Isla del Encanto

(April 2022. Delivered at the Poet’s Passage in Old San Juan at my last open mic night. Dedicated to Lady. A manifesto of sorts for reenchanting the 21st century.)

Isla del Encanto

Puerto Rico, me encantas.
Quiero cantar por la isla del encanto.
Perdoname mi pobre espanol,
Awkward like the wobbly knees of a newborn giraffe.

Here, in the Poet’s Passage,
We are free to indulge in all degrees of Spanglish.
We pray and we perform,
We translate and we transform,
We realize that all languages tend towards
The same thing beyond language,
And that this pull towards the ineffable is, itself, enchanting.

There are those who declared the story of the 20th century
To be the disenchantment of the world,
Negative nellies like Weber and Eliot
Who conflate critical thinking with negativity,
Intellectualism with pessimism and philosophical hopelessness.
They saw the encroachment of rationalization over the realm of mystery
The replacement of wonder with mere knowingness,
The evacuation of myth and meaning-making from the field
Of life in the face of scientific domination.
They declared this world a wasteland,
That the fragments of culture could not be united into a compelling vision,
And so they abandoned their duties, returned to their ivory towers,
Content with the failure they decided was inevitable without trying.

We artists of the 21st century do not have this luxury of cowardice.
In a spiraling world falling further apart,
Meaning-making is the only force strong enough to save us.

So I declare, here and now,
That the task of the artist in the 21st century is nothing less
Than the reenchantment of the world.

Luckily for us, the task is easier than it appears,
For enchantment is always around us—
We need only look for it,
We need only desire to be enchanted,
We need only open ourselves to receiving
The magic always around us.

Enchantment is more than mere charm.
It is the feeling of entanglement with
A meaningful universe,
Meaning meaning the way everything touches.

To be enchanted is to hear the music of the spheres,
To feel the touch of the stars,
To see the threads tying you
To a web of being impossibly real.

The novelty of the universe is enchanting, and
The symmetry of the universe is enchanting.

The world feels enchanting when randomness seems like design,
When the true story is better than fiction,
When reality feels more than perfect,
As if everything is exactly where it needs to be for your story.

Humans, who live in language, feel enchanted when they hear
The universe singing to them.

To render a thing significant is to sing it.

So, to reenchant the world, we need only open our channels
To channel the enchantment we choose to receive,
And to then chant that enchantment for others to hear.

While enchantment can be channeled anywhere,
Some places make it easier than others.
Of all the places I’ve been,
Puerto Rico is perhaps the most enchanted.