Magic has been laid asunder like Beowulf has slain the dragon. Satisfied, we watch the monster draw its final breath as we die for battling it. We strive to allay our fears with understanding. We try to steal a monster’s power by explaining it. We pile up the evidence and investigation and steal the wonder from the world. Humans will always choose rote structure and sterility. We will sacrifice freedom and choice for security and comfort. It is just our nature. It eliminates adventure and struggles largely from our lives.
What if I wrote about a creature that can’t stop moving or it will die, has seven rows of razor sharp teeth in its mouth that can bite you in half, skin can cut you if rubbed the wrong way and can be as large as 25′. That would be a scary monster. It would keep people from wanting to enter its environment under any circumstance. But we swim in the ocean with sharks all the time. See how we sterilize the majestic and make it mundane.
Though we try to stifle the imminence of the unknown in the real world, we readily explore it in the world of fiction. How many times is the most unbelievable and magical story the bestseller or box-office destroyer? Who doesn’t know Harry Potter? Or T’Challa? What about the name Skywalker? Do the masses still know Atticus Finch? It seems that the more fantastic and unrealistic the more we hold our literature to heart. It allows us to more safely explore the most dangerous possibilities that imagination allows.
Our job as creative types is to inject the monsters and magic back into the peripheries of the banal worlds we live in. To help eyes see the once boring with new eyes full of possible wonders. Making the mundane a splendiferous almagamation of possibility, practicality, unreality, imagination, and magic. That’s our job, taking our lives and building a beautiful vision of reality that touches souls, minds, and hearts in new ways. Opening the perceptions to a widening vista the includes the beauty of our commonality and individuality into a unity that helps us all to comprehend the human condition.
At least that’s my take on our job as creative type people. Could be wrong.