I was listening to an interview with Salman Rushdie yesterday and amongst the many things that he discussed, he talked about surrealism, fabulism (a term I believe he created to describe a narrative technique where fantastical elements are placed within an ordinary setting) and magical realism.
He went on to speak of the draw towards surrealist art and storytelling, saying (and I paraphrase):
“Learning the truth in art can be arrived at through many doors. Realism is only one convention. Many cultures have preferred the language of myth and fable, fairy tale and highly imagined work [to arrive at understandings]…
… and what’s more, the world has ceased to be realistic. The world is now surreal. So maybe surrealism is a better way of describing the truth of it.
The problem with magical realism is that when people use it, people only hear ‘magical’ they don’t hear ‘real’. It has to be very deeply grounded in the sense of the real. It has to be rooted in a kind of truth.”
I wrote not long ago how, as humans, stories, mythologies, and archetypes have existed for millennia as portals for humans to express their fears, longings, and desires. As ways to shape and conjure what we experience as a collective. We have been influenced by them to negative effect- a long and extensive conversation for another day- but we have also been empowered, uplifted by them. We cannot separate ourselves out from our mythic imagination, from our dreams and hopes that express in the imaginative collective.
For better or worse, we are where we are because of our imagination. Understanding the power of symbolism, of images, of our ‘first thought, best thought’ that lies just under the surface of our skin, is an important piece in understanding our creative potential, of how we can use our imagination as a way in to deal with things that feel challenging, hopeless, or cause us to be overwhelmed.
But I beyond this, I also believe imagination to be the basis of connection- especially when it comes to establishing relationship and communication with a creature whose methods of communication differ from ours, but whose spirit shares the same desires; for cooperation, collaboration, and freedom.
I was talking with Chantel Prat a few days back (a legit neuroscientist) and we were discussing how so much of what we have come to ‘know’ about how a horse may feel or the true nature of their internal world is based on inference. We cannot ever truly know. We infer. We observe. We postulate and come to conclusions based on our observations of patterns and predictions.
But beyond that- and perhaps most importantly in my opinion- we sense.
Imagination, hunches, ideas that we have in the presence of our horses, curiosities that we follow based on nothing but our own ideas and intuitions; this is the process of enchantment. This is the process of co-creation. Where the feeling, energetic body of another living creature combines with ours, and together we create a third reality.
One that we could never have arrived at alone.
When those amongst us turn their noses up at the idea of magic, I actually feel sorry for them. Because it seems to me they are missing the whole point. After all, what makes life full and rich are the magical elements.
Consciousness, after all, is magic.
Thought is magic.
This enervating quality that causes us to know that we are alive is magic.
It’s wild and, for the most part, unexplainable.
Which is why we can never rest on our certainties- if we have them in the first place. The more I learn, the less certain I become.
And what’s more, the more I learn about the tangible and touchable, the more certain I become, the more trusting I am in the magical, surreal elements of the horse and human partnership.
Interestingly, they are what make the most sense to me.
‘Learning the truth in art can be arrived at through many doors’. And all good horsemanship at its root is art.
