I watched “Leaving Neverland” soon after it came out last winter and came away perplexed. All over the Internet, there had been articles about how overwhelming it was for people to come to terms with what appeared to be irrefutable testimony to Michael Jackson’s guilt as a child molester. Did people have to give up the music, the videos, the memories? I was perplexed because I myself had no association with any of his work; I had barely even heard any of it. I remembered the outpouring of grief in 2009 following his June 25 death, which also made no sense to me at the time.
This time around I was sufficiently intrigued that I decided to see what the fuss was all about. I started with the music video of “Thriller”. At first it bewildered me, the long opening scene between a strange looking boy and his date and the Vincent Price voiceover. But then, a transformed Michael snapped into formation with the ghoulish dancers and began to move, letting loose with the song, and I was transfixed. I had become enchanted by Michael Jackson.
I made a study of him over subsequent days, and for awhile I fell more and more under his spell as a vocalist and a dancer. And then, almost ten years after the fact, I began to grieve his death, and to understand what so many people have been experiencing ever since that documentary came out. Do his actions cancel out the merits of what he accomplished? People may differ in their answers, but one conclusion is impossible to avoid: Michael Jackson was and still is a master of enchantment.
The term “enchanting” has been watered down in our vocabulary to suggest something lovely or appealing, although there is power that still lurks under the surface. A true enchanter is a dangerous weaver of spells, someone who can capture another person and lead them anywhere. Our modern world has a hard time even acknowledging such power, much less coming to terms with it, even though our obsession with celebrities throws us directly into its path.
Nineteenth-century sociologist Max Weber describes the modern world as disenchanted, with the onset of scientific thinking that has diminished the importance of religious belief. There is something tragic about the loss of enchantment with the appearance of reason at the center of our universe. Certainly few people can argue with the benefits of science and medicine, nor would most want to bring back the bad old days of homophobia, misogyny, and hideous tortures as punishment for the sins of blasphemy and heresy. An enchanted forest may sound exciting, but in folklore it is a place of terror, where all sorts of dangers could catch a wanderer unawares.
Yet many of us seem to have a longing for enchantment nonetheless; we want a world that is more than the sum of its parts, that has hidden and unknowable depths inaccessible to the rational mind. This desire finds outlets in such phenomena as the Harry Potter or the Twilight books of ten or more years ago, which may fall in the category of young adult literature but are enjoyed by many adults who are no longer young. And then there are our celebrities, those quasi-divine beings who are the focus of our unacknowledged longings. Michael Jackson was the consummate celebrity of his time, combining extraordinary creative abilities with powerful charisma (another bleached-out word).
The trouble with being enchanted by a celebrity is that it’s a lot like trying to wrap one’s arms around a ghost. Jackson is dead two times over, first in 2009 and now in the death of all illusions about him, but even so, he was for his fans no more than a dream while he was alive. According to the Buddha, all of life in samsara is just as much a state of enchantment. We seek fulfillment where none is to be found, until our disenchantment motivates us to practice (although the process is not automatic; most people continue looking for lasting satisfaction in the world of appearances right up until the end).
Such is one side of traditional Buddhist thinking, which comes with a substantial dose of asceticism. There is another side, however, which is populated by deities and gives rise to vivid imagery, an enchanted world that only the most advanced yogis can enter in states of deepest concentration. This is the source of the religious art and ritual that is so strange to western thinking, with its own asceticism of scientific materialism. While one project of western Buddhism seeks to reconcile the Buddha’s teachings with the scientific study of the brain, there are other teachers such as Rob Burbea and, recently, Daniel Ingram who are calling for greater openness to our capacity for enchantment.
In the words of Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” As we travel more deeply into our own minds, we find these words to ring true.
Light Getting In 