Magical Reality

I read a feature on Kevin Durant in The New York Times Magazine by Sam Anderson (s/o a former housemate of mine with the same name) with a questionable title and many, many beautiful phrases describing the Slim Reaper, the former MVP, the enigma known as KD. 

Anderson's description of Durant as an esoteric-thinker, a stoic savant ("He has exactly the sort of transcendental galaxy brain that likes to rise up very high, and then slightly higher, to think about things like deep time and space rocks and the meaning of life") is awfully different from the public image Durant has with the many NBA fans as a petty, delusional, somehow insecure superstar. I'm obviously in no position to comment on his character given that I've never met the guy; what I liked most about the piece was the way Anderson wrote about KD's game.

"He moves with a pure, unforced economy of motion, a frictionless glide," "When Durant makes a shot, its swish seems extra pure — the ball hovers inside the net for a second, as if it lives there, as if it wants to take its time and really enjoy itself before it falls," "the tall ethereal phantom."

A master in his craft is at a spiritual level, Anderson is trying to say. Almost magical. 

This got me thinking about the ubiquitous place that idea, magic, has in regular life. The concept of the inexplicable, of irrational occurrences, of things beyond our sphere of knowledge, is everywhere people are, and it permeates quite deeply. 

Authors use magic all the time. It feels like every piece of fiction employs an element of the fantastical. And in a somewhat contradictory way, the role it plays in storytelling is to help tell the audience something about the material world, the world that is in many ways defined by not having magic on its list of possibilities. The world defined by scientific principles and reason and logic.

 

I'm reading One Hundred Years of Solitude; it embodies the genre of magical realism, which itself comes from ancient human traditions. Religion, through its priests and shamans, has been crossing the canyon between real and magic for thousands of years, bringing stories and signs and even supposed displays of the divine existence to our holy rituals for time immemorial. 

Our levels of skepticism on the subject vary widely, but even if you only recognize the widespread, nearly universal presence of the metaphor of magic, the idea of miracle and that some things in our lives elude rational explanation, you see that there's something deeply ingrained about magic in us. It seems to be everywhere, and humans seem to rely heavily on it to grapple with a strange and chaotic existence. 

Magic might be a rudimentary word. But I think it captures the scope of what I'm talking about--how we have an urge to explain what we don't understand, and there's a whole lot we don't understand, so we need a stand-in idea to fill the gaps and allow us to move on with the day. When faced with the subconscious, or the bizarre laws of physics, or the endless creativity and curiosity of the brain, or the skills Kevin Durant has on the hardwood, we recognize a perceptible form of magic, a mundane and grand reality we can't really explain, a world that demands the inclusion of the great beyond in all its aspects. 

What each person considers magic is different, but I think there comes a point for everyone where the only explanation left is an ultimately unexplainable one. That's why it comes out in the mediums in which we try to answer those big questions; art, human communication, spirituality, our passions. Facing, and reckoning, the unknown is another shared experience between all of us.