Magical Thinking

I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking in October. Of course, I remember it and refer to it as The Year of Thinking Magically which, if you were an allegorical neuron resting within the old cranium, you would immediately recognize as a collision at the intersection of Memory Lane and Cognitive Boulevard between Ms. Didion's bus and the trolley of The Year of Living Dangerously - a film starring Sigourney Weaver ( sigh...), Mel Gibson, and Linda Hunt. ( I have an entire gallery of memory devoted to Sigourney Weaver. There is an exhibit scheduled for the new year. Check at the virtual TicketMaster...no, send 25 dollars and I shall save you a ticket!)

If you were fortunate enough to have viewed A Very Long Engagement, you will recall that the character Mathilde played by Audrey Tatou was a very magical thinker, "If I reach the bend in the road before the car, Manech will return alive from the war!"
Magic can be an earnest desire for good. Magic can be a fearful obsession to deflect pain. It can also be a desire for evil - or so it seems to me when we wish damnation upon ours enemies. Magical thinking is something we use to create our conscious world. This is not to say that it is somehow an illusory exercise; not necessarily. The thinking of Faith is similar to magical thinking - its images of desire are forged within our passionate hearts. However, it exists in a conscious structure of Faith which prevents the worst excesses of magical thinking - such as believing God will give me a winning lottery ticket.

Arthur C. Clark once said that a sufficiently advanced technology will always appear to be magic to a backward people. We may add that a sufficiently advanced Faith will always appear to be Magic to a backward people.
--