selves. The metacrisis can be conceptualized as a kind of atomization, a separation of so many things into so many problems that we forget their deeper root. I really like this use of the wall from the Irish poet and philosopher John Moriarty, who takes Hadrian's Wall, which the Romans built across the north of England, and says that before the first stone of it was laid, Hadrian's Wall had become an inner wall against shamanic Eurasia, against dreamtime, against fairy. Aristotle had a hand in it. Descartes had a hand in it. Hardly an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century scientist or philosopher did not have a hand in it. Milton forced his savior to have a dreaded hand in it, and we have gone on building it, inwardly and outwardly. Philip K. Dick talked about the Black Iron Prison, that we are all stopped in time, and Jeremy can talk more about time: the idea that we have been frozen at a point in history, in the grip of empire, and the world is waiting for us. That is one beautiful thing about the wall metaphor. It implies there is a world waiting on the other side. Another version of the wall is the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the story of the creation of the walls of Babylon, and Marduk, who was a precursor to Yahweh, becoming the king god by slaying Tiamat, who represents the natural world, building that wall, taking the throne. These old wounds, these walls that were built, are also traumas, and trauma shuts us down and blocks us from the world. They become both social and collective, and inner and deeply personal. Every one of us in this room can remember a moment of disenchantment, maybe in childhood: you had an imaginary friend until someone told you they were an imaginary friend. That rejection, that pushing away, that exiling of the imaginal. The imaginal is a dimension of depth in this world that we cut ourselves off from when we take only the literal, only the surface, only the kinds of truth we are told hold authority. We block ourselves from the concretizations of the relationships between things, and those concretizations are the imaginal: a being you might have an experience with that is very real, that shapes your world, your phenomenology, your life. Through the colonial schooling we all had we became cut off from our own personal access to that deep realm, the imaginal other world, which really is just this world.

One more metaphor: vision, or blindness. We often think of the imagination, myths, stories and art as things that people create. What if they were instead things that we perceive? The idea that art is a reflection of us, that stories are a reflection of human creativity, is weird and new. In almost every other culture on the planet art is something spiritual, transmitted, acknowledged as coming from a source, at the very bare minimum collaborative. What we have been learning instead is what William Blake called single vision, and each of us, as an act of re-enchantment, can recall and resummon, and feel ourselves called to, double vision. Blake wrote: double the vision my eyes do see, and a double vision is always with me. With my inward eye an old man grey, with my outward a thistle across my way. And twofold always, may God us keep from single vision and Newton's sleep. What all of these metaphors share, and this is the last thing I will say, is separation. We have all of these conceptual wounds, these splits, these dualisms. A wall is a kind of dualism. A blindness is the shutting of one eye to see with only half our vision. A wound is a cutting open of flesh. The root of all of it, the metaphor of metaphors, seems to me to be the split between inner and outer: the very deep, inherited sense that our inner worlds have no relation to the outer world. The mid twentieth century had a revolution of the inward mind, of contemplative practice, that has been hugely transformative. I think now we need a revolution of the outward mind: the animate, the more-than-human, the collective, a multi-species sense of what consciousness is. That, to me, is the project of re-enchantment.