Enchantment & Resilience
As a teenager in rural Louisiana, I often gazed through my bedroom window into a star-streaked night sky, concentrating all the forces of my adolescent will to hail a passing alien spaceship. Take me with you, I’d beseech the twinkling expanse as I projected powerful brainwaves (or so I thought) from my forehead through the glass and into the cosmos. As my unblinking eyes fatigued and watered, the distant points of light seemed to enlarge and move. I’d lapse into a kind of fugue state of calm anticipation, awaiting rescue from whatever had brought me to the window, grief, angst, boredom, on that particular night. Then I’d blink, sigh, and disappear into a novel.
The alien lifeforms and interstellar adventures I imagined sprang from Carl Sagan’s Contact and a host of sci-fi paperbacks whose titles have sadly left me (oh for a copy of my library checkout log from those years!). Films contributed to my personal space mythology as well: E.T., Starman, Close Encounters, and the Star Wars and Star Trek movies among others. And unlike some of my fellow earthlings, I assumed the aliens who intercepted my transmission would be of the benevolent variety.
Before extraterrestrials, I appealed to the creatures of fantasy and my own imagination. The Wizard of Oz books were sacred texts as were the Chronicles of Narnia. As a thirteen-year-old, I tried unsuccessfully to gain entry into Narnia by repeating a chant from the beginning of The Silver Chair. As a seven or eight-year-old, I flew into a rage after a dramatic death scene I’d staged failed to move the hearts of my audience of stuffed animals. Between death rattles, I’d clearly explained that the only thing that would save me was the revelation by the animals of their secret lives, played out in the wee hours when grownups and children were fast asleep. The traitors remained inanimate.
I remember as well, sitting cross-legged in my backyard in the purpling, mosquito-flecked dusk, staring into the mottled surface of a small stone, loaned to me by someone who claimed that Native Americans had blessed it with visionary properties. I had only to peer with commitment and an open heart for prophecies, personal and wondrous, to emerge. The stone may indeed have been blessed, but its secrets remained veiled to me.
Today, I look back at my younger self and admire how, despite these “failures,” my spirit still bent toward something greater, more vibrant, more welcoming than seemed to be available in the ordinary world. I see my search for enchantment as a healthy means of coping with the often confusing, sometimes painful aspects of childhood. I might even categorize it as a kind of space-time travel, depicting other possible worlds and ways of being as well as different states, changing circumstances, and expanded experience.
I’ve been heartened to see a similar “coping mechanism” flourishing in our current challenging times. Imagination and creativity are hard at play, from the spontaneous clapping that swept the globe early on in the pandemic, to the many instances of art, literature, and comic brilliance spun from the stuff of our new normal.
More recently, the short-lived monolith in the Utah desert and a possible copycat in Romania fired the imagination of many, myself included, with a playful, transcontinental whodunit. Some have fingered beings who dwell in the starry skies.
Has this prompted me to drift to the window once again, searching for the few faint stars visible beyond the lights of New York City as I beckon the E.T.s?
Naw. I’m inclined to stay put — see how this fantastic, mysterious, comi-tragedy turns out.