Sometimes I create lists of writing prompts for myself, either as an exercise, or to keep this blog thing going.
This one, Mystery is Bigger Than Magic, showed up on my list without my intervention. Well, maybe I typed it. I don’t know. Somebody must have. I have no idea why I would have, and I don’t really remember doing it, and I certainly don’t know what the hell I meant . . . so . . . here we go.
I’m a huge fan of mystery. I even love to read mysteries, and how it makes my brain feel to work at a mystery, to follow threads, to untie knots in reasoning. In the abstract, murder mysteries can be fun. The plucky heroine risks life and limb, following clues, digging up details, making discoveries, uncovering secrets. It’s fun to walk along beside the Detective Inspector as he flashes his Scotland Yard badge and asks impolite questions with intense diplomacy. And sometimes the solution to the mystery is really satisfying. And sometimes it is really not satisfying at all. Sometimes maybe the author was past deadline, had no idea who the hell done it and just made something up.
Real mystery, on the other hand — and not the grisly murder kind — is bigger than that. We have to face the Unknowable, and be okay with that. To be okay with glimpsing a fragment or a fraction, just enough to make us want to know more, only to have the rug yanked out from under us with the next thought.
Oh, there’s the floor, yes, I was wondering what happened to that. Glad my ass could find it.
Mystery is an ache in me, a life-long longing and a yawning void. I fucking want to know. I need it. I crave it. Mystery keeps me awake at night. I stare into the abyss in the pitch dark and rage because I can’t see a goddamn thing. I have studied, read, meditated, ingested, inhaled, and imbibed, all for the sake of peeling back the veil and finally understanding some tiny piece of the mysteries. And sometimes it has worked, and I grabbed my journal and frantically scribbled it all down . . . and the next morning I excitedly re-read it, and most of the time it was grot. Pure tosh. Useless.
Not always. Sometimes I got a slightly bigger glimpse. And the mother and father of all headaches. So was it worth it? Not really.
Seeing past the veil exacts a price. You lose something that you never get back. Think about . . . when you were a kid, did you snoop in the presents under the Solstice tree? Guilty. There was one present one year, I just had to know. It was so tantalizing, so mysterious. So one evening when my parents were out, I got my snoop on. I surgically unwrapped it, and saw this amazing, strange, magical, beautiful thing. It took my breath away. And then I rewrapped it, and no one could have ever known. But I did. And when it came time to officially open presents as a family, my heart was not in it. I felt no surprise, no excitement. I knew what it was — and I loved it, I truly did. But the magic was gone.
Ah, magic. When you see through the veil into the mystery, you sacrifice the tingle, the shivers, the racing heart. You lose the intensity of the excitement. If I hadn’t snooped, that present would have been like a snog straight from the jolly elf. I don’t think I snooped again after that.
Magic is what fuels the mystery, not the mystery itself. We understand a bit of magic. We get it that what we put our minds to becomes part of our life, one way or another. We know that the Universe works in mysterious ways, and we know how to tune in to some of that, to harmonize our frequencies with the frequencies of the things we want to attract. We know how to cast spells, how to read omens, draw sigils, read runes. But the real mysteries, the arcane knowledge, the hidden truths . . . Well, they’re hidden, aren’t they?
They’re “That-Which-Cannot-Be-Told.”
There’s a story about a cauldron (oh, it’s always a cauldron, init?) into which the bodies of dead soldiers were placed, and they emerged from the cauldron reborn — but they couldn’t speak, because they had been to the Other Side, they knew what awaited us after death and they were forbidden, or unable, to verbalize it.
Have you ever had one of those experiences that was so dazzlingly magical and amazing and so deeply affecting that you had no words? Yeah. Me too. You can’t talk about it. You try, but you can never get it right, so you quit trying. It’s there, in your memory, but the inability to articulate it makes you doubt yourself, and eventually, it becomes a thing you thought happened, but now you know it was . . . you know, trick of the light, some sound from outside, maybe a hot flash or . . . some kind of seizure? Maybe you fell asleep for a second?
We will never know.
It’s a mystery. That’s what mystery means. There are some things that are just unknowable, and we have to know they can’t be known and accept that we will never know. We can’t understand everything. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than exist in your philosophy. Or mine.
I often compare being a guitarist to climbing a really big mountain. You think you’re getting close to the top, and you come up onto a rise and you think, yeah, now I’m really cooking; and then you look up. There’s another huge mountain in front of you.
Mystery is like that. You get a glimpse, and you think, ah, now we’re onto something! Sometimes you realize that the principle is so utterly simple that there’s no mystery involved at all, it’s just everyday commonsense, and that’s a letdown. Practicality is not at all romantic. But the Universe is organized, and efficient. It doesn’t waste any energy being flashy. We can’t understand a lot of the mystery because our brains are just too limited, so we have to wait until we’re discorporated and can handle everything happening all at once to understand it all. Until then, we will have to do the best we can.
