Now, last week I said I’d write a two-part series on the poetic mindset, fantasy literature, and abuse of spiritual power. I suspected when I hit ‘send’ that I was leaving a hostage to fortune: what if it turns out there’s more to say than will fit in part 2? And so it has transpired.
Last week, I argued that a cluster of behaviours dismissively described online as the “BPD art hoe”, and stereotyped in cinema as “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”, feels from the inside like an intensely poetic mode of living, in which everything is drenched in enchantment and mysterious significance. People who commit to living like this are, I suggested, often both compelling to be around, and also acutely vulnerable to abuse, especially of a spiritual kind.
I have some first-hand experience of what I’m describing here. In part 3 I’ll draw on that to offer some reflections on staying grounded in a re-enchanted world. I will write this, I promise; likely the the week after next, as I’m hoping to have a spicy book review for you next week. Meanwhile, in what follows I want to widen the Manic Pixie Dream Girl frame a little. For it’s not as though MPDGs are living in this heightened Technicolour emotional world while everyone else is still in a Spock-like state of rationality. On the contrary: they’re a slightly more pronounced form of a now very widespread yearning, to believe in something.
In his famous poem, Dover Beach, written in 1851 as Victorian England approached Peak Rationalism, Matthew Arnold lamented the cultural shift which precipated this yearning: what he described as the ebb-tide of a “sea of Faith”. Like the ocean, Arnold mourned, this sea was “once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore/Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled”. But this sense of enchantment was now swiftly ebbing in what Arnold called a “melancholoy, long, withdrawing roar”.
The poem ends with a plea for love and loyalty, in the bleak and nihilistic world its loss seemed to presage:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Arnold’s disenchanted “land of dreams” is the terrain in which those Manic Pixie Dream Girls who yearn so overwhelmingly for joy, love, and light pursue their always idiosyncratic quests for a life lived poetically. But most of them don’t search for meaning by going to church: a space that, in any case, has largely suffered the same withdrawal as everywhere else. In the absence of the scaffolding such institutions might afford, they - in fact, most of us - search for meaning across a cultural terrain methodically stripped it.
As I described recently, that premodern consciousness where “enchantment” was routine supported a “common place” of shared meaning via diverse social forms including rituals, guilds, liturgical faith, a panoply of visual signs and allegories, and a store of folk-tale, allegory, song, and poetry. But the modern era has all but dismantled that legacy. And it is in this context that fantasy writing emerged, roughly concurrently with Arnold’s lament on the departing “sea of faith”, as the last hiding-place of the old gods.
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