King Sisyphus was renowned for being a braggart. He had a reputation for being mean to travelers and way farers because it helped to promote the image of his iron-fisted rule in the popular imagination. This annoyed Zeus under whom travelers and strangers are protected. But mostly what pissed Zeus off was that Sisyphus betrayed secrets. He thought himself magically beyond the rules of confidence, once revealing the whereabouts of Asopus’ daughter Eagina, who was having it off with Zeus at the time, to her father in a Quid Pro Quo for causing a spring to flow on the Corinthian Acropolis.
Eventually Zeus had enough and sent Thanatos, God of Death, to have a quiet word with Sisyphus and escort him out of play but Sisyphus claimed he was a fake messenger and tricked Thanatos into demonstrating how the chains for his journey would work, thus escaping his divine impeachment. This ticked Zeus off even more. He sent Ares, the God of War, to free Thanatos and in the process Sisyphus was accidentally, well, collateral damage. But the trickster king had thought ahead, making sure that his wife left his body un-buried so that when he met Persephone, Queen of the Underworld en route to Hades, he managed to persuade her to send him back to ensure he was buried with the proper rites, as was indeed required by the Gods before anyone could enter the land of the Dead. Needless to say he skipped bail and did not return, magically returning to life.
Eventually Zeus has to send Hermes, part messenger/part bailiff, to drag Sisyphus back to Hades after which he is punished by having to carry his famous rock up the hill only to have it tumble down of its own enchantment. The Gods’ punishments are invariably a poetic form of justice. Sisyphus thought he could evade and defy the gods. He behaved as though he was magical…
”One day it will just disappear. It will be like a miracle.’ D J Trump
and so he had to be on the receiving end of magical actions, experiencing the Gods’ frustration as his own. Both Sisyphus and his apprentice Trump have self constructs rooted in magically circumventing the law, turning night into day, having lies be truth. Their identity is derived from magical exemption, the proof of which is behaving as you please and being locked in combat with anyone who says otherwise because their disagreement means annihilation. Identity could be lost along with the argument, which is why the magical always seem to be fighting for oxygen no matter what the content of the conversation.
The following, from a Corona virus briefing and in a robust push back to reporters, is noteworthy, not simply because it is a bare faced lie delivered seamlessly and without a flicker of conscience but because in the space of a single sentence, a fantasy future is magically transformed into factual history, ”When you have fifteen people and the fifteen within a couple of days will be down to zero, that’s a good job we have done.” Trump Jan 30th.
Narcissistic supply goes way beyond folk using others to puff up their ego. It goes way beyond him wanting to slurp his beak in a sacrificial dish of your essence. There is a kind of magic in inverting reality all the time and having your words make things so. It fascinates as much as it confuses, like any stream of magical thinking, tinkling uphill. Originally, magic was the power to transform ideas into reality, the word made flesh. The meaning of the ancient invocation, ‘Abracadabra’, is “I will create as I speak”
Such magic is hard work…
“If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so.” Lev Grossman, The Magicians.
So magical thinking has to have backup, generously provided by the noble art of sadistic with-holding. Being magical and keeping everything to yourself go together, which you’ll know if you’ve ever had to take a toy off a two year old. The cadenza it produces is like Sisyphus being dragged of to Hades.
This with-holding is clearly evidenced in Trump’s handling of the Corona virus crisis. He’s not just incompetent and its not just that he doesn’t care about you. Perhaps a clue to the underlying and more fundamental dynamic is in the one campaign promise he has kept, to run the country like he ran his businesses, namely, as his to trash; or as a magical penis extension, his to fondle till his hands get furry.
The President’s choreographed in-action is a strategy which works hand in glove with the magical thinking. Life shouldn’t be like this and so it is not. Such an attitude has huge voter appeal and seems to be a significant part of what got him elected, perhaps as much as political affiliation or cultural prejudice. You no longer have to reflect. Willing can make it so. The reefs of life can be negotiated representationally. For example, the recent fetishistic hoarding of toilet paper in the face of the pandemic. You have to admit its a bit strange. The rush for the luxury of Charmin has been far more fierce than the one for more essential needs like foodstuffs which you’d think might have greater priority in the apocalyptic imagination.
Perhaps it is the concretisation of fear, an expression of crapping oneself. Or is it deeper still, the eternal loo roll standing for the stable preservation of a known way of life, symbolically imposing a sense of order and regularity on the inconvenient shittiness of plague, as though anything can be defended against, even death itself, provided you’ve got clean knickers and polished your nipsy. It would be much better to beat a drum and sing magical songs. At least you would be clear about what you were involved in…
Trump is a loathsome, soulless monster but he is not the problem. He represents a certain spirit of our age, fixated at the developmental stage of pull-up Huggies. Whilst it is truly scary that suited toddlers have nuclear codes, perhaps there’s also some comfort in the notion that we might still, having avoided the attention of Thanatos, yet grow into short pants.
