The Song That Revealed a Hidden World of Magic

The first time I heard "Ship of Fools," I went into my bedroom and drew a map.

It was a map of the world the song created in my mind. It had a massive forest with towering trees that waned in size and number as the land spread into gold-tinged rolling hills. Those hills were precursors to a low and rocky mountain range whose ridges ended abruptly in a vast desert. On the other side of that were slowly rising forested cliffs, at the bottom of which was a forceful sea crashing against them.

On the forest side of this world lived one king, and on the ocean side lived another. Together they had found this world and a way to tap into its magic, but they had quarreled over its proper use.

I started writing about this place, about who these kings were and how the world worked. I didn’t write with the goal of making a book or publishing, I just needed to create someplace to escape into, away from the drab concrete trap of the city and the life I despised. The life in which I spent two hours underground every day crammed in a sardine can to get someplace I had no desire to go. The life lived almost entirely through a computer screen, chained to a desk in a fluorescent-lit box without windows.

The world I imagined had the uncanny vacant feel of driving the nearly empty roads at dawn. I often daydreamed about being alone in a car, driving through the fresh, slumbering world, my mind foggy and susceptible to the possibility that gets crowded out of everyday existence. Then, somehow both gradually and suddenly, the sunlight would fill everything, suffusing my eyes and my head and gently pooling in the hollows above my collarbones. Even afterwards, when the world would wake up and I was no longer in my private universe, I was still in a rarefied place. The highways feel like a parallel reality, tenuously touching but also very separate from the daily routine of business and community. That was the kind of place I wanted to live.

The world of the song was a place of possibility. My world was wrong, and I wanted a do-over. I felt trapped in a life—in a city, in a job—that was not for me. It had no meaning, no wildness, no freedom. I was terrified to leave it, and I was terrified that I would never be able to. If I followed the thread back through all the choices I’d made along the way, there was nobody to blame but me. I had picked this life. Each choice had seemed like the best one in front of me at the time, but I was dissatisfied with where I’d ended up.

I saw all the things that needed to change to make my world habitable, and I could see no way to do it. It was a too-tangled knot. Because of my choices, because of people’s expectations, because this is how we’ve always done it. But the song transported me to a new world without those things, without history, without so many people contributing to a reality that was miserable, and there was possibility there. There was magic.

I listened to the song every day for months, maybe even a year. I listened to it on the subway, letting it carry me away from the stifling crush of bodies, reminding me that there was sun and fresh air and birdsong above when I was trapped underground.

I listened to it at work when the panic started creeping up my legs like seething wires, clutching my skin and clamping my veins closed. When I had to fight myself not to run out of the office, out of the city, out of my life.

I was always looking for something. A windfall. A natural disaster. Something to distract me, good or bad. A way out.

I was looking for magic. I knew it was hidden, but it wasn’t the way I thought. The thing about magic is you can’t look for it—you can only allow yourself to see it.

One summer night I felt a restlessness that drew me out of my cramped apartment and up to the roof of my building. The air was saturated, charged with wind and electricity. I put my headphones on and listened to the song. The night sky was clear right above me, but there was heat lightning flashing inside the purple and grey clouds off toward the city that pulsed in time with the percussion. Occasionally a wrathful golden trident was hurled toward the city, and a like-shaped bolt would hit my worry nerve, making me fear I should go inside before I got myself struck by lightning. But I stayed.

I was rooted to the hard slate of the roof tiles as they granted the last embers of sun warmth to the soles of my feet. I began to dance, atavistic and uncivilized, the music and the storm telling me how to move. Eyes closed, I flailed with the song and with the storm, and a great surge of energy filled me with vitality. The lightning in the distance grew more intense, its flares over the city painting streaks behind my closed eyelids. I opened my eyes, and through the dark curtain of the storm, I squinted to make sense of what I saw: in place of the city skyline was the shadowy profile of a low, rocky mountain range.

After that night, things were different.

I still needed to leave—that was real. I didn’t want that life. But it was not because it was devoid of magic. No life is.

Prior to hearing that song everything I did was a search for magic, but it was the magic of escapism. Whether trying to recover the magic of childhood, the magic of first experience, or the magic of myth and legend—the stories we make up about the world to make it a habitable place—I was looking for something to save me. A deus ex machina device to pry me from my unhappiness.

The first time I heard “Ship of Fools,” I didn’t just hear notes and rhythm. I heard stories. I heard the Truth: There is another world beyond the quotidian that is stranger and scarier and yet more alive and rich, navigable if you’re able to suspend your assumptions and stop taking things for granted.

I believe that whatever magic is left in this world—however you define it—is hidden, or perhaps hiding. No matter my life circumstances, I need a connection to that to feel alive. Music is how I uncover it. It’s like a dowsing rod that tugs me, stumbling, toward what I need.