I’ve never had the drive to search out the Divine.

I’m not sure whether that’s a genetic thing or an Episcopalian one – but I always assumed that God was an old white guy with a beard who was going to make sure that things went okay for me, or that there was no God, or that the universe was based on some unknowable pagan relativistic thing of which any Holy I might imagine was just one tiny facet that in no way excluded anyone else’s conception of Jesus fish or Loki. I’m a big ball of neurosis that stays up at night worrying about all kinds of things . . . but the nature of God isn’t one of them.

Which isn’t to say that I haven’t always wanted a glimpse of magic; and I suppose that there is a degree of hairsplitting going on there since I’m not talking about fireballs and dragons with scales.

The magic I’m referencing is the Uncanny, the Surreal, the Slightly Off. It’s the sickeningly addictive lurch in your gut as everything you thought was certain alters. It need not be much, a fraction of a degree changed in its foundations can topple a skyscraper. But it’s a change that alters everything about you. I guess for some that might be another world for the Divine – just not for me. I suppose that Divine to me inherently implies inaccessible, what makes it Divine is that a creature of base matter can’t reach it . . . so I call the accessible and the mysterious magical. Like I said, hairsplitting.

I suppose a lot of people find this in drugs – or in fasting, yogaing, whatever – anything to alter their perceptions enough to allow them to look sideways at reality and spot the places where certainly bleeds off into chaos. That’s one way to go, but I’m pretty draconian about mind-altering substances being excluded from my body (see “neurotic” above – then cross-reference with “control-freak”) and, more importantly and for better or for worse, while my soul may live in my heart, it’s way too wrapped up in my head to tolerate inspiration without narration. I need a story. When the world lurches I can’t be able to write it off to overloaded synapses – I need to see the magic, but also have a story for it.

I’m not sure any of that makes any sense. It probably doesn’t – so let me provide an example.

On Friday I went ruin spelunking in Old Detroit.

I went as a tourist, and by the time I realized I was making a pilgrimage it was too late to turn back.

The subterranean beginning should have been the warning. We passed out of the light into a darkness formed of earth and of iron. No Modern could have a womb constructed of anything else – we are no longer just products of nature, but of civilization. Our Mother is as much the Machine as She is the Soil. And so our gestation, our rebirth, began here.

Through the darkness we followed the sound of water channeled down runnels that only partially contained it. Our shoes were wet, and mineral-rich water dropped from corroded arches onto our shoulders. As our clothes were covered in dust and as we breathed in particulates settled here for decades we stopped being in the darkness, and became of it.

At times the symbolism of the Path was unmistakable. The ground would take on the contours of a cobblestone road. We create the symbolism, we make magic from lifeless matter . . . but the subjective, not the objective, is reality . . . and the subjective screamed that we did not walk without direction, but upon the same road as questing knights and devoted pilgrims. The dragons to be slain, of course, just like the sins to be absolved, were also the ones we carried with us.

For the most part the perils that we created were also within ourselves. The things which inhabited the shadows around us – the things which leaped away from our torches and lurked forever in the corners of our eyes – we put there after plucking them from our own minds. But it is no untruth to say that death and injury dogged us. It is ill form to comment upon, to mention that all Journeys carry Risk. But we saw ceilings fallen, floors disintegrated, rusty spikes, bottomless drops . . . a dozen and more ways to be mangled. Near strangers became friends as we all realized that the eternal footman walked behind us – none wanted to meet him alone.

Bravery is not the unwillingness to acknowledge peril and fear, it is the unwillingness to be dominated by it. It is also the choice to laugh rather than to blanch. Or to laugh at the same moment. The hero’s journey, the search for the wondrous in self-discovery, is always rich in hilarity – however dark.

Then sometimes it’s just dark without the funny.

But this was no weekend jaunt for giggles and for souvenirs. Our unlikely Charon, our unassuming Virgil, urged us ever onwards and upwards out of the dark. He hushed us when the blue-clad guardians of the netherworld drew too close and he doused our lanterns when the curious eyes of demons turned our way. And above all he showed courage when we flagged. Our first true hurdle, the first indisputable evidence that we had stepped out of the Mundane was this . . . and as we stood and gaped in impossible wonder and with no small misapprehension, our Virgil climbed.

We were now well and truly in it – in a place where there was no escape from the certainty of the uncertain. We walked over the ashes of a millions textbooks – some of which the older members of our gang recognized from elementary school – and across a literal sea of understanding. Our own ignorance of how such a thing could happen made it impossible not to imagine medieval shepherds wandering the ruins of Agamemnon’s palace and wondering if it had been built by gods or by monsters.

The damned Crones, though, the Weavers at their Loom, were relentless. There was no escaping the fact that we were here to the purpose they had crafted for us – they had abandoned anything like subtlety.

Stairs and slides were everywhere. Once workers must have scrambled and books must have slid . . . but now each was an invitation, every one was a call to ascend, to climb higher, faster, to reach the summit before the sun fell below the horizon.

Before our ultimate ascent I stumbled into a room of mildew and of worse. I had wandered away from the group, called or lured by my own unique siren. Perhaps we all were called by something at that moment, for when we gathered again we walked in silence, the last part of our journey taken as a group only in name and in number.

I don’t know what my fellows saw, or if they saw anything at all. But I found a mirror. In a building in which every piece of glass had been long ago shattered by idiots with rocks and everything (save books) not bolted down had been harvested by scrappers and tourists, I found a mirror. True, it was one covered in dust – willfully hidden by hands more cunning than mine and by minds that play a far longer game than I can imagine – but it was a mirror nonetheless.

So I looked. I looked at the man about to attempt the final ascent. I looked at his chains, at his shackles. I looked at his weaknesses, and I looked long and hard at the raw wounds left to suppurate because he refused to let them close. I looked at him and saw someone who was no longer me. I looked him long and hard in the eye and then I turned away, leaving him trapped in that glass. I expected to hear him scream – but why would he? He finally had what he wanted, a place in the dark to brood and suffer forevermore – not held back by my refuse to give up.

But I’ve tried to shed him before. There are few things as tenacious as one’s own personal haunting. But that was the point of the quest, of the pilgrimage. To find the threshold and to cross it – in the material, and in symbol made Truth. Ours was a window, small and perched high in the wall of a dark interior, and from which we had to leap down into the unknown and onto the unstable to reach Illumination. Glass remnants jutted at awkward angles and a concrete ledge took a large bite out of my shin. But, hobbling and grinning, I made it. We all did.

There, upon the roof of the ruined brain of an entire educational apparatus, we watched the sun set:

And we looked out upon the city, wondering how many people wandered there trapped by the same invisible chains we had all just released . . . and wondering how many such chains we still carried in complete ignorance.

No quest, after all, is ever complete.  The magic one finds is never enough.

Even when it is a gossamer thin wand grown from the ceiling out of mineral concretions drawn together by the same water that leeched the ink from the pages of the books on the floor above.

I am no sorcerer, I am no wizard, but if forced to choose between a wand of ash with a core of phoenix tailfeather, one of oak with a dragon’s heartstring core, and my wand of Lost Words . . . well, it’s no choice at all really. The great paradox is that the only tools I’ll ever have to fight the Crones are the ones that they give me.