I believe we've all heard by now, from any number of sources, that
Shimer is magic. I'm willing to agree without too very many
reservations, which may come as a surprise. I hate to say it, but
Shimer isn't Hogwarts (although David Shiner may or may not be
Dumbledore), nor is it a land of unicorns and cute little fairies.
Possibly our dean
Folklore is yet another pet subject of mine, and calling Shimer magic
is an irresistible temptation for me to outline exactly what kind of
magic it is. Clear out what magic usually means in modern conversation,
if you will, and let's go back a bit. In times and places not our own,
magic is/was scary, a vital and dangerous force to be guarded
against lest it upset the day-to-day business of living. Think witch
bottles, think salt and iron, think St Benedict medallions. Think
Faery, in the older sense than sexy miniature women living in flowers.
They were called the Good Folk to appease them, not because they were
good in actual fact. If you've ever read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,
which you ought to if you haven't, by the way, think of that kind of
otherworld. On the surface it's compellingly pretty, even
heartbreakingly so. Under the illusions, however, there are dead bodies
hanging from the trees and human children stolen away from their
hearths and families (see Yeats' "The Stolen Child," even though it's
super-silly Irish romanticism that he later moved far beyond). There
are not dead bodies at Shimer, as far as I know, nor stolen children,
and those things that appeal about Shimer, that make us call it magic,
aren't necessarily illusion. However, I think that idea of Faery is a
good jumping-off point, and the idea of magic that goes along with it.
Magic is unsettling, essentially disorienting. It pulls us out of the
normal hearth-and-family course of our lives and into something strange
and dangerous. What I'm proposing is that Shimer is magic in that
sense: what we study here is unsettling. Stretching the Faery analogy
further than might be wise, I'd even propose that there's something of
the stolen-child/changeling motif going on here. Go home to people who
know you well after a semester at Shimer and see whether you don't feel
that in your absence you've become slightly Other, altered by a stay in
our particular otherworld. Of course, I've not known anyone to wither
and perish when home from Shimer, as people home from all sorts of
otherworld often do.
Another useful analogy might be alchemy, incidentally the subject of my
fall semester project. It's already used as metaphorical currency for
what I want to say, which is convenient. Read widely enough for long
enough and you'll eventually encounter something about the "crucible of
suffering" or some such, in which one is transformed. Alchemy was
originally a mystic discipline more than a science, and many of its
texts use allegories that are equally applicable to making the Stone
and to personal development. For example, one must kill the White King
(the first stone) to allow the Red King (the Philosopher's Stone
itself) to be born. If you'll allow me to put that in the Shimer
context, one must kill or discard some very dear preconceptions and
habits to get where one would like to go. There's a fairly high
incidence of intellectual or emotional crises during one's first
semester here. I don't think these are dangerous, or indications that
one is working too hard or in the wrong place. They're alchemical. The
first-semester Shimer crisis (and other semesters beyond that, I'm
sure, but I've only experienced the first) is evidence, as it were,
that the White King is dying. Shimer is in this sense an alchemical
crucible, carefully planned for some kind of transformation. Part of
Shimer's curious magic is the guarantee that at least once a semester
you will have at least one reading in at least one class that will
knock the legs out from under you in a way that feels calculated for
harm. Issues with how female sexuality is represented? Welcome to
Freud. Problems with gender essentialism? Hello, Gilligan. Unshakeable
devotion to free-market capitalism? Marx might shake it. Chronic
illness? The entirety of Humanities 2 for me has been connected by a
thread of illness=immorality. Again, I'm putting forth here that this
isn't malignant magic; we don't need to make scholarly witch bottles
(although that sounds like a community Tuesday event to me) --
this is alchemy. And alchemy, no matter what it destroys, always
creates something better.
The bottle here represents the crucible of Shimer
Shimer's magic, sure. But, in class and out, we really need to define all of our terms.
