SmArts

August 31 - September 6, 2015

On moving and magic

By Molly Rector

For the past two weeks, I’ve moved. Again. Something I’ve done at least once per year for the last ten. An exhausting process, not least of all because I have a tendency to hold onto things that maybe shouldn’t actually travel so far with me. I made an effort, this move, to get rid of some things: shredding tax receipts from five years ago I never got to use anyway, recycling notes from undergraduate classes I haven’t thought about for years (not to be confused with the notes I kept, from classes that meant more to me).
One of the things I found, in my (seemingly infinite) collection of papers was a note I had written on a small piece of paper – a quote from theorist Giorgio Agamben that said “what a disaster if a woman loved you because you deserved it.” I had forgotten about the essay (“Magic and Happiness”) this quotation came from, but I can tell this rediscovery will be a part of my vocabulary of thought throughout the coming months. It’s a meditation on the notion of “deserved” happiness, and the connection between magic and language. Agamben theorizes that the only true happiness is happiness we don’t aspire to (which he calls hubris), but which can be achieved through the “magic” of transformation that takes place in language.
Of course, being back in Fayetteville and beginning the next school year, I am thinking of this in terms of poetry – an art form that takes place largely through verbal symbols, which are a kind of transformation. But “magical thinking” is another concept that comes up often in what I’ve called my vocabulary of thought – the way we reach for what’s illogical in order to make sense of the unknown; how we do this through linguistic transformations, by uttering the “if only…”
Molly Rector is a staff writer for the Daily Record. Contact her at molly@dailydata.com.