Meaning & Enchantment

With some house-keeping

I have just a bit of house-keeping to start. Here are a few of the core ideas of this Practical Meaning Substack:

1. Meaning-making is fundamental to being human and we’re doing it all the time.

2. But we’re mostly unaware of the meaning we’re making, which is causing issues.

3. Creating meaning in a more conscious way would be a net good for us as individuals, as groups and for the planet as a whole.

My overall intent is to give attention to each of these, but as I am still in the process of developing a meaning-making framework that I hope might be of some use for #3, my posts have tended to skew towards #1 and #2. I may be deluding myself, but I subscribe to the idea that “a problem well-defined is a problem half solved.”* In any case, if you’re more inclined to solutions, I appreciate your patience as I gradually shift to more content relating to better meaning-making.

The topic of this post is enchantment, which I define as a pleasurable state of wonder and curiosity that brings us into the present moment and includes a sense of inspiration and possibility. Enchantment makes the world seem magical in the best sense and invites us to explore further. In my view, one of the primary goals of meaning-making should be to support experiences of enchantment.

Let me begin with a poem by my father:

The seeds of tremulous vision

Lie bulging in dormant ecstasy,

Waiting for us to unlock 

Their power.

These seeds will not germinate

In the cool, abstract 

Mental clime.

They require the warm heat

Of July child,

Juggling jellybeans in his pocket.

I’ve been reviewing my tattered copy of The Reenchantment of the World, by Morris Berman (a title I claimed from my father’s bookshelf), in which he suggests that we could remedy many of our modern ills by engaging in what he calls “participatory consciousness.” That is, instead of attempting to view the world from “the cool, abstract mental clime,” which disenchants, we need to immerse ourselves in the world, getting our hands messy, and inviting the enchantment that this intimacy offers.

When was the last time you experienced enchantment? I suggest that when we say something is “meaningful,” we mean, in part, that we had an experience that included some kind of enchantment. Perhaps we encountered this while looking into the eyes of a loved one, or walking through an old growth forest, or eating an amazing meal. If it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what was enchanting, even better!

When I was living in New York City, I could experience this sense of enchantment nearly every time I went to the Met to view the Impressionist painting collection. For some reason, Monet’s Ice Floes has a particularly strong ability to shift me into this state:

Ice Floes - painting by Claude Monet (MET, 29.100.108)

Enchantment can come unbidden and does not require meaning. And that’s the case for me with Ice Floes – I don’t know the story behind it and I don’t really want to – it’s just raw, pleasurable experience for me. In general, my philosophy regarding art has been based on a paraphrasing of Krishnamurti: "We never actually see anything because we have so many opinions about what we see." 

But an experience I had with another Monet changed my mind.

My experience of Monet’s Un coin d'appartement (A corner of the apartment), was enhanced by multiple layers of meaning. First, I was in Paris and traveling with my uncle, who I had not spent such an extended time with in many years. We rode our bikes along the Seine to Musee d’Orsay and I decided to get the audio tour.

The recording allowed me to layer on even more meaning to my encounter with the painting. I learned that Monet’s young son was depicted in the foreground and his beloved wife, Camille, in the background (which I honestly hadn’t noticed). I learned that Camille was Claude’s primary model for his paintings and when she died a few years later, Monet, in his grief, began to paint fewer and fewer people and focused on landscapes instead. 

Wow, did this add to my experience. I got teared-up right there in the gallery as I was listening: I have a young son and if my wife suddenly died, I don't know how I would handle my grief — could I channel it into creativity as Monet had done? I was both enchanted and moved.

Consider the stories in your own life that made the world seem enchanted. Can you remember what it felt like to have a sense of wonder and possibility about the world? For most of us, it’s probably easier to remember enchantment in childhood, but hopefully you continue to find stories that make the world feel more magical even today.

One of the tricks with the stories we experience in books and movies is that they can be used as escapes from the world. If we find our average day at work and the chores of home life to be the opposite of enchanting, then escape is tempting. Instead, what if we used these stories as opportunities to inject enchantment into the world?

As someone who is deeply concerned about the climate crisis, one of my hopes is that if we can collectively re-ignite our sense of enchantment about the natural world, which might motivate us to action more effectively than just a sense of duty.

It’s easy to see climate action as various forms of deprivation: Oh man, if I have to drive less, and cut back on AC and take fewer flights to new and interesting places, that’s gonna suck! But if we can become increasingly enchanted with the world around us – and each other, spending less time in our cars and air-conditioned homes might actually become more appealing.

So what’s holding us back?

Returning to The Reenchantment of the World, Berman, the author, has a PhD in the history of science from Johns Hopkins, and studied mathematics at Cornell before that. He’s sort of a poster child for STEM education, and yet he leveled one of the most incisive critiques of our modern scientific worldview I’ve ever read:

[O]ur modern view of reality was purchased at a fantastic price. For what was ultimately created by the shift from animism to mechanism was not merely a new science, but a new personality to go with it. 

Berman then takes us on a journey through the life of Isaac Newton, including portraits that show his shift from a personality brimming with enchantment, to visages that increasingly seem to reflect a slide into heaviness and disenchantment. We now know that the whole time Newton was helping to develop modern science, he was also secretly journaling about occult phenomena, which was probably his desperate attempt to re-enchant his own world.

If we don’t want to face the same fate as poor Isaac, we will need to find ways to shift from enchantment as an escape – in TV shows, movies and video games, to enchantment as a part of our daily reality. As you might guess, this is something I’m only beginning to grapple with, and I hope to have more insights in future posts.

In the meantime, here are some journaling prompts if you would also like to explore enchantment on your own:

1. List the stories (in books, movies, series, etc.) that have created a sense of enchantment for you.

2. List any other activities in your life that bring you a sense of enchantment.

3. Select a story or activity to reflect on more closely:

   1. Do you have any clarity about what is enchanting about this activity or story?

   2. In what ways might you bring more of these elements into your daily life?

   3. Are there new activities you could do that could enhance your sense of enchantment, for example: creative writing, drawing, making music, learning a new language, gardening or cooking?

*This quotation has been attributed to Einstein and Charles Kettering, but I choose the attribution to John Dewey.