As often happens, a topic that’s preoccupied me for a while continues to be pondered somewhere other than in consciousness. I have been reading two very different books – Paul Hammond’s Constellations of Miro, Breton (City Lights Press, 2000) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Books of Earthsea (Gollancz, 2018), which collects together all her writing on that place, the six main books and a number of short stories. Having done so, it now occurs to me that I need to add an afterthought to my earlier posts about art and magic.

In a section entitled The Wish-Landscape of This Everywhere, Hammond discusses the relationship between Breton’s book L’Art magique (1957) and his texts to accompany (‘illustrate’) Miro’s set of paintings known as Constellations. To do so he sets out Breton’s understanding of magic as it relates to Surrealism and the history of art in which he locates it, which in many respects draws heavily on Freud. Reading Hammond’s account, it seemed to me that Breton (and Freud) ultimately don’t offer us an understanding of the relationship between art and magic that breaks with the dominant culture that is now in the process of not only destroying itself but much of the web of more-than-human life along with it. A reading of Le Guin’s collected Earthsea material, on the other hand, does seem to me to do just that, both by drawing on her own concerns as a feminist and by reaching back to, and re-imagining, past understandings from non-Western cultures and how they might be enacted in everyday life.

It’s very possible that the particular reading of Le Guin I’ve come away with is coloured by having recently worked my way through the philosopher Eureka Santos Aesthetics of Care, an extension of her previous thinking in her Everyday Aesthetics in relation to a possible project. I read the second three books, and some of the short stories, as a critique and correction of the ‘masculinist’ assumptions that result in over-investment in the kinds of power enacted as ‘art magic’ (Le Guin’s term) in the first three books. I will not insult the subtlety, pathos and humour of Le Guin’s powerful storytelling by trying to paraphrase it in a “message”. However, while if I were to begin to address the notion of thinking art and/as magic together again, I would come to broadly the same conclusions, I would have save myself (and the reader) a good deal of time and unnecessary meandering by drawing directly on Le Guin’s Earthsea narratives.