Composed in the woods of Satans Kingdom at moonrise, December 21st, 2005.

Weary hunter at my head
Turning moon at my left shoulder
Ere I find my way to bed
The wine is gone, the wind grown colder
Where I ply my maple pole
The crusted snow has gone to seed
Come, Midwinter, make me whole
Bind the holy to their creed

I sat in a burgundy leather armchair in the study of my parents’ Norwood house, drinking tea and shuffling through old magic cards that had never existed. It was Christmas Eve.

My father came in. “Merry Christmas,” he said, tossed an envelope into my lap, then headed off to bed. A letter? Who knew I was here? Someone named Okami, apparently. The letter contained a single, typed sheet of notepaper in which Okami invited me to submit to a new magazine he was starting. He wanted something quick and dark, and he wanted it soon.

I had just the thing!

Ecstatic, I turned the envelope over, and realized I knew the return address. It belonged to an anime, comic and gaming store in an underground mall. It closed at midnight. If I hurried, I could make it. I shuffled through papers, found the story, pulled on coat and scarf and took a last look at the address.

Along the bottom of the page, I noticed a line of writing in a thin, feminine hand: a warning. “Don’t come after dark.” I shrugged it off, tossed the envelope onto the chair and headed out. I was just going to drop of the story and leave.

Danielle was sitting on the kitchen counter in her PJs, playing with her laptop. “Where you going, Boon?” I told her. “Can I come? I’m bored.”

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”

#

The mall was a series of angling, claustrophobic corridors connected by stairwell after stairwell leading down, then up, then down again. The walls and the floor and the ceiling were all white, all windowless. Who knew how far we were underground? Every shop window was dark. We hadn’t passed a single person.

“Where is everybody?” said Udi. “The mall doesn’t close for half an hour. It’s Christmas Eve!”

She was right. I was beginning to worry about that warning.

I shoved the story under my arm, fumbled in my pockets for something reassuring.
My fingers found the smooth, textured handle of my scrimshaw penknife. I wrapped an arm around my sister’s shoulders. We walked faster.

We were almost to the comic store by the time we noticed the two white cats following behind us.. It wasn’t clear how long they’d been there, but all of a sudden they were desperately friendly, pawing at us, rubbing against our ankles as we walked. I stopped to pet one and it jumped up into my arms. Udi tried to ignore hers. It was freaking her out.

At first glance, Okami’s was as dark and dead as all the other stores. Ultra-violent, ultra-cute anime girls on comic covers lined the walls from floor to ceiling. A cardboard stand-up of a cartoon dragon. A glass case, where they kept all the really rare and valuable stuff. More magic cards that didn’t exist. And behind the glass case, blending in so well with her surroundings I hadn’t noticed her until I looked her in the eye, a skinny asian girl in a ponytail, dressed all in black, with an expression of blank astonishment on her face.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I got your call for submissions letter. I was in town. I just came to drop this off.” I slid the story towards her across the glass.

She stopped it, turned it around and slid it back. “I can’t take this now.”

“What? But your letter said–”

“Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t take it. We closed early today. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to come here at night? You can bring it tomorrow. During the day. Now I think you’d better go. Quickly, all right? Get out of here.”

I was confused. I wanted to protest, to ask her to explain. I wanted to give her my story. “The Nine-Tailed Cat”. I knew they’d like it. I knew it was right up their alley. But the look on her face made me back away, grab Danielle and rush back the way we came.

Luna (for the cat in my arms was surely Luna, Singing Brook Farm’s fuzzy white female demon) yawned and pawed at my chest, claws poking gently through my shirt and into my skin, her unmistakable, eerily humanoid fifth claw sticking out like a thumb. It was like she wanted to reassure me, convince me things would be fine. I wasn’t convinced. Udi’s cat kept pawing at her, meowing plaintively.

“God,” she said finally, after the white mall corridors had blurred past us for who knows how long. “Aren’t we at the end yet? Why does this mall have to be so big?”

“We’re getting close,” I said. “Five more minutes.”

“Oh, fine!” Udi gave an exasperated sigh and scooped up the second white cat.

We were almost to the entrance. One more flight of stairs…

She screamed and dropped the cat. It must have clawed her or bit her. It ran into a corner and sat down licking its paws. “Ohmigod, Boon. Something’s happening to me! Help!” She held up her arm. It was thinning, elongating before my eyes. White tufts of cat hair sprang up out of her skin. Her hand was shrinking. She was turning into a werecat.

I put Luna down with an accusing look. Her green-white eyes were reproachful.

I fumbled in my pockets for the scrimshaw knife. A sailing scene carved in the handle, a ship and a rocky shore. I’d bought it on a stupid impulse at a tourist trap in Newfoundland. In the real world, it was already many years lost.

I flicked it open, locked it in place. The blade was a warm, clean gleam under the mall’s ghastly pale fluorescent lights. Pure silver.

I gave it to Danielle. “Prick your finger with this. It’s silver. It might help.”

Her hands were shaking. She crouched down, put her hand on the floor, palm facing up, and raised the knife. I was afraid she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t press hard enough.

She grimaced and brought the knife down. It pricked her finger. I saw a little smear of blood.

“Did it cure you? Did you feel anything?”

Udi nodded, face pale, lips hanging open. “Bliss. Relief. Understanding. Complete understanding of everything in the universe all at once.”

I thought she must have been joking, playing bitter sarcasm for all it was worth. Maybe the catness was already taking over her mind. But the way she said it sure didn’t sound like it. And her finger looked better. Pink and healthy.

“Then do it again,” I said. “Harder. Cut deeper.”

She shook her head. “You do it,” she said. She gave me the knife.

Five minutes away from the exit.

I ran my thumb across the blade. There was a catch at the very tip, a tiny, sharp burr I could never get out no matter how many times I tried to burnish it away with file or stone. That burr was what had pricked her. But I needed more than that now. I got a good grip on the handle. I held her wrist tight against the floor, positioned the knife just over the marks of the bite, right along the meat of the palm.

I gritted my teeth and tensed my muscles to slice–

And I woke.

I posted twelve more dreams from the back catalog, most from the period between Spring 2003 and Winter 2004, including some of my most profound experiences with lucid dreaming, superhuman powers and dream control.

I particularly recommend The House Was a Clockwork Automaton, perhaps my most thematically coherent dream ever.

What is magic realism?

I guess It would have made more sense to open the series with this question, make sure we were all on the same page before I started to tear them out and paste them together haphazard-like. Matter of fact, I meant to ask myself this question months ago, well before Odyssey, when it was still my sworn, deluded intention to write nothing but magic realist fiction while I was there. As it turns out, it’s lucky I didn’t. My definition has been drastically altered since then. Indeed, it may yet continue to change even as I’m sitting here trying to pin it, like the poorly-embalmed undead butterfly, to the page. Among many, many other things, Odyssey taught me wariness of terms. Does it show?

Still, I’m certainly never going to figure out how to write it unless I can ramble on about what it means long enough to work certain things out. I want a definition I can work from, which means a definition that allows me to write what I love. Beware. Here there be self-indulgence.

As I believe I’ve now made abundantly clear, what immediately gripped me upon first picking up Borges (upon first encountering a magic realist author termed as such), was the incredible gripping depth of his ideas, the complexity of his metaphors, the profound level on which his fictions engage the human condition. Yes, the preceding all sounds very pompous, and maybe makes me sound cleverer than I am. I believe what it all boils down to is the emotion they produced, which is awe.

Had I ever experienced that feeling before? Of course I had–it’s very much the same emotion that drew me to genre fiction in the first place. To Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper, when I was still just a kid. Before I’d become all jaded, before I’d grown accustomed to their tricks, to the standards they had set, I loved that awe so much that when I’d exhausted the good stuff I moved on to the Forgotten Realms and wondered why it all left such a foul taste in my mouth.

College caused me to break with that tradition (or rather, perhaps, intellectual aspirations originated by Michael Milan in my junior year high school english class, but only brought to fruition in the free, individualist environment of university-style education). As I couldn’t get the original pleasure out of the genre anyhow (or so I thought) I figured I must move on to the literary, refine my tastes, and attempt to get some similar pleasure out of the the inspiring quality of the writing itself as opposed to that of its content.

I loved Borges, and went on to hunt down everything else I could get my hands on that some unknown critic somewhere had convienently lumped together for me under the confusing heading ‘magic realism’, because it gave me a way back to the original raw emotional affinity I felt for fantasy without having to sacrifice the rarer pleasures of intellectual aspiration.

Magic realism, then, is for me rather like the cocaine to fantasy’s weed and literature’s alcohol.

Which is NOT my working definition.

Hell, I might just as easily say “magic realism” is merely “literary fantasy”. I have no desire to go into my immense dislike for THAT self-contradictory term and the writings which wedge themselves beneath its leaky umbrella. Suffice it to say that “literary” is a term reasonably applied by critics, not writers, a term, in other words, entirely subject to opinion. I’d much rather refrain from insulting the writing of any still-living author by referring to it as “literature”, and reserve that term for the works of the dead. Even the term “fantasy” carries problematic weight when applied to a contemporary work. For me, it connotes a great deal of derivation from fantasy of generations past. And frankly, how many gryphons/dragons/wizards/airships/magic swords does one find in Borges, Garcia Marquez, Bioy Casares, Calvino (just sticking to my canonical magic realists so as not to rock the boat)? None I have encountered. Now, there are a lot of writers I’d like to shift into the magic realist category who do in fact derive from other speculative fictions–Castaneda is my prime example–but they derive from what I’d call primary fictions. Myth. Tradition. Belief.

So, I’d say magic realism requires a more direct, distinct, and independent form of derivation from fictions that precede it than do either fantasy or literature. Indeed, it’s just possible that’s all it requires. Let’s look at something really borderline, then, shall we? To see if fits this theory. Consider Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel, or indeed any of his several other works that deal in transmigration of the soul, along the lines of Frankenstein. Are these not science fantasy? Is Frankenstein then a magic realist work? No. No, I do believe there is a distinction to be drawn, and here we come close to the definition Jeanne used for “magical realism” (my emphasis, as that “-al” will become important as we move on). Dr. Frankenstein treats his work as scientific. Shelley herself treats it as such. And while passion may overwhelm science as the driving force by the story’s end, science never ceases to be a subject of the conflict–science as exclusive province of man, indeed as one of his defining attributes, the way divine creation is attributed to God. The same could be said of Dr. Moreau. For Dr. Morel, on the other hand, fictitious science is merely the means which allows for the plausibility of a unique sequence of situations meant to illustrate the combined nature of love, memory and apprehension. Science is neither a theme nor a concern in the narrative. Passion is. Emotion is.

I use the term “magic realism” as opposed to “magical realism” at least partly because it is the term to which I was introduced. It is also, as I understand it, the older term. It originated in the 1920’s, intended, somewhat arbitrarily, to describe a style not of writing but painting, a style not entirely divested from post-expressionism and surrealism. But it was Miguel Angel Asturias, a Guatemalan writer if possible even less readable than Borges, who first chose the term to describe his own work, and it’s his example I choose to follow. “Magical realism” has always struck me as a critical rather than a writerly term, and I suspect its adoption by the modern English-speaking critical community may have been the result of a mistranslation. Mistranslation though it may be, however, it does serve a practical purpose in conveying one aspect of the meaning of the term. What sort of realism can justifiably be referred to as “magical”? The sort, I should say, that strikes the same chords as magic in a reader’s emotion–the sort that invokes awe. A magical realism, in other words, need not involve magic at all as the supernatural force we know from fantasy, so long as its realism evokes the same emotions. Thus can something like The General in His Labyrinth, by Garcia Marquez, a completely realistic, if fictional, memoir, still be accommodated by my definition.

Asturias, however, certainly did not choose the term for his own writing because of this literal interpretation of its mistranslation. Rather, he chose it because his writing does indeed involve magic of the traditional, supernatural sort–only not safely removed to some well-distant fairytale, but here in the real world. Asturias’ Men of Maize postulates, albeit with certain subtle reservations pertaining to fiction and belief, that Mayan mythology is true, that the Popol Vuh is real–or at least it was. Here then is the last, the broadest, and likely most the controversial facet of my definition of magic realism–the facet which allows me to include, not only Castaneda, beloved fraud in half-truth’s clothing, but the Bible, the Quran, the Torah, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of the Dead, the Bhagavad Gita, the Popol Vuh, etc, etc, on down through every divinely-inspired text of human belief ever produced. So long as you’re willing to admit they’re all fiction.

The second half of Jeanne’s official Odyssey definition of “magical realism” is that it must take a matter-of-fact approach to the fantastic, taking it for granted, so to speak, that magic is real and nothing to make a fuss about. A good example is the five-year rainstorm in One Hundred Years of Solitude about which nobody seems to bat an eye, so preoccupied are they with their wars and tragedies and suchlike. I’ve already established that the inverse of this rule also applies–that an everyday event treated as magical can have the same profound impact on the reader. But don’t the Popol Vuh, and indeed every other form of cultural mythology, fit Jeanne’s criterion? From our enlightened, English-speaking Western perspective, sure. They are fictions which, because they were once believed true, treat their fantastical content as real.

There are certainly others aside from myself who consider Carlos Castaneda among magic realists. There are others who consider him a writer of nonfiction, who would scoff, or even take offense, were I to suggest otherwise. But isn’t that true of any religion? My opinion in the matter originates with what Michael said when he lent me his copy of The Art of Dreaming. I paraphrase: “He claims it’s true, but there are complications. It’s best if you read this as fiction.” There is in Castaneda, however fraudulent, however tongue-in-cheek, an assertion of realness. And so long as I take Michael’s advice, and, for the purposes of pleasure, choose not to take Castaneda at his word, I am able to include him among magic realists.

A particular complaint leveled against the use of the term “magical realism” by Western critical circles is that it’s merely a postcolonial means of marginalizing colonial fiction, depriving it of the respect it deserves from the literary mainstream. I haven’t bothered to address this, because I couldn’t care less about the literary mainstream, whereas I hold the utmost respect for a great deal of what hovers on its fringe. But it’s this particular and peculiar distaste of mine for the cultural mainstream which gives me such perverse pleasure in including this last cagetory of magic realist works–those that people still do believe in. If that which brings me utmost pleasure in reading either fantasy or magic realism is awe, what then can be more awe-inspiring then the possibility, however far-fetched, however seemingly absurd, that the magic of which a ‘fiction’ speaks could indeed be real?

At last I reach a point of relative confidence. So. What constitutes a magic realist fiction?

1. Independence from the line of descent of mainstream fantastic fiction, either via the use of primary fantastic fictions such as myth, folklore and belief, or through individual creative thought.
2. The capacity to foster intense emotional responses in the reader, which I’ll call awe, through an uncanny, near-magical depth of understanding of the human condition demonstrated by monumental metaphor, or through the ability to reverse the roles of the fantastic and mundane, to create the possibility, however slight and by whatever means, that the fantastic is real, and the real fantastical.

This began as an attempt to define “magic realism”, but the tangent got so long I have decided to cut it off and isolate it in the manner of a mad scientist experimenting on a possessed extremity.

My first experience with magic realism termed as such was a Tufts class called “Literature of Chaos” taught by Juan Alonso. Best reading list ever! Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, Notes from Underground, The Stranger, and Borges. A harrowing lead-in, if I do declare. Violence and self-destruction digging deep ruts into the tracks of my consciousness, so when Borges came and knocked me sideways out of my shoes, the flood picked me up and dragged me with it. And no, that metaphor is not mixed. It is drawn from erosion.

It may not have been the first story of Borges’ I laid eyes on, but it was certainly “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” that first caught hold of my imagination in that elusive, open-ended way that has ever since riveted me to these strange aspirations.

The structure of “Tlön” is strongly reminiscent of horror. Its narrator is fervent, fastidious, quite Poeish really, even rather Lovecraftian, in that he remains consistently direct, seeming not at all interested in the beauty, the near-magical impact of the language by which he conveys his tale, but concentrates instead on the immense, brooding, consuming revelation that its events have provoked. Like so many of Lovecraft’s works and Poe’s, “Tlön” is written as historical narrative, as clear, concise observation by an intelligent, rational man of a series of events leading swiftly and directly away from rationality.

Often, a fiction of Borges loses its narrator entirely in the course of the telling. It seems to begin as a traditional story begins, with a person and a problem, a connection between reader and character that draws the reader further. Yet that human connection is lost at the wayside. What draws me to read to the end is not identification, not an interest in the outcome of a character’s plight. Rather, I have become that character, taken on his only defining attributes: his diligence, his fascination. I am unwilling to abandon the fathomless puzzle, despite the knowledge that this puzzle, as it has already caused the elision of the character whose place I’ve taken, will now impose that elision upon the story itself, projecting itself, by means of the human connection with which it began, out of fiction and onto the canvas of my own consciousness. “Tlön” has this structure, as do “The Circular Ruin”, “The Garden of Forking Paths”, “The Library of Babel”, “Funes, His Memory”, etc.

This structure is in fact what I was referring to when, in an earlier comment, I said the attempt to emulate Borges could lead to a mistaken emulation of Lovecraft. The Lovecraftian story structure, in order to achieve the sense of awe/terror with which the story leaves the reader at the end, simply replaces that monumental, ineluctable Borgesian metaphor (for example the garden-containing-book-containing-garden-actualizing-fate of “The Garden of Forking Paths”, or the self-actualizing universe of “Tlön”), with something from the standard Lovecraftian phraseology of externally-imposed madness (for example a Horror from Out of Time, or an Unspeakable Monstrosity from the Fathomless Aeons, or some such silliness). Not that I don’t love Lovecraft. But his stories veer sharply away from profundity as they reach that crucial point, and begin to move instead in the direction of pulp. Which is what makes them so much fun. Everybody loves pulp. Not everybody loves profundity.

It’s this fascination with profundity, with the intellectually engaging rather than the merely entertaining, to which I was making reference in the previous entry when I referred to a “willingness to hold a narrative at arm’s length”. It’s the reason I think the majority of people who read Borges find him dry and unpalatable, the reason I call him the Kant of Magic Realists.