enactingmodernmagic

[enactingmodernmagic]

modern magic, protesting, and conjunctive linguistics

Protesting, at its best, feels like you are caught in a spell. The spell of turning words into action, of collective healing, and of achieving something despite being far away. Many times this summer, I felt the protests I took part in journeying into some sort of magic, a collective prayer. Raising up your voice to the sky to cry out against burned babies, destroyed hospitals, innocent lives caught in a crossfire of a group of people defending themselves who never should have been there in the first place. 

I continually witness horrors happening in Palestine and Lebanon from behind my screen. A pane of glass and countless generations of colonization in my own bloodline protect me from fearing for my loved ones in the same way. This glass isolates me, continually fights a battle to keep me silent, keep me impotent. How many man made horrors beyond your comprehension can you see before feeling like fighting against them is futile? 

This glass, however, does not protect those I love, their families, their loved ones. 

And I remember magic. There’s a perennially unresolved (perhaps entirely unresolvable) tension in linguistic theory between a conventional and conjunctive understanding of words. Often dissolved into a division between philosophers and poets respectively, one argues that words are simply convention, bearing no significance to what they signify; one that names implicitly bring forth the thing they signify. Magical thinking has its foundation firmly in the latter, where names, letters, and sounds are among the tools by which the expert brings about a desired outcome. 

And I think back to every protest I’ve attended. There is a magical release in crying out as a community against collective pain. What affects one of us, affects all of us. We transmute that pain into action. We build community through being together and connecting with each other. Protests are nothing if we don’t speak to each other. These are moments to build our power, build our networks. The prayer means nothing if it is not supported by a community ecosystem that can work to enact it.

There is a magical manifestation in calling for freedom. 

When we work together as a community, we bring about our own miracles. The collective magic of a protest is just the first step.