There is an omnipresent temptation to claim that everything is magic, to believe that everything is a spell being woven by the world, reality itself a net to ensorcell the mind and enchant our steps. There may be some truth to this. There is also an inconvenient reality that ruins such idealistic pontifications like a persistent gob in the throat: when everything is sacred, nothing is sacred.
Is magic everywhere? Possibly. Is Beauty everywhere? Most certainly. Even when it is hard to appreciate.
In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” This is certainly a charming sentiment, a romantic one, a line to sigh over and lovingly inscribe with looping letters in the front of your journal. And it might also be the fact of the matter.
My body has an irritating knack for worshipping beauty, for taking the pantheon of Beauty as its gods and offering them every devotion. I am a slut for the lovely, in all its forms. I have a perpetual unrequited crush on the world–including the things that my brain (or, to quote the inimitable Shawn Boland, my “wrinkly pink meat computer”) tells me are bad…Very bad indeed.
Those who are chained to the unforgiving devil of an addiction know this feeling. Some are locked in a bottle, and sacrifice family, work, friends upon that smoky glass altar. For some it is attention, for others love, for others still, it is playing chicken with the bottom of their bank account at a slot machine. For me, it is Gregorian chant.
My body loves many things, but it does not love sleep. At least not when it is supposed to. The time signature of my circadian rhythm has always, since I was a baby, been set by a nocturnal metronome. When life demands I rise and shine, I have a fight on my hands. I tried melatonin, to no avail. Limiting screen time. No help. I generally drug myself to sleep, and even that is a 50/50 proposition. To my traquillize/caffeinate sleep/wake strategy, I have added a playlist of Gregorian chant on a timer. It soothes me as well as any over the counter chemical, and I drift away on waves of sound.
And I know that, if I could understand Latin, I would grind my teeth at every word.
After many years spent as a fanatical Christian, I have developed a loathing for Christianity that can be appreciated only by those who have had severe and chronic indigestion. Since escaping the religion, my reactions to it are generally selected at random from a litany of trauma responses and flavored with a positively liturgical peppering of profanity. I despise it. And yet, my body does not know this when at night my ears cup themselves around the soaring tenors, bouncing around in the natural reverb created by the airy cavities of a vaulted cathedral ceiling. It knows only beauty, and it responds accordingly.
Because it is beautiful. Achingly beautiful. And while my mind knows that Latinate poison is being dripped into my earholes the whole time, my body only knows that it is in the presence of beauty, and thus it curls up in its warm lap and falls asleep in perfect love and perfect trust.
My waking brain is often a furious thing, manic with outrage. It’s something I must work on–though it is also useful to me. One of the sins which I have the most difficulty in forgiving is the offering of beauty to unworthy pursuits. Some of the most lovely art and architecture in the world was made as an act of worship for the vilest deity the Near Eastern desert has ever shat out of its sandy pucker. Apologies. My Appalachian roots show very red when I grow angry. And this does anger me. It is an injustice. And yet…beauty. And beauty is as close to truth as we will ever get.
It makes me wonder, as an occultist, why? Why did these beautiful, artistic souls bow before this monster, and with their priceless talent worship it…as beautiful? And more disturbing still: Is it possible that the beauty that was reflected in the mirror of their creativity originated in the way they saw their god? And am I, as an ardent and shameless worshipper of beauty, missing something I should see, should know? Should bow before? Is my bitterness blinding me?
As a witch, I know that something from nothing is a kind of magic that is seldom workable–the stuff of preteen sorcery school storybooks and Marvel movies. Whatever alchemy stirred in the cauldron of Michaelangelo’s heart required a reagent; whatever the invisible charge that sparks between the finger of Adam and the finger of God is, it is not nothing. Whence cometh the beauty?
I want to dislike Gregorian chant. In fact, I feel like I have to, as if distaste is a spiritual obligation, much as when I was a Christian I felt I had to dislike “secular” music–punk rock, metal. But then, as now, my ears betrayed me; I cared nothing for distinctions of genre (or, much to my God-haunted soul’s horror, spiritual allegiance), I only craved the sounds my body found beautiful–Alice Cooper, Anne Murray, Billy Joel, Green Day. I was such a sonic sinner. Strangely–almost perversely–now that I walk the Crooked Path, now that I am “free,” I am far more strict regarding what musical pleasures I allow myself to enjoy than I was when I was a Baptist. The Christian bands I once loved (Jars of Clay, Stavesacre, Blindside) I now religiously avoid. But I can’t let go of that sweet, monkish droning at bedtime.
Because it is beautiful, and beauty is the native language of the body. Beauty is the Barbarous Tongue in which the spells of the world are natively chanted. What we each find beautiful is utterly subjective. For some, beauty is vibrant color; for others, black lipstick, black eyeliner, pasty white foundation and shocking purple underwear. For some it is sculpted marble; for others the fractal poetry of tree limbs in winter. For others still–and these are the ones I really can’t understand–beauty is a balanced equation, a solved Sudoku, a quantum calculation of the give-and-take of gravities that keeps galaxies spinning and not sinking to the bottom of the universe. But whatever beauty we worship, I have yet to meet a person who is completely inoculated against the sting of beauty in some form, whose soul is warded against its enchantment.
And this is the lesson beauty has for me now; love of beauty is the sin which needs no forgiveness, the one way we can transgress our own boundaries without sinning against ourselves. I have built a wall of resentments to keep myself safe, and to keep all I hate safely on the other side. Beauty is the bluebird that perches on that wall and sings to me, the luna moth that pollinates my wild forest from the flowers growing in the old garden I left behind. Beauty is the interpreter between what I was and what I am, the link that makes it impossible to separate myself utterly from the things that helped shape me. Beauty is the memory that refuses to become a regret, the lover you make love to time and again with every new lover you love. Beauty is the scar that still bleeds, the door that never closes.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty–, that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
JON GOODFELLOWE
Jon was born and raised in the heart of the Appalachians, in the eastern United States. Growing up at the rusty buckle of the Bible Belt, the Crafte was all but unknown–but also everywhere around him. His great aunts saw haints, his grandmother knew people’s day of death weeks in advance, and his father made sure he knew Merlin before he knew Moses. Being brought up in a family of story-tellers, the dead were never far away, and previous generations were kept alive at the dinner table through the tales they inhabited.
Studying literature and art (and seeking to master every craft for which it is hard to get paid), his romantic nature made him seek to throw himself into some greater purpose–and he picked a bad one, lingering in fundamentalist religion for many years. Finding his way out, he has rediscovered his family’s strangeness, the stories that fill him up like air, and has begun to hear again the voices that never stopped speaking to him–those of his ancestors, and the mighty Mountains that cover their bones.
