On creating enchantment.
When things feel hard, it's time to shake things up and make some magic.
“Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so… Creating enchantment is an effective means of counteracting this depressing, banal habit.”
- Rene Magritte
A few weeks ago, my electricity cut out. None of my appliances were at fault; something else was wrong. I called an electrician who determined that there was a fault in a circuit my living room. As soon as he got things working again with new cabling, the boiler wouldn’t switch back on. I called another expert in. The fan had died. A replacement part was needed. Meanwhile, the plumbing in my bathroom started backing up. A bunch of money and time lost, I reached a bit of a breaking point.
All this came after months and months of endless rejection, disappointment, and obstacles in my creative process and serious stress in my working life, too. In the face of all this, even small disruptions felt much bigger than they ought to - something mundane can become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. None of this helps with the daily creative routine.
I had enough of this banal, dejected feeling that had begun to permeate everything. I was starting to bore myself. So, I decided that the money I was saving for another purpose was no longer worth saving. Instead, I booked a solo getaway. The vibe was very Emily Gilmore having completely had it, in one of my all-time favourite Gilmore Girls episodes…
In the quote at the top, Magritte mentions “creating enchantment” as an effective means of counteracting the urge to see life as terrifying - by extension, I’d add that it is also easy to come to see life as disappointing, cruel and exhausting. Especially as a creative, whose identity is merged with their practice in many ways. I’ve talked before about the difficulties of maintaining hope and creating space to be yourself and assert an identity alongside your practice. But this is harder to do when the banal and the terrifying become the norm. So I found this idea of enchantment to be particularly appealing as a potential salve - what does it mean to create enchantment?
Going on a journey, but not an adventure.
For my solo getaway, I started out in Venice. For me, this is a city where several key core memories are associated - moments where I have pivoted in life, by rethinking and reframing myself. So in a way, I chose it because it feels familiar. I wasn’t really trying to push the boat out, or go on a big adventure. I just wanted to eat a lot of pasta, walk anywhere that looked interesting, and take lots of pictures with my new 35mm camera.
I ended up having two baths a day, and hanging out with my friend, an artist who normally lives in New York. Catching up with a good friend, revelling in a beautiful city, and having no agenda whatsoever, meant I did nothing else except create enchantment for myself. It helps that every inch of Venice is an aesthetic experience; a place that is rich for sensory refuelling.
For the longest time, I felt I needed to prove my discipline in order to prove my seriousness about my craft. But I could no longer create enchantment for myself by staying in the same space, in the same routine, as I’d been ruthlessly maintaining for months. The trust I have built with my craft is able to withstand a break - I knew a week away won’t end my creativity forever. It was long overdue for me to rely on that trust.
While a lot of attention is paid to getting started, or indeed to finishing things, it’s the long middle that is hard to define and often neglected in discussions about craft. That long middle - when nothing has yet come to fruition - can be years in the case of a novelist. But in any craft, the chance to shake things up may just be the thing that sets you back on track.
Embracing small magic.
After Venice, I flew to Edinburgh, a city I lived in as a student. I often think of Edinburgh as the place where I “grew up”; even though I spent most of my youth in Sydney, Australia, it was Edinburgh where I properly started to learn how to adult. In Edinburgh, I did more walking around, more picture taking, more solo meals, and met yet more artist friends. There isn’t much of Edinburgh I haven’t seen before, so I felt no real obligation to do anything in particular. All I did was take it in.
I don’t know how much of this is female-coded, or just a fact of my particular personality, but I have a tendency to see all problems and set backs as mine alone to solve. Things got too heavy. That’s where the terror creeps in; when the enchantment leaks out. I probably didn’t need to go as far as Venice or Edinburgh to create this enchantment. All I needed was a permission slip to step outside my everyday self - the self who is always at the desk by a certain hour, who always addresses problems in the home quickly and efficiently, who keeps things running smoothly. It took a pleasing balance of newness and familiarity to create enchantment enough in order to reset my everyday. But familiarity and newness is everywhere anyway. To quote Nick Cave:
The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.
This sure is easier when you don’t have a million responsibilities to attend to. But the responsibilities don’t go away; they are part of this. So the question is: can you create a little space, to be a different self for a while? To re-contextualise? Can you create just enough enchantment in what you find, to keep that long middle from sagging?
The everyday routine is something I write and think about often, because I firmly believe in the importance of creating the regular structure that serves your craft. However, a mix of career setbacks, personal disappointments and too much adult administration, slowly but surely eroded my excitement for my work (and life more broadly). Fear gets its hooks into you when you don’t have the reserves to counteract it. It’s like having a low immune system; you’ve got to rebuild it before you can survive more attack. I’ve said before that I don’t think writer’s block exists - you just need to refuel. This was my chance, and it made the simple act of a walk in the sun feel like enchantment again. I returned home feeling more regulated, more myself again.
A note to my future self: Don’t let the terror become everything. Create enchantment instead.
On a separate note, some news from me: I am the co-editor-in-chief of a new literary journal called glut and we just released our first edition - Double Take!
Glut is really all about the ethos of this newsletter: revelling in experimentation, revealing the process behind creative work, and fostering a playful spirit. Glut is all about wanting more, and enjoying it fully. I’d love for you to take a look and tell me what you think of our five featured pieces.
That’s all for now. Thanks for sticking with me in these increasingly sporadic missives. Your support means a lot to me.
Until next time,
Be well.
CCx