The Immutable Necessity of Discomfort

I want to clarify something before we get going: I know this is present moment is a time of great discomfort for a lot of people. Pain and tragedy, even. That is not the kind of discomfort I want to talk about. That discomfort is neither necessary nor immutable, and we should all be doing what we can to alleviate it. Please find your local mutual aid organization and get involved however you feel you can. Just wanted to get that out of the way.

One of the ways I have been spending my quarantine is by catching up on all the old recommendations people have given me, and one of those was a Podcast called Imaginary Worlds. I’ve enjoyed a lot of episodes from this series, and love the concept of exploring the types of imaginary worlds we create, seeing how they reflect us (an anthropology of the self, if you will). But one I listened to this past week really stuck with me, an episode dedicated to Octavia Butler and her works. One of the recurring themes that the podcast’s host brought up was the intense sense of discomfort almost all of her works elicited, and how it was because of, not in spite of, this discomfort that her work had such staying power and appeal. We need discomfort, sometimes. We need to be put outside our place, not as an escape but to feel ourselves as the Other, to have our own dominion, over ourselves, our realities, our faculties, and our understandings, challenged.

Obviously the methods don’t translate directly between literature and magic, given the differences in agency and control (audiences know they can set the book down at any time, but can feel trapped in a magic effect), but the ends can be the same. Traditionally, in fact, they always have been. The Jester, the Fool, the Wise Man, (and even the Madman); all magician archetypes whose roles were to break the social norm and cause some discomfort where no one else could. But ultimately that role was, and is, about empathy. Helping people empathize with perspectives they had never imagined possible, or people they had never truly considered, including, sometimes, themselves.

When asked what Butler’s technique was that made her writing so powerful, one of the guests answered, “she doesn’t flinch. Her specialty was to think about the things that people would rather not think about.” We do this not because of the discomfort it brings, but the empathy it demands.

So that is my exhortation to us all, magician or not, especially in these challenging moments.