O

nce upon a time, Mark and I bought a puppy, we named him Kiefer after the German artist Anselm Kiefer as he was a cross German Shepherd/Alaskan Malamute. But it was the early 90’s and calling him at our local park in Elwood made me appear like an overly eager fan of the actor Kiefer Sutherland which was a little embarrassing.

We knew he’d be a big dog, he had huge paws but we weren’t expecting him to grow quite as big as he became with a massive tail that swept things off tables. It was also at this time that Isabel Allende’s book, The House of Spirits entered our lives and you can imagine how I connected with Barabbas the puppy that “Came to us by sea” and just kept growing and growing and had a tail “with a life of its own that led to lamps and china being swept from tabletops”.

This was my first introduction to Magic Realism. Michiko Kakutani writes that “The transactions between the extraordinary and the mundane that occur in so much Latin American fiction are not merely a literary technique, but also a mirror of a reality in which the fantastic is frequently part of everyday life.”

Often too these writers have been through extraordinarily heartbreaking personal and historical upheavals which cannot always be completely described without an element of strange phenomena to make a point about the pain of their reality.

We continue to mix what is known and what is imagined, the expected and the unexpected in the eternal quest for understanding. The image of a rabbit being pulled out of a hat is the quintessential image of Magic and The Magician (dating back to the King’s Conjurer, Louis Comte in Switzerland the 1800’s) but who of us has ever seen it performed? It’s just something we know, something magical we accept in our real world.

The dove at the top creates the perfect triangle – the base representing stability/Realism with the upward point representing ascension toward the spiritual world/Magic.