Spells
A little SF Poem
It's not religion. It's practice. And you need it here in interplanetary space. The Witch is calm when the rest of us are panicking. Her voice, her gravitas, pacifies us. We don't ask you to believe. Spells don't work because you believe. You do Magic. It is empirical. She says spells are software that we inject into the sloppy goo that we call our brains. Spells—mantras, stories, prayers— inculcate and inoculate. They shape the universe, even the void. So many points of failure, and still so far to go— She points at all of us. We name the darkness to tame the darkness. “Great Goddess Nut protect us.” It's code that slips past logic, and dispels the terror when it threatens to choke us. Does it still work if we know it's a trick? Not a trick, an algorithm. The captain nods. She taps the console. Her tears are drying. We get back to work.
I think prayer and religion, when understood deeply and spoken from the heart, serve a purpose far beyond ritual. They have the power to reconnect us - with one another, with our own souls, and with our deepest nature. To me, that is the most authentic value of faith: not blind adherence, but a personal, sincere experience that unifies rather than divides.
I read this as a way of warning to keep your bearings, or at least find a way to do so, when so many leap to conclusions all around us - and almost to a person, all the wrong conclusions. This is the province of everything from conspiracy theories to quack remedies, and we currently have a government full of these panicked people who, on the face of it, project themselves as being sturdy and in control when they confuse ruthlessness and the barking of orders and howls of shrieking urgency with leadership. Deep down, they have never led themselves; they have gone from impulse to impulse unchecked because they convinced others just enough that they looked tough enough for the role. They are too insecure to see their way to a better moral bearing. They are too far gone to be worth anything to anyone.
Maybe the Witch does deceive. I liked the analogy with algorithms - are they our cyber-spells? Spells do indeed lie, or enable us to lie to ourselves. Sometimes, they reveal truths. How to navigate the difference would represent the challenge.
Great poem for this!