Thank you, President Zaki, for the kind introduction and for the invitation to converse with everyone today.
Because from time to time we can all use a little magic, I thought I’d share with you the way my teaching has made me change my mind about how magic works. And I want to show you by discussing two examples, examples that will involve two of my favorite topics: words and dreams.
But first, be forewarned that my remarks will also address (and in no special order) three potentially scary things: nightmares, local controversies, and dentistry.
So, my dentist is on the top floor of a building overlooking the river. For a small town like ours, it’s a setup that’s surprisingly like an urban loft condo, with high ceilings, exposed brick walls, and big windows with water views. For me, it takes the edge off a cleaning to look out at the clouds and occasionally see bald eagles, ospreys, or gulls, crows, and pigeons fly by. Recently, though, the view’s also featured cranes. But not the avian type.
Just as Brunswick’s sidewalks are currently a work in progress, so is the bridge that crosses the Androscoggin River and connects us to Topsham. This project, as you may or may not know, has not been without controversy. Once the old bridge’s state, with its signs of advanced wear and tear, was assessed, a repair versus replace debate set in, drawing forth powerful sentiments and centering on conflicting cost estimates. To me, it seemed ironic, metaphorically speaking, that two sides would be so divided and estranged over something like a bridge. Nevertheless, I’ve respected our community’s way of maintaining a spirit of largely collegial disagreement.
But getting back to my dentist, it was right before a cleaning, as protective wear was put in place and we made small talk, that I complimented the view. “It must be so nice to see eagles right from your workplace,” I remarked, and then asked, “But does all the construction get to you?”
The hygienist said something neutral and polite because, I assumed, for a sensitive professional, a fight is probably the last thing you want to appear to be picking as you turn sharp instruments towards someone’s teeth. “Oh, well,” I said, “you’re probably used to bridgework.”
This exchange, and the little bit of laughter it made room for, comforted me because, as you’ve probably guessed, I take comfort in words. And I like to think a pun is always possible. It can dispel tension, ward off doom, or at least make everyday distress seem somehow less dire. But, if we’re investigating its power, at least for me, to cast a protective spell, we need to ask why.
Sure, a psychoanalyst could say humor is often a thinly disguised form of defense, or even aggression, a kind of power play that lets you fend off fears and perceived threats. If the hygienist was going to attack my tartar and plaque, I could at least try, from my vulnerable position in the long chair, to feel a measure of control by sparking a spontaneous chuckle.
But this is what I would have said if I hadn’t changed my mind about magic.
A pun is special, another interpretation would say, because it lets a word be in two places at once. It can fill a gap between two teeth while spanning two banks of a river. One word “bridge” making for plausible meaning in two lines of thought.
And isn’t this—the power to simultaneously be in more than one place—a dream many of us have?
Going further, we could ask, isn’t it the truth, not just fantasy, that because we dream, we often are in two places at once—wherever it is we fall asleep—hopefully not in a meeting or class—and wherever the dreamscape takes us?
This means that a standard feature of fantasy worlds and mystical visions, the power of double location, actually has everyday or every-night forms. It’s more ordinary than we say.
So then why do we rob the ordinary of its magic? Why do we insist on fantasy and the mystical being a world apart? And what do we lose when we do so?
Let me give you my second example, and this one will be literary. It comes from a book I taught last spring, Bad Cree. Canadian author Jessica Johns says of her novel Bad Cree—a work she first wrote as a short story— that she wrote it as an act of rebellion. Not against the Canadian government, though certainly its history of what it now recognizes to be not just “cultural genocide” but genocide against Indigenous people does come up for criticism. No, there’s a particular element, a strong strand of meaning woven throughout her initial short story and her later novel, one that Johns says she highlighted to answer back. But to another entity: one of her professors. These are Johns’s words:
I wrote that story in one of my creative writing classes during my degree, but I wrote it in defiance of advice the class received from a professor. This professor advised us to never write about our dreams, and said that writing about dreams would lose your audience. I had a really hard time with that because dreams are such an integral part of nehiyaw ways of knowing and communicating. So I wrote a story based completely on the power of dreams, and I hope my audience takes away that dreams are cool and valid.[1]
The novel follows its protagonist Mackenzie as she tries to escape her grief for lost family members, her grandmother and, even more recently, her sister Sabrina. In the book, there are objects that Mackenzie dreams about, for example a crow’s head in the opening scene, that then appear in her hands as she wakes up. Often, she enters a dream space where she seems to meet Sabrina. These dreams haunt her. But throughout the novel, she learns to overcome her tendency towards isolation, her urge to always go it alone, separating herself from others when she suffers the most.
When she finally opens up to her family about her bizarre, tormenting dreams, she learns that several other family members are uncanny dreamers too. Some, like her, meet the dead in their dreams. Others dream of dangers poised to occur in the near future. And still others meet up with siblings, sharing the same dream and interacting throughout it. Whether they have what are typically called visitation dreams, precognitive dreams, or mutual dreams, they all receive and learn to share valuable information from their nighttime visions. And this helps them build a renewed sense of community and helps Mackenzie overcome her haunted isolation.
Johns was recently asked whether the way all her protagonists dream differently might be analogous to the way individuals, even closely related ones, can experience trauma differently. She said yes, but she added a further valuable point. She says:
We talk about intergenerational trauma and generational trauma, and that is a community conversation. And what I really wanted to bring into the conversation was also generational joy and generational magic. If our trauma is passed down, then so is our magic. So is what we’re able to do.[2]
For Johns, this magic comes across in dreams but also in the bridging power of words. Johns claims that the very idea of objects moving from dreams into waking life came to her in a dream, and that she “leaned into” writing fiction that would resemble popular genres like horror and fantasy. But she also says, “I’m also not trying to do the same thing some folks tend to, which is to look down on literary fiction.”
Her points are simple ones, but they can still seem academically counterintuitive: it’s that “complexity and craft” can still take approachable forms, ones that can span often separated categories. And that something as basic to us as dreaming doesn’t have to be set to one side.
If sharing dreams supposedly risks losing listeners or being too revealing, so does speaking, so does writing. From wherever you are, you’re casting off a bit of yourself, hoping it lands well. And what you have to say may not always conform to dominant dictums or others’ advice. It may not always be comfortable.
But Johns reminds us that not speaking up for dreams can mean aiding more dangerous forms of forgetting, larger powers of erasure. Just as Mackenzie learns to navigate her initially frightening dreamscape, Johns steers her idea of the dream through a skeptical academic world. They’re both ventures that are scary but also visionary.
Johns demonstrates two principles I find magical, ones that go beyond ideas that dreams are all in the mind and minds are fundamentally solitary. First, that far from being confined to the unconscious, dreams can be experienced and shared with direction and intention. And second, that works of literature can be like waking experiments in dreaming. And if dreams are just one example of magic, then this means there’s power there waiting for you in any work that honors your own ways of making connections.
For me, puns, and they do run in my family, are like literature in miniature. They’re a way words show what they’re so good at—maintaining multiple associations, even ones that might have to fight their way through well-meaning but questionable urges for censorship.
As someone who makes bad puns, I can say that I know that feeling of risk. There’s the potential for embarrassment, disapproval, or a joke just falling flat. Puns are a strange venture that can double-locate words, but also seem to double-locate you, making you aware of your quirky inner self but also another you, one that hazards the dangers of sharing, the risks of communicating.
Or maybe whenever you share a terrible pun that you just can’t stop from occurring to you, we should call it an act of resistance, a way to say no to suffering alone.
Whether you ever take a literature course or write creatively yourself, I hope you’ll consider taking the risks of sharing your speech, articulating your visions, and maybe experimenting with words.
Is a pun always possible? Maybe it’s better to think a pun is always a possibility—not just that it’s nice to believe that life will always let you make a good one, but more that if you do get the chance for a creative play of words and you seize it, that it can open up worlds of alternative senses, worlds of possibilities—just as dreams do. And that these forms of magic, pretty ordinary magic, are valid and cool.
Thank you.
[1] See for the full interview.
[2] See for the full interview from which this reflection and my following three brief quoted phrases are taken.
