Art, Magic & their Inextricable Link to Childhood

Your five-year old self knew what was up…

Maturity is a poison.

An insidiously invisible poison that saps our minds of its ability to perceive the world through a lens of ardor, awe and astonishment.

The expectation of maturation is endemic in modern society, as we place increasingly added pressure on ourselves to grow up, as if our childhood days of frolicking whimsy must be left behind for an entirely new chapter- one of strict, serious business.

I reject this notion.

The day we can realize that the world exists a richer, fuller place from the perspective of a child’s eyes is the day we can begin to harness and unlock life’s richer, fuller potential.

Alan Watts tells us to watch children. “We’ve lost [their] way of seeing… they see things in a fresh manner not related to survival or profit… Even scratches on the floor [have] magic.”

I turn 21 this September. Proudly still a self-proclaimed kid (it helps that I still do look like one).

Power, money, sex. Most of us can’t wait to grow up.

My thesis, however, is that we just go about it all wrong. There’s simply no reason (beyond our own unfounded insecurities) why we can’t enjoy all the spoils of an independent adult life without leaving our giggly, care-free nature behind.

They can coexist if we just allow them too.

After all, how much do we really know anyway?

I think a little Jostein Gaarder is appropriate here:

“Maybe we can comprehend a flower or an insect, but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe”

There is, and should remain, wonder and awe in a world of mystery and doubt.

So the remainder of this piece has bits and pieces taken from an essay I wrote in a Modern Philosophy course my sophomore year of college. I tried to (all too verbosely, honestly) focus on the fields of art, magic and love- exploring them through the lens of several of history’s most influential and illustrious philosophical works including Michel Foucault’s Prose of the World, E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art, and D.P. Walker’s Spiritual & Demonic Magic. These works all inform one another, illuminating the wrongs in the contemporary adult viewpoint, and elucidating the importance behind viewing the world like children again.

Before we engage in any critical discussion of these texts, we should establish a foundation of the human faculties that we use to grasp and understand our lives.

Of the “similitudes” we all recognize in the world, perhaps no philosopher has been more renowned in identifying the parallel relationships of resemblance than Michel Foucault.

Written in the chapter, The Prose of the World (in his greater work The Order of Things,) Foucault broke down the obscure barriers separating all natural objects from each other, and effectively strung all of the cosmos together through the invisible chain of these special types of association.

These associations he deemed similitudes.

In his chapter, he focuses on four main similitudes that the human mind creates when interacting with the varied, arcane symbols of the universe around us. Two specific classifications he describes, analogy and sympathy, draw upon physical comparison of similarity and difference between two objects’ characteristics.

Consider then, D.P. Walker’s explanation behind “the connexion between astrology and music”, which he deems “a simple…metaphysical metaphor or analogy”, despite the two ideas having steep differences in background or foundation.

When we think about these types of connections, the adult mind breaks down.

It complicates these things, drawing them apart from each other.

However, only when approaching these modes more simplistically, can we truly begin to understand the true complexity behind these associations that exist around us.

In order to understand these magical relationships between distant objects or ideas, it is perhaps helpful here to focus on a bottle cap.

From an arm’s length away, it should appear to look like what we expect: a rusted bottle-cap.

Only when we bring our eye closer to it, we can begin to easily discern the wonderfully vermillion hills and valleys that traverse it.

It will begin to appear like a world of its own.

In this way, there is a sort of dependence placed upon the spatial arrangement of objects to the viewer’s point of view, which ties into Foucault’s description of a third type of similitude, convenientia, which deals with the comparison of things that seem to touch.

The distinction is that the bottle-cap may not be touching exactly the rolling hills the eye may compare it to. So we say that rather, this likeness is reminiscent of the fourth type of similitude, emulation, which compares objects that do not exist on the same spatial plane, like the resemblance between the cosmological stars and a field of sunflowers.

Regardless of the species of comparison however, it seems that all too easily children are able to do detach themselves from external assumptions and implications (like that of rusty metal) and in doing so, strike a much deeper meaning behind life’s beauty.

If this is because children simply are not aware of these implications, then we adults must learn to get rid of them, constantly reminding ourselves:

How much am I really sure of anyway?

I argue that this natural ability to connect one distant entity to another is innately present in all humans, however it is society and it’s overbearingly Thalesian approach to life that narrows the field of possibilities to only what can be explicitly perceived.

“Thal- what now?”

I mean to refer to the ancient Milesian scientist Thales, and his influence on history in the attribution of cosmological uncertainties based on the explainable and not the supernatural.

This was a key progression in the history of thought, but also served as the beginning of viewing the world as an easily understood entity. It should be established that the world couldn’t exist in this ideal condition. On the grounds of their inexperience (more so than foolishness), children understand this.

We may be tempted to attribute that view to their ignorance, but there are ways adults can compromise knowledge and doubt to create a delicate balance in which a level of much greater understanding can result.

Let’s turn now to the story of art and its great developments across the ages of history.

Perhaps shed some light on the necessary mentalities viewers must adopt in looking at the world in this starkly different way. This is because the way viewers must look at art, Gombrich indirectly asserts, is precisely how we must go about understanding the strange, mystifying world around us.

In this way, he walks us through the art’s strange beginnings in practicality, and its objectification for particular modal purpose or definite function. “The primitives are sometimes…vague about what is real and what is a picture. On one occasion when a European artist made drawings of cattle in an African village, the inhabitants were distressed: ‘if you take them away with you, what are we to live on?”

These depictions of art predictably morphed into a focus on realism from the artists’ perspective. Much of art began to take on this strict approach to achieving exhaustive likeness to the world around them. With practice through centuries, the cows drawn on the inner walls of caves in Avignon (despite having fooling everyone then) have become perfected.

This is what Gombrich refers to when he discusses the “conquest of reality” in the early fifteenth century and the renaissance. When people of [this] period wanted to praise a poet or an artist”, he says, “they said that his work was as good as that of the ancients.”

But Gombrich is very clear in stating that this traditionalist view is something we as observers have graduated from.

It would seem that this story of art is quite a bit like the thesis of this paper.

I want to make the argument that there comes a time in the history of everything that we must graduate from our traditionalist, realist views of things in favor of the “surreal.”

Something about Dali’s Sleepâ gives me goosebumps. Everytime.

That’s the face I’m running from in all my nightmares.

Dali just it hits human consciousness on the nose with this one.

Perhaps he’s illustrating the dream world.

I argue he’s illustrating real life.

In discussing the art of the first half of the twentieth century, Gombrich is clear in stating, “reason can give us science but… only unreason can give us art.” Through this, he emphasizes the momentary subordination of attention to this aforementioned Thalesian doctrine in order to give further consideration to the inexplicable, and the anti-material. Gombrich states in reference to these surreal artists, like Magritte or Chirico:

“Their frantic wish to become childlike drove [them] to exercises in calculated silliness… [In] the creation of fantastic and dream-like images… [That] represented a complete break with the mental habits of artists who are prisoners of talent, virtuosity and all the little aesthetic specialties it was a new…inexplicable vision [that attempted] the impossible… and [captured] the feeling of strangeness that can overcome us when we encounter the unexpected and wholly enigmatic.”

This was a new approach to the illustration of life; however, it marked the popular notion that consumed most people in this part of the century. Of people at this time, Gombrich states, “they have become too much aware of the many problems which are hidden in [our lives].”

This surrealist movement was pivotal in exemplifying this shift in mentality, and serves as the single turning point from these times of classical thought. While Gombrich respects all ranges of artistic movement, a certain significance must be placed on this movement in proving my point.

However, the drive away from traditional, which is the force at the heart of the argument, wasn’t simply limited to this specific surrealist view.

Gombrich discusses Michelangelo in particular, who “show[ed] a bold disregard for all conventions”. It was through this process of true revolution that Michelangelo was able to break from the past and cement his name among that of art’s greats.

There is a fundamental importance in viewing art through our own original viewpoint, rejecting some of the precise ways of the past.

That’s how we have to view the world too.

It is as if the conservative, realist movements in art are to symbolize the very adult emphasis on strictly what can be perceived, while more modern, surrealist movements go to symbolize a richer, deeper understanding of all of life’s complex angles.

We err towards the philosophy of the latter if we are to appreciate all the unseen aspects in our fully indiscernible lives.

In the realm of the general theories of natural magic, it seems all too available to children that these invisible forces can and shall exist around them, while adults reject what cannot be directly seen.

I mean really, who believes that the rabbit was actually in his hat?

Walker defines the cumulative force of interpreting the magic in the world around us as vis imaginativia and speaks of “planetary influence[s] acting directly on the imagination of the operator, or indirectly through any or all of the forces.”

This indirect perception of the unexplainable is what adults (or the overly scientific) shun. However this rejection rejects, in and of itself, an entire mode of perception- the mode of hearing and the sympathetic vibrations of the waves around us. Walker asserts this point and explains, “the following passage from Ficino’s commentary on the Timaeus explains this quite fully”:

“Musical consonance occurs in the element which is the mean of all [i.e. air], and reaches the ears through motion, spherical motion: so that it is not surprising that it should be fitting tot he soul, which is both the mean of things, and the origin of circular motion. In addition, musical sound, more than anything else perceived by the senses, conveys, as if animated, the emotions and thoughts of the singer’s or player’s soul to the listener’s soul.”

There is an allusion to the soul here which is an entity all too easily disposed of by non-religious, atheist adults.

This should not surprise us, as Ficino entertains the idea of the soul as imperceptible and entirely unreachable through sight. However, this is the crux of his argument. We must not look with our eyes when uncovering these magical forces, but we must extend the sense of hearing to reach this level of higher enlightenment.

To be artists, dreamers, magicians, and loving individuals tends to embody everything that pragmatic adults do not.

As children, possibilities are endless and views are uncomplicated. This does not stem out of ignorance per se, but stems out of freedom.

In our modern society, growing up is just like a gradual imprisonment into our own limitations. It seems as though we all tend to check ourselves into cages of predictable certainty in a beautiful world of undecided impossibility.

Take The Little Prince.

Judging by its illustrations and simple prose, you would think Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote this book “for children.”

You’d be thinking like an adult. You’d be thinking wrong.

If you made it this far in the article, well, I give you no choice but to read this book (in its original language of French, if you can quickly learn it).

If, on the off-chance, you can’t learn all of French this afternoon, I give you full permission to take up the second-best option and read the English. It shouldn’t take you more than an hour to start and finish and I promise you, you will put it down, changed.

After taking an expedition across the universe, Exupéry’s protagonist, The Little Prince, tells us, “only children know what they are looking for.”

From the experience of his life and travels (and at the heart of Exupéry’s many lessons) the prince believes that “what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“The eyes are blind [and] one must look with the heart.”

Don’t these views echo Ficino’s assertions in his discussion of music, magic and the soul?

So much of the world exists underneath a veil that is simply waiting to be uncovered. The best method of uncovering this thick, silky veil is to open up the senses to doubt and the unknown.

To return to the beautiful mind of Alan Watts:

“The only way to regain a child’s view is to realize that you can’t do anything about it at all- you can’t even do nothing about it.”

Best wishes, kids.