✍🏼 How to become a magician: on aliveness and creating soul

Can we give inanimate objects a soul?

Mar 17, 2024

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How to become a magician: on aliveness and creating soul

I think inanimate objects can have a soul.

Not quite in the way that living things have a soul, emerging in a moment into the world from nothingness, with an intrinsic life energy and personality.

But as I walk through life, certain lifeless things do make me feel something. It’s like there’s another layer, intangible, somewhere beneath their inanimate surface.

It feels like magic.

At first glance, it doesn’t make sense. But I’ve long been fascinated by this marvelous wonder.

What gives an inanimate object a soul?

Perfectly imperfect

The other day, while listening to an episode of the Acquired podcast on Hermès, I came to a hypothesis.

I think that a craftsperson can imbue a thing with soul through the creative process.

I think that the tension of the creative process - between the human’s pursuit of perfection in the work and the inevitable imperfection along the way - works a sort of alchemy, with soul as a byproduct.

I think that a non-living thing gets a soul from its human craftsperson creator.

Humans pursue quality. Often, we pursue it to its extreme: perfection.

And yet, humans are imperfect. Our mortal, terrestrial existence is the domain of imperfection. Of limitation.

Despite the impossibility, we still find ourselves striving for perfection.

This strikes me as amusing - that humans (myself included) often find ourselves locked in a futile Sysiphean pursuit.

But I’ve learned something from this. It reminds me of this infinite game concept from James Carse. I’ll spare the explanation, save for linking more info here and here.

With the infinitude of our pursuit of perfection guaranteed, I’m struck that the most important thing is not achievement or success, but choosing the right game(s).

There’s an ancient Greek word for this: autotelic.

I now seek an autotelic path. One that has meaning and fulfillment embedded in the journey.

Soul is quality, fully realized

I mentioned my theory that soul is a byproduct of a sort of alchemy activated by the tension inherent in the beautifully doomed pursuit of perfection - that soul is a human phenomenon.

But as I write this, another word comes to mind and demands to be understood: beauty.

What is it? What does it feel like? How does it relate to the realities of quality and soul? What makes it different? Is it different?

I think that quality is a gradient, with perfection, in all its unattainability, on the far end. I think that we can inherently sense and identify quality.

But what about beauty? I think that when something is quality and makes us feel something, it becomes beauty.

Beauty = quality + feeling.

Then what’s the difference between beauty and soul? Soul makes us feel something after all, doesn’t it?

Yes. But a machine can make something with beauty. I believe that only when something beautiful has embedded in it the story of a human’s involvement in its evolution from quality, through feeling, to beauty - only then does the thing have soul.

So, for this alchemy to work, into the cauldron must go:

the foundational human pursuit of perfection
the spark of tension between our pursuit of perfection, and the inevitable flaws along the way
the ignition of felt emotion roused in another person
all fanned by the story of this experience, written piece by piece through the shared experiences of the humans along the way as this alchemy unfolds

It’s this shared experience of the humans in this process that turns beauty into soul. That of the maker(s) throughout the creative process, and anybody who encounters and is moved by the creation.

It’s not just about quality.

It’s not even just about feeling and beauty.

It’s about story.

Human story is the magic.

Magic comes from the stories that we write together. As we come into contact with each other, and even with inanimate objects, part of our own story seeds others’.

Soul is about quality, and the process of its pursuit. It’s about making people feel something. It’s about story - our own, and the one we write together.

I believe inanimate objects can have a soul.

See now why I think it’s magic?

We can be magicians

There exists a beauty beyond aesthetics. It comes from the complicated, wandering story of the process of our lives.

You and I have the opportunity to contribute to the soul of the world around us.

I believe that if we commit to the process we just talked about - pursuing quality, feeling, connection, evolution, and becoming - we can be magicians.

It’s not simple.

That’s how I’ve gotten it wrong before. Unbeknownst to me, I’ve been on detours pursuing just one of these ingredients at a time.

But it’s worth it.

It requires looking inward, following what feels authentic, rich, meaningful, and fun - what makes us feel alive.

This is my new rubric for life - solving for that feeling of aliveness - since it seems to come with the other important things in tow.

As we continue our process in pursuit of more aliveness in the world, I believe we give a gift to the world around us.

We give the gift of beauty, of connection, and of soul.

We can do this through our art, whatever that looks like. Painting, writing, interior design, relationship, entrepreneurship, cooking, architecture, sport.

As Rick Rubin says, art is anything that’s an expression of what’s true about us and our experience at the time that we make it. Art is a tool for expression. It’s about the relationship between the self and the world. It’s a way of being.

And as Jacob Collier says, art is not about reach, but rather about moving a person. It’s about going deeper than surface level, making somebody feel something. We do this by being the person that we are, and telling our stories, in all their truth.

And as Cyan Banister says, in a world where everything is quick, cheap, and flawless, the things that are flawed have value.

We can create beautiful things out of nothing - things with depth, texture, nuance, imperfection. We can make things that should be lifeless have soul. We can make things that move people, and make them feel less alone.

We can be craftspeople.

We can be magicians.

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