Tag: marriage
Psychologists have something they like to call “magical thinking” and they don’t mean that phrase in a fun whimsical way, but more of “hey dude, face reality” kind of way. The website Healthline says “Magical thinking refers to the idea that you can influence the outcome of specific events by doing something that has no bearing on the circumstances.” Let’s take a look at some examples I’ve come up with:
This week’s video and poem go all in on magical realism. I found what I think is a good definition of magical realism in a blog post by the author Neil Gaman:
“Within a work of magical realism, the world is still grounded in the real world, but fantastical elements are considered normal in this world.”
The narrator in the poem takes as normal that furniture moves and arranges itself and has some kind of motivation for doing so. So a typical Sunday afternoon early in a marriage is shaded by these fantastic happenings. If the poem had just said the “we” in the poem moved the furniture around on Sundays it loses something compared to the furniture moving itself. The magical realism in this poem functions as representing an external force that is frustrated around Sunday afternoons, that time of the week the busyness of life disappears, and the couple are just observers rather than active with respect to this force.