We were talking about how certain events acquire special meaning when they occur in clusters, or in certain juxtapositions, like just when you’re marking off your labyrinth there’s a super-rare earthquake, or the night somebody dies you see a real big horizontal meteor. This particular rainy August has been rife with synchronicities and clustered omens. A meteor, an earthquake, and a Biblical-grade hailstorm within a few days time catches one’s attention: the world is being ripped and warped by unseen forces full of volatile portent. The movie we’re working on, ROWS, is about enchantment. While shooting we’ve witnessed massive hatches of strange bugs. I keep finding box turtles crossing the roads. And people died. Within one degree of separation among our cast and crew we lost a mother, a grandmother, and three young men. All of the young men died under circumstances involving nature, ravines, and rocks. There are supernatural designs involved here: magic, spirits, and enchantment. Most humans project secular confidence in the things we call reason, logic, statistics. But in our animal guts we know that some force surely is at work, unleashed by God(s), demons, or fate. The Evolutionary Psychologists and un-magical thinkers call this Agency. Agency is when human beings see magical or divine purpose in coincidence or calamity. We are not comfortable with the idea that clustered events are merely random and meaningless. We must give them meaning, we must ascribe agency to those unseen forces. But you don’t need to believe in magic of the fire-and-brimstone sort, or even the Harry Potter sort, to be of the magic world. The secular rationalist might argue that the unseen forces, the enchantments that perplex and stir us, are not anything supernatural, but survival mechanisms, or physics, or poetry. But if the enchantments we fall under are not due to supernatural forces, then they must be due to natural ones. Does that make the world any less strange, any less magical?
-David Warfield
Stills from the production of ROWS.
