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A type of magic

December 5, 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Anthony Carnovale

I was surprised when my daughter asked for ‘magic tools’ for Christmas. She was inspired by a friend that made two squishy sponge-birds disappear from her teacher’s hand, in class the other day. When I asked her how it happened, she said: “It just came out of nothing, Daddy. It was magic.”

I imagine (because I can still imagine) that there are plenty of people who could do with a little bit of magic. Personally, I wish I could just snap my fingers and make it snow; I’d love to wave a wand and have Trudeau levitate out of office. I wish I could close my eyes and just wish away the high taxes we pay to live in this beautiful town. I imagine that this may be a difficult holiday for many of us.  We may not feel so festive, but festive (v.) we must — for our kids’ sake, and, I guess, our own.  

Look, despite the tone of some of my previous columns (I mean, the last one was titled, Where Is My Mind?), I think there’s hope. If we’re going to get out of these dusty days, it’s not going to happen with a wave of some magic wand. It’s going to happen when people step up and start putting in a shift. We need to step up, and out. It’s vital that we don’t retreat within ourselves. It’s understandable that people want to protect themselves but wrapping yourself up like a present won’t keep you from being ripped open like one.

We all have to start somewhere. For me, I find myself coming back to my favourite writers. I always turn to books in times of crisis and turmoil (both the personal and existential kinds). You see, I like to think of every word, inside every book I own, as being like a breath that keeps me alive and alert. Like water to a fish. Sustenance. I haven’t read every book I own, but they’re there for me when I need a shot in the arm (or a punch in the face). Reading is not an act of tuning out. For me, reading can be the first step in tuning yourself up for the fight you’re about to partake in. And to fight ahead, I find myself turning back, back to the writers who have brought me to this point in my life, writers who have helped me think, walk, talk, and breathe.

Nelson Algren got me out into the streets, into the alleys, onto the corners where some of the most vulnerable people in our community, in any community, live. Algren teaches me that street kids, the homeless, addicts, and hustlers are people in need of our love and compassion. He says: “Their names are those of certain nighttime notions, held too tightly, that would not have been conceived had there been someone in the night to hold instead.” The kid begging for change is asking you to fill his heart as much as his outstretched hand. He’s pleading to be loved.

James Baldwin teaches me that love is the only thing that is ever going to save us. He writes: “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle; love is a war; love is a growing up.” It’s time for us to grow up. It’s time for us to love.

Max Frisch’s, ‘The Arsonist,” has seared itself into my consciousness. When the fires burn and the sirens begin to wail, why have so many of us not been compelled to act?  We’ve invited the arsonists into our homes and supplied them with the match that sparked the flame that is consuming us all. 

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been reading books by more pious men, like Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and Jesuit priest Father Gregory Boyle. I’m inspired by their thinking, compassion and how they put both into practice. Father Boyle writes:“You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behaviour is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.” It’s not about what you stand for, it’s about where you stand.

Recently, I’ve been reading about Hannah Arendt and her take on the notion of ‘natality’, and how each new birth into the world is an opportunity to bring something new into the world; an opportunity to make sure that every young person feels like they have a chance to contribute, to be truly free, a chance for them, for all of us, to Be. Arendt hoped we would apply this idea to how we engage with one another and participate in the public sphere.

These writers and thinkers may have turned inward, but they didn’t abdicate their responsibility to themselves and to the world.

Reading and writing are action. For me, reading and writing is a contact sport:

Pen touches hand: Contact. Pen touches page: Contact. Person picks up book: Contact. Citizen reads this column: Contact. Like pieces of a complicated puzzle.

And, of course, there is always Ali Smith. Like no other writer I’ve come into contact with, Smith takes everything that is so enchanting and hypnotic about Algren, Baldwin, Father Gregory Boyle, and Hannah Arendt and concocts the perfect potions (stories) for these trying and complicated times. She writes: “All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.”

If we feel like things are breaking, it’s time for us to start putting things back together. Things may never look the same again, but it gives us the chance to reinvent ourselves, to make something out of nothing. Like magic.

Contact.

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