The Space Between Thoughts

nerohead_coin2.jpgI read a folk tale, years ago, where a boy receives a purse that always con­tains a gold coin. This handy source of income helps him on his quest, which I can­not recall. When he takes out the coin, there is still a coin in the purse. Always. Mag­ic!

Typ­i­cal­ly, I can get my head around the tech­ni­cal aspects of folk­tale mag­ic. Sev­en league boots are eas­i­ly under­stood, by tak­ing a step you move sev­en leagues. A hat that makes a per­son invis­i­ble is equal­ly com­pre­hend­ed; by wear­ing the hat, invis­i­bil­i­ty occurs. The nev­er-end­ing coin in a bag trick is some­thing a bit dif­fer­ent, how­ev­er. How, I won­der, does the coin repro­duce itself? Where is the line drawn between where the coin in the purse becomes the coin no-longer-in-the-purse? How can the mag­ic sneak around our heads and put anoth­er coin in the bag if we are pay­ing atten­tion?

The only expla­na­tion I can think of, is that at some point, no mat­ter how hard we try, atten­tion is not paid and the mag­ic tum­bles to its con­clu­sion: anoth­er coin in the bag. The point when this occurs scares me because I sense that it might be the heart of myth and fable. I can only real­ly describe it as the space between thoughts. In between reach­ing into the bag and pick­ing up the coin; or pick­ing up the coin and remov­ing it from the bag, the mag­ic does its thing.

If this is the case, that, even as hard as we try to see the mech­a­nisms of things, we can­not grasp all that is entailed, then there is illim­itable elbow room in the infi­nite­ly small gap between one thought and the next. The boy with­draws a coin and in the time it takes to direct his atten­tion from the coin he is tak­ing back to the purse he took it from, anoth­er coin has appeared.

So, in this space, I think, lives intu­ition, lives imag­i­na­tion, lives inspi­ra­tion, lives some­thing deep­er than the sub­con­scious. I think this might be the same thing that G.K Chester­ton grap­pled with in many of his writ­ings and that J.R.R. Tolkien addressed in his remark­able essay On Fairy Sto­ries.

I think what struck me about the nev­er end­ing coin was the repli­ca­to­ry nature of the mag­ic and its trig­ger were just slight­ly dif­fer­ent enough from an enchant­ed flute or a fly­ing car­pet to make belief just a bit hard­er than usu­al to sus­pend. It also helps that I have nev­er end­ing curios­i­ty.

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