A Pitched Battle Between Magicians
The life and death of oil painting, MTV, the liberal arts, buffalo dances, snackable content, and the miraculous serpent of Pharaoh.
In Exodus, there’s a scene where Moses is making his case to Pharaoh, and to prove his bona fides, he throws his staff on the floor and it turns to a snake. Pretty wild stuff. Then without missing a beat, Pharaoh has his court magician throw a staff on the floor, and it too becomes a snake. Then Moses’ snake eats the magician’s, which is cool, but not cool enough to convince Pharaoh.
That scene always struck me as a little nuts. According to the book, Moses had the one true Author of the universe on his side, and produced a miracle that barely outpaced the one made by an employee of the false idol. It’s the first of many such miracle contests among priests in the Old Testament.
These contests seemed strange and obscure to me when I read them to pass the time in Catholic school in Massachusetts. But they’re coming into focus more now that my own magicians are taking it on the chin.
Lately, I’ve been reading the letters of George Caitlin, who traveled among the then-unsettled western territories between the Mississippi and the rocky Mountains in the 1830s. He was an artist from Back East who wanted to paint the vanishing world of the Native American.
He started at a fort on the Missouri River. There, the great and the good of the passing tribes jostled and competed to sit for their portraits. Before long, Caitlin got into a canoe and went to the villages themselves, where he was a lone stranger.
The now-vanished Mandan tribe welcomed Caitlin. Their medicine men appreciated Caitlin’s painting as a medicine in its own right, invited him into their ranks, and shared their stories and rituals.
Medicine, as defined by Caitlin’s hosts, is something like mystery and something like potency. It belongs to individuals, as it still did in the hands of Mark Rothko or Thelonious Monk. It is magic itself.
Magicians always compete, as in Exodus. In music, poetry, even technology, there are always rivalries, always competition. Caitlin describes a scene where the young men compete in a dance to end a drought, and then try to connive credit for their magic when the rain does arrive.
What’s interesting in Caitlin’s overall account is the relationship between totally different kinds of magic. The painter and the buffalo-dancer have a kinship that they don’t need to explain.
At one point, the Mandan medicine men hold an exhibition of Caitlin’s images. After an hour of awe, fear sets in. The pictures aren’t a creation, say a few in the tribe, but rather a theft.
What Caitlin stole, he understands from the hubbub, is something small, but deeply significant. The subjects of his paintings may not feel it now, the critics, argued, but later they’ll find themselves unable to sleep quietly in their graves.
The medicine men stand up for Caitlin, and the controversy dies down. But there’s something true in your first misapprehension of a piece of art. In my experience, this since-disproven glimpse often comes back again, long after I know better - to haunt, or to free me.
Who is Mona Lisa these days? Can she sleep peacefully in the grave? Does she benefit from the attention she extracts from? Does she bestow some of her deathless grace upon us? What exactly does the Mona Lisa do all day?
In the glance of a painted face or a sculpted face, some power of vitality passes between the living and the dead. And it’s up for debate who’s the lender and who’s the debtor.
I saw a movie a few years back that ended with the Mona Lisa being incinerated. There was something kind of nice about it, in the movie. And I’m the kind of cranky middle-aged man who invariably gets irritated when the climate kids throw soup on a Van Gogh.
This magic of art is complicated - not only a cost, but not purely a benison, either.
I wonder if the peanut gallery of the Mandans may have had a point. Consider the great spirits of 20th century rock-and-roll now trapped in the schemes of the owners of their IP.
A few years back, I wrote a book - Ms. Never - with a main character who was the son of a rock star. He grows up to become telecom mogul in part to buy up the masters and the publishing rights to his deceased father’s catalogue, and destroy them. It’s the only way to set the old man’s spirit free.
After that, I wrote another book - Pharoni - about a tech wunderkind who invents a palpable form of digital pain. By inflicting it on a person’s digital double, they could make that person experience sympathetic agony. They acquired all kinds of data to make better digital voodoo dolls of the people they wanted to influence.
Magic is a desperate thing. It’s no one’s first choice. It’s no vocation for the reasonable.
Every day, the reasonable creative professionals come up with fresh new concessions to the illiterate and the post-literate. I’ve seen these folks come and go - the street teams, the snackable content, the brand partnerships, the pivot to video, the social-first content. They do okay for a while, then get sad, quiet. They were clever, and that’s exciting. But their heart wasn’t in it, because there was no home for anyone’s heart there.
Magic is tied up with luck and love. One gets lucky. One falls in love. A seat at the bar is a lucky break.
The Chinese supermarket on Fort Hamilton Parkway is a lucky break, though the fish smell gives me a headache. But everyone falls in love with the world once. And it’s happening to some kid right now between the tanks and the freezer case in that supermarket.
We all fall in love with the world at least once. After that, we all need help.
One time, I had a publisher for a book of my poems. But one of us was a prick. At this point, I won’t venture to guess whom. We parted ways like outlaws inching away from a confrontation, knives in our hands. He agreed to relinquish his claim on my book if I agreed to buy out the rest of his stock of it - about 70 copies, about $700 with shipping. Fine.
Then I had this big brown box of books in the back of my closet long enough for it to survive a house fire, and long enough for the smoke smell to fade away.
When I was a younger writer, I’d write letters to older writers in hopes of some benediction, or at least an introduction to someone who’d pay me. Mixed results (see 2024’s “Networking With the Dead”). Now I’m older and I realize I’ll need help from people younger than me.
I started depositing these surplus copies in the little library birdhouse boxes I find around the city. Maybe someone falling in love with the world will happen across one, and buy me lunch in 2045. It seems at least as good a bet as the S&P 500. Probably, though, they’ll just ask me to blurb their book.
Writing and reading is a kind of magic, and one that was predominant in the world I fell in love with. I was reading Song of Myself in parking lots in Worcester, declaiming Howl up a tree in Connecticut, reciting The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock from heart on long, lonely walks across the old, bouncy sheet-metal walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge.
Literature found its way to me through the larger culture in several ways when I was a kid. There was general reverence among the adults - even if you didn’t get Ulysses, it was still there, like Kilimanjaro. It was imposing.
People like Allen Ginsberg could use the reverence people had for literature to influence the larger culture. People try this angle more strenuously now, but to little effect. The reverence simply isn’t there, and people don’t have much respect for pamphleteers.
And there also was homework. These were books you’d have to at least attempt to be called educated. And you’d probably have to be educated to get paid in any real way.
The homework is also changing. Godard College is caput, Hampshire too. I heard the Naropa Institute sold its land and laid off most of its staff. The New School University, which sheltered and credentialed me as a young man, has since resorted to peddling business degrees to stay afloat. Harvard has apparently lost the nerve to ask its prize pupils to read an entire book.
News outlets don’t review books anymore, and it seems like these Top-100 Books lists make up half the criticism there is. Those lists make my stomach sink, not because of what’s on them or not on them, but because they have the feeling of a Noah’s-Ark guest list to them. The waters are rising, and we can only save 100 books.
It’s a hard time for the magic I was raised on. The pendulum swings against the written word. Maybe not swinging away so much as lashing out against it.
You can call the thing that’s wrecked our American society since 2008 materialism, but the so-called material that it’s chasing is mostly dollars on a screen, backed by ever-flimsier promises. It’s panic and it’s idolatry and it’s infectious.
An idol, as I mean it here, is important when you’re scared. An idol is the single the symbol that sets you free from the nightmarish world of symbols. In more concrete terms, it’s the object that sets you free from the world of objects. It could be a ten million dollars, or the Presidency of the United States, or a paid-off condo, or the Nobel Prize, or a seven-figure 401(k). In a landscape of symbols and objects, the idol is the keystone of the whole structure, which gives it coherence and hope.
The features of the change, but its position does not. The sin and the punishment of the idol are the same - it steals you from the living.
The Liberal Arts, the reverence of the partially educated, and homework itself was the medium through which the mind-altering sacrament of literature persisted in my lifetime, much like how the dirty convoys of buses and vans following the Grateful Dead conveyed the mind-altering sacrament of LSD across the country.
Both those practices that conveyed the sacrament of literature are waning, and no one can say if they’ll come back. The tide turned in 2008. It was the financial crisis, when we said we couldn’t afford nice things like the humanities, and when a deep fear set into the culture from the top down. People who envy billionaires mostly fantasize about an absence of fear.
The year 2008 also when the iPhone began to seep its way into more hands and begin its corrosive effect on our ability to relate, perceive, and think. I know that wasn’t the intention, at least at first.
Caitlin is dubious of the medicine practiced by the Mandans. They do dances to bring buffalo and to bring rain. And it works every single time, but only because they dance until the buffalo or the rainclouds show up - be it days or weeks.
This was the 1830s. Caitlin was a guest and kept his skepticism to himself. By the 1930s, people would be equally dubious of Caitlin’s own medicine as an oil painter. They had cameras. The miracle had become a hobby.
A book can do many things. People love to extoll its virtues as a diversion, or as a panacea for whatever we’ve decided is wrong with our society lately. But the real magic of a book is its ability to acquaint you with your own mind. The right book at the right time is an intense conversation in which you can test your own experience and ideas, while discovering another form each might have taken.
Authors who do this are magicians, potent and mysterious. But as in any fairy tale, though, there are evil also wizards. Their new magic is the endless scroll, with no ultimate image, no last word. They serve up an anesthetic non-conversation, all sensation and disputation leading nowhere. It’s only the latest attack of the panicked opportunists and manic idolators against the written word.
The endless scroll is killing the brains of the kiddos, and people say we’ll get around to stigmatizing the endless scroll eventually. The next gambit of the evil wizards is already in play, gathering immense quantities of electricity, water and cash to its data centers. It is an attack on literature, on reading, and on writing. After all, who could ever trust a word that wasn’t even written? Who could ever trust a person who’s not even a person? But they can swamp the real people and the real words in non-people and non-words - that should do the trick, right?
And why do they hate the written word? The written word is too plain. The lies are harder to hide within it. You can go back and re-read it. You can find contradictions between one paragraph and the next. You can ask who wrote it, and ask why they might say the things they do.
The money has been in a panic for a while now. And the money needs everything both ways, at least until the deposit hits, and then who cares?
To a panicked person, a promise is impossible. To a panicked person, a promise is poison.
The written word is a danger to people who want control. It’s too unruly, too perceptive, too potentially disloyal. Even when you outlaw a few hundred words and attach shame a few thousand more, you still can’t control it. The written word is a strong medicine. It’s shaped the movement of nations and redeemed some of their sins. It’s made sense of the love in which we fall with the world, and killed some of its finest practitioners.
The fundamental conditions of our lives change constantly. Caitlin speculated that the Mandans were a remnant of a lost Welsh expedition sent in the early 1500s. They were surrounded by hostile tribes whose own lives had been transformed by the arrival of wild horses that had escaped the Spanish conquistadors a few hundred years before, and by the newly arrived Europeans.
Words change meanings. Go to Cooper Union today and find me three people who can make a barrel. Magic changes. Find me three optimistic people who can execute a landscape in oils today.
New magic is always bubbling up, and subsiding. In my youth, MTV was considered a threat to the sanity and morals of the kiddos. A new form of magic, it opened its broadcast life with the song Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles, which seemed to warn about exactly MTV would go on to do, making music stars out of non-musicians and even non-singers like Milli Vanilli.
Although MTV made and broke careers and entire aesthetics for a while, it closed up shop last year without much fuss or even nostalgia.
The past is perpetually unwound. What we keep is what we’ll pay dearly to keep.
These will be the things that protect and defend us, permit and forgive us. They will be what we love. Artists will bat their eyes and try to be lovable, with mixed results. Others will try to be useful. The weather’s always changing. Some medicine doesn’t work new weather. Some comforts don’t hold up under pressure.
I’m not trying to die on a hill or uphold some time-honored standard. It’s too late to defend anything connected with the magic that succored me. Put all the blame on the VCR, as the Buggles suggested, but it won’t help.
It’s not innovation or evolution that we’re experiencing here. It’s a pitched battle between magicians, when we discover what we are.
Selected bibliography
North American Indians by George Caitlin
Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles
Ian Svenonius’ Censorship Now
Same sort of people who dream of going to space and think how amazing it would be if we could find a planet just like Earth that humans could live on without spacesuits and maybe even a place where there are people just like us and these are the same people who have never spent a minute actually living on this planet, so I guess they figure if they go somewhere else they might be able to appreciate the same things they've never appreciated here. Same sort of people who dream of becoming trillionaires. Way back when, I used to travel through strange parts of the USA and one of the things that I used to do in my $29.99 motel was to find the room copy of the local phone book and I'd spend an hour or two just browsing through it with the local news on.