The Magic after Graduation

One of the things we are examining through the lives of bicycle messengers in the fictional universe of Hotspur and Little Booker is what happens when the wizard graduates from Hogwarts and has to go out into the ‘real world.’ In the traditional fantasy arc, evil appears, evil is fought, evil is vanguished, the world is better for the hero’s involvment. In the world beyond the pages of fantasy there is a high wall of limitation. Very few people acknowledge that life becomes far stranger after the evil is vanquished. In fact, we might have to acknowledge a world beyond the limitations placed by terms good and evil to utilize the argumentation laid out in Nietzsche’s famous work: Beyond Good and Evil.

The true poetry of the world does not really come into play until most people stop recognizing it. Our society explicitly encodes childhood as “magical” and adulthood as “mundane,” and therefore places works of fantasy and science fiction implicitly in the ‘juvenile’ category. Playfulness and work become heavily demarcated in this constructed, synthesized world of masks worn out of stoical commitment. The term adult becomes a verb as in the phrase: “I am adulting today” as if time given over to playfulness is not a mature use of one’s time. When we use it as a verb, “adulting” means we did such things as taking a train to work, going to church, mailing a package to a friend, washing the kitchen floor. There is, in fact, some ultimate magic, though, in each of these tasks if we look at them differently, in a more humanistic light. Trains and transportations feed on the magic of logistics and communal, collective infrastructure. Going to church becomes a recitation of ages old hymns and seasonal reminders. Mailing a package utilizes a centuries old system of codes and numbers to teleport objects and messages around a planet. Washing a floor utilizes highly researched organic chemistry to renew and cleanse little dust demons from corners and baseboards. (And most religious traditions have prescriptions of good times of year to do this: Pesach, Lent, or Ramadan, as example.) A friend of mine pointed out that there really isn’t that much wonder in Paul Atreides learning to ride a worm in Dune. “He’s just getting his Fremen drivers license” she commented. There is no hero slaying a dragon, these activities are actually a bit more like utilizing a worm from Frank Herbert’s Dune to get from point A to point B. It is an ecological use of magic we do not even recognize. 

We have all come through social graduating experience. We have ben filtered through high schools, colleges, training programs, community programs, and the collective narrative shared by these clusters and groupings tells us we should have learned something. What happens if we drop out, drop the ball, take a drop or leave one? All these skids are greased by finance - loans, grants, applications, salaries - these are the hidden manna of our lives spent adulting, professionalizing, networking, glad-handing in order to earn something and to “do our duty” to society. Duty becomes a burden and not a magical boon. It becomes rather circular in the end doesn’t it? Fantasy is taken as an escape, not necessarily as a departure.

We want fiction that places us at or near the locus of that main character who works with a purpose and a duty. Who dispels evil from the world, and if not for all time, at least some small portion of it for their time. Dispelling is just that isn’t it? It takes the magic out of the world, then what? We are back to commuter trains and the magic of infrastructure and administration. That hardly seems to be a pursuit of happiness to most people. There’s an implication that happiness involves overcoming, not constant solving.  The bicycle messenger or any sort of service level courier, cleaner, or worker becomes an ironic counterparty to these notions. They are at once seen as a ‘drop out’, a deadbeat, a person with a ‘go-nowhere job.’ Yet, at the same time, in these roles there are opportunities to work some magic - to get that rush in under the wire, to deliver needed medication or factory parts over great distances in the dead of night, to make someone’s space more liveable where they are unable to do it by themselves because of incapacity or lack of time. The courier - whether on a bicycle or in a vehicle sees strange things in the world too. They see the inter-workings of factory, pharmacy, office space, and courtroom, for example. They see messy homes and vacant lots, they see graffiti and urban art form, deteriorate and get replaced.

One does jobs like these long enough, one quickly realizes that there are stranger enchantments in the living world. Supply chains start looking like magical networks and corporations that run them as immortal collective entities. The algorithms keeping their pace become divination oracles. Governments and associations write the spells uttered for entry and exit at each of these portals. The messenger’s face is recognized and waved past metal detectors, crowded check lines, and government  building entrances. There is a kind of human, bureaucratic enchantment to the place with all its dexter and sinister machinations. Life becomes a maze to be solved, an amazement of entertainments where there is no single main character and the characters are all a collective. The revelation that quickly becomes apparent to Harry Potter, the local head of a financial  advisory a decade after graduation, isn't that Voldemort is vanquished, it’s that this system has potential Voldemorts at every turn. Mr. Potter, licensed financial advisor realizes perhaps that the boredom and malaise with adult life is perhaps this: there is no boss at the end of the dungeon, the minotaur in the maze is but a bleating goat who’s more of an annoyance than a mortal enemy. Even if evil was punished when he turned 18 or 21 that phase departed. It’s not wrong, it came of age, it grew up. The departure is exciting but it also gets written off the page, by pages in the marginalia and the liminal spaces between texts. An evil might ultimately remain in waiting for the next rung, the next clock, the next evil to appear and being sadly disappointed when no dragon at all turns up to slay, there’s just these boring worms to ride among blue-eyed jihadists.

This is something that JRR Tolkien actually handles in his telling of the tailings. He comes to his terms at the end of the saga of the War of the Ring. We realize that there is both reconciliation and new sins present in the final chapters of Lord of the Rings. On the one hand, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins repents and becomes a truly charitable person, she gives up  her petty greed and gossip, forms a charitable organization for hobbits displaced by the war of the ring - but locally, she doesn’t troop all the way to Mordor, she utilizes the boon of her reach in exactly the space she can measure, her ugly pettiness transforms into assured and beautiful petiteness. On the other hand there are magical things from the last age that will go on in decline: the Ents never find their wives and slowly become sedentary trees, beautiful memorials marking the landscape. The elves leave Middle Earth and their immortality fades with them into the farthest West. Everything goes into a sunset without the need of heroic vanquishment or overcoming. That might be where we arrive in a state beyond good and evil. In such a landscape, there is a true bittersweetness there and not simply a main character who goes on winning forever. There’s no winner or loser, there’s just a game to be played anew each day, each season. Very few of the outcomes of daily games carry mortal consequences - except when you’re a bicycle messenger running a rush and forget to notice the cement mixer coming up behind you.