The Re-enchantment of the World
In the studio lately I’ve been catching up on podcast listening. Here’s one that stood out. This discussion between Stanford University professor Joshua Landy and UC-Davis professor Michael Saler aired on a recent Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature) with Robert Harrison on KZSU-Stanford. (Harrison is out of the studio for this one.) It’s thoughtful, devoid of cliche, and touches on a lot of themes that come up in discussions here: Rationalism, Romanticism, spirituality, Pragmatism, Romantic Irony vs. Slacker Irony, villiany, scientific discovery as a form of Wonder, and Star Trek. It’s an absolute must-listen.
Don’t know about anyone else, but I had to go to the iTunes store to get that specific podcast (it’s free). I think they must update the link to the most recent show…
Fixed the link. That was my bad. But I have enjoyed every episode I’ve listened to, so do recommend subscribing to the podcast.
Thanks, Sam!
This post lead me to discover that I can listen to podcasts on my ipod. I liked the one about agriculture, civilization is fascinating. Thank you! I check this blog every few days. (p.s. This is Alicia Obermeyer, your humble Herron student from years ago. p.p.s. I quit my third shift job and started to like art school a lot more, thanks for the persistent advice.)
i loved this podcast and found it coming back up in my mind for day and days after listening.
one of the major things i took away from it was this notion that there is a secular enchantment, a nonreligious or nonspiritual enchantment and that this might be the means of re-enchanting a world where – in spite of some aspects of recent history – we’re becoming more and more post-religious. i’m interested in this even as a faith-motivated individual myself.
my interest is in sussing out the dynamic of what carries enchantment. it seems to me that in the past it was the institutions and ordinances of religion that created a kind of perspective set which made a certain kind of enchantment possible for believers, and this spilled over into the general population. one thing that i’ve noticed a lot in my readings and seekings over the last 15 years is that it seems like the conveyance of enchantment is in a kind of awe.
i think awe is something that connects subjective experiences of all kinds, and bridges gaps between romantic and pragmatic poles.
there was a great article in national geographic magazine from 2003 years ago where the scientists looking for the earliest galaxies would play mazzy star each night while looking over the data and peering into the 13.5 billion light-years of void from high atop keck observatory on mauna kea in hawaii . i don’t know about you, but to me this combination of geeky ontological mysticism is just about my definition of enchantment.
to stay on the astrophysics/cosmology theme, i once saw a really fantastic interview of carolyn porco, a planetary scientist who worked for JPL back in the 1980s working imagery from the voyager spacecraft when it made its pass of saturn. in the interview she describes (i’m paraphrasing) once being alone in the lab in the early hours of the morning and receiving photographic data from voyager and experiencing a moment of awesome connection, a realization of the preciousness of being the first one to see these images, of her connection to voyager, saturn, and all of human yearning to know. the focus of a human attempt being embodied in one person connecting to a vast scene that no one else has ever seen. that’s awe. that’s an enchantment of the world. i love it.
(BTW, porco really is a national treasure: she’s been a leader in the study of saturn for decades and currently heads up the imaging program for the cassini spacecraft that’s in orbit around saturn right now. you can see her TED talks here watch the “carolyn porco flies us to saturn” one to get a sense of what i mean about awe and enchantment).
anyway, i’m going on and on, but what i’m aiming at is that our sense of awe via relational connection and perspective is the basis of enchantment (or re-enchantment, if you feel like you’ve been living in a disenchanted world). how does that relate to art? i think it’s fundamental to what pictures do.
great, trans-historical artworks are – i’m convinced – based on a twin notion of the finite and the infinite, the iconic and the immense, in tandem or some sort of tensed balance.
the iconic is that singular element that provides focus, detail, specificity, and identifiable knowing. it is about the part, the limited, and the basic. the iconic is singular, not the whole; it’s about the individual, not the group.
on the other hand the infinite is broad, abstract, the kind of world or cosmic force. it provides a sense of totality, of massiveness, of more than the sum of the parts. it is vertiginous, an arena of uncertainty beyond sight and what is readily identifiable. it touches our arena of knowing but passes beyond that horizon.
it is the perspective-giving, relational, cross-contextual interface between these two things – the finite and the infinite – that becomes the place where awe and enchantment and art reside, delivering to the human psyche a point of access to what we can know and a place for contemplation of what is beyond us.
i just got done going through moby dick again, and i certainly experienced what i’m talking about above while reading it. the podcast talked a lot about c.s. lewis and tolkien, but i kept coming back to the swaths of science, anthropology, philosophy, theology, romanticism, and narrative force that moby dick has in it…
or maybe the enchanted world is too over the top?
PS: james elkins has done quite a bit of work in re-enchantment. he’s collected it here.
@matt ballou:
For Porco as you recall her, see +-4:00-5:00 in the following youtube video:
Matt, that kind of gives me a great idea for a discussion topic. I want to take an informal poll: MWC readers, commenters and lurkers, what gives you that sensation of re-enchantment (or awe, even)? Anything you’d want to mention especially at the moment–be it cultural products or nature or whatever?