Spell it out
“The words first. Damned near everything begins with words.”
Jim Butcher’s “Dresden Files” book series features a wizard called Harry solving paranormal crimes on the streets of Chicago. They are good-enough plot novels with a protagonist concocted from James Rockford, Han Solo, and The Witcher—leather and all. Harry’s wizardry isn’t terribly nuanced or sparkly—I recall silver bullets and wooden stakes and Excalibur—but every once in a while, it’s inspired.
It’s been years since I read Butcher’s novels, but I remember a particular scene from…one of them…in which Harry is mixing an invisibility spell. I remember the scene because the approach was clever, meaningful, and I never saw it again in any other books.
In this scene, for a spell to work, the wizard needs to mix five ingredients—one for each human sense—that carry the effect the spell intends to cast. For an invisibility spell, he needs five ingredients so bland, boring, and unnoticeable that, together, they neutralize any possible perception of themselves or the thing upon which they are cast.
As I read this book probably 20+ years ago and did not write down the exact spell, I’m making one up below.
A Spell for Invisibility
In a small cauldron or microwave-safe dish, mix together equal parts of the following:
Gray paint in a shade in a perfectly neutral hue—not institutional nor glamorous. A gray unworthy of comment. (sight)
Dust shaken from a cobweb. (smell)
Water—common, tasteless, and still. (taste)
Rabbit fur, so long and soft it feels like air. (touch)
Whispers audible but indiscernible as white noise. (sound)
The wizard then mixes the ingredients with a wand or a waggle of the nose and—poof—the potion gains potency and makes that to which it is directed so unobtrusive it cannot be perceived with human senses. It is functionally invisible.
I am not quite sure why Butcher abandoned this device—perhaps it was too difficult to write each spell or perhaps it was too potent and things just kept disappearing.
But it stuck with me. Because, of course, this is poetry.
Take ordinary ingredients, mix them together, and speak them out with intention on to your surroundings. Not to change the world necessarily, though that happens, but to disappear into and change the nature of where you are for a little while.
Break the spell
A poem and a spell are both inexplicable patterns that trigger a realization that seems to have no congruity with the past and alters the trajectory of the future.
I don’t know where that came from, but I am going to follow it.
