Magical realism as a philosophy for living - Step Two

Be horrified. Be amazed.

We live in constant fear of the worst possible thing happening and yet when it does we seem able to almost instantly accept it, or perhaps worse, become desensitized to it. Queensland floods followed by Christchurch earthquake, followed by Japan tsunami, followed by Japan nuclear melt down. Or, more eloquently put...

‘The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory 

of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in 

Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the

 Sinai Desert drowned out the groans in Bangladesh, the massacres in

 Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, 

until everyone has completely forgotten everything’ 

(Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting).

Perhaps it is that we live in a reality so strange, so desperate and so overwhelming that a lack of reaction is our only method of self-preservation. Magical realist Anne Hegerfeldt puts it like this:

 ‘…to describe atrocities of war, governmental oppression,

 police brutality or racism…in supernaturalizing cruel events,

 the texts express a stunned incredulity about the state of

 the world, implying that the idea of such things actually

 happening exceeds – or should exceed – the human imagination’.

But the fantastic reality, or defamiliarisation of the everyday, however cruel it may be, also permits us to view events with a fresh wonder and childlike innocence.

You may already be living a magical realist perspective  based on the ability to assimilate the truly bizarre, shocking and extraordinary into everyday reality. But for most people this merely suggests their apathy.

Magical realism attempts to shock people out of the habitual response to the travesties of this world. The magical works as a method of defamiliarisation. But yes, you have to impose that perspective for yourself. You have to allow yourself to be shocked and you have to maintain that position in order to do more than  experience some fleeting catharsis extracted from someone else’s pain.

I’m not arguing that a magical realist perspective can only come into play when we are presented with an event inexplicable to science and logic. Rather, that if we could start reacting to the things we take for granted as absolute tragedies and wonders both, then we may wake ourselves up from the inert slumber we spend most of our time in. Not reacting to either the beauty or the horror is as good as being dead.