Creativity for relationships, rather than getting attached to symbols
Transcript of this video:
In the “Harry Potter” books, the arch villain, Lord Voldemort, uses a very dark form of magic to split off a fragment of his soul and vest it in an object or a creature or another human being, and that then becomes what’s known as a Horcrux, a container for a fragment of his soul.
The idea being that should he ever die, he can be reconstituted from that fragment. It’s a way of achieving a kind of immortality.
But so dark is the magic, that each time he uses it, he becomes less human and he ends up as this almost non-human character, this empty chaotic creature, a victim, in a way, of his own dark magic.
And I think in our daily lives, we also can be tempted to create a kind of Horcrux in which we are invited – often by marketing people – to invest a house, a holiday, a car, a brand of some kind, with magic properties.
When I worked in advertising, I suppose I was a victim of my own dark magic. I remember buying a Mercedes Roadster, and before I bought it, I thought, oh, if I buy this car, I will become the kind of person who goes on trips to the south of France, every weekend.
I’ll become this very extrovert sociable character, merely by my buying this car. Not quite noticing that what I’d done is taken an idea of myself, something I’d created with my own imagination, and then attached it to this expensive external object, which of course I then had to pay for.
So I was kinda giving away the power of my imagination rather carelessly and then paying for the privilege. I think politicians do it with some of their campaign ideas as well. If you vote for this fairly abstract idea, your beautiful humanity will somehow be attached to or preserved by it.
Now, a counter example to that was a story a friend of mine told me years ago of how his daughter, his young daughter, desperately wanted an ice cream, but she’d already had enough sugar for that day, so he wasn’t going to buy her one.
But instead of saying just no, he asked her to use her imagination to describe what would be the perfect ice cream. And he said he joined in with her in imagining, oh, the multiple flavours it would have, the chocolateness of the cone, the nuts and the hundreds and thousands would be added to it, so that she could fully indulge in her fantasy in relationship with him, they could create it together.
And he said by the time they’d invented this most beautiful of all ice creams, she no longer needed to have the real thing.
So it’s an anti-Horcrux in which her imagination, her humanity was maximized and her relationship to him maximized and they didn’t then need this expensive external object, this Horcrux to do it.
And one of the things I think I’ve realized from hosting so many of these unhurried conversations is that there’s enormous human satisfaction to be had from being able to daydream together without necessarily having to take dramatic or expensive action as a result.
And I think our survival as a species is going to depend on getting better at enjoying those kinds of imaginative relationships without the need to rush out and start consuming things quite so quickly, so that we can live with more real, if imaginary, experiences and fewer apparently real, but actually rather fantastical Horcruxes.
Photo by Matthias Müllner on Unsplash
