Destroying "enchantment" in the arts

Ever since I became self-aware in my mid teens, I have valued "enchantment" - that magical quality of what I might now call "participation" - which is depth and breadth, significance and beauty. Enchantment is the same thing that CS Lewis called Joy, and Novalis called Sehnsucht - and was something of an obsession for the Romantic Movement.  

I found it first in Tolkien - and realized quickly how rare it was, and how it was altogether absent from most of what most people valued and praised. Furthermore, there didn't seem to be anybody else who valued it as I did - rather, more exactly, there were differences of opinion as to where it might be found, even among those who did value it. 

Finding it was therefore something of a personal quest; and I began to realize that even when I located a source of enchantment, the trend of our times was working against it. 

I found enchantment in the work of the electric folk group Steeleye Span, especially in their supernatural and magical ballads. But after seven LPs of reliably enchanting music - I noticed that in 1975 "All around my hat" was a considerable step down in this respect. It was something to do with a feeling of "overproduction" in the music - which was apparently intended to make it more "commercial", more instantly appealing to a mass audience; and this being achieved by what seemed like excessive messing around with sound and arrangements and (presumably) performance; excessive production-control - such that the delicate bloom of the songs was somewhat rubbed-off. The following album - Rocket Cottage - was poor, and then the band broke up. 

The thing about enchantment is that it isn't usually a conscious goal, but happens as a by-product, as a part of a larger and spontaneously integrated activity. Indeed, it is not possible to get enchantment by making it primary - as CS Lewis describes and explain in Surprised by Joy.

But enchantment can be prevented or destroyed by any focus on almost any specific - it can be pulled-down, but also killed by breaking-up.

So, whereas I quite often found an almost accidental enchantment in many amateur plays and music; I only seldom found it in the work of professionals - especially when they were required to repeat performances, and these became routine. I have never seen a play with enchantment in the West End London theatre, for instance - where actors do long runs of the same play. 

Routine is a killer of enchantment; as is management, "mugging" (exaggeration for effect, as when performers show-off); more generally a striving for entertainment, shocks, horror, laughs. 

A political agenda dominating is maybe the commonest cause of deadly disenchantment. Politics is one of the most disenchanted of all domains. 

Any priority, that is, which arises from outside, and imposes onto the creative process and interaction.

The death of enchantment is a product of separation... Modernity takes an original unity, analyses it into components, treats it as a collection of attributes - and then pursues these singly, perhaps in sequence - or emphasizes on or a few at the expense of the whole.

I have even come across modern attempts - some genuine, others probably insincere - to make enchantment itself an externally imposed priority, to layer it onto works or an intrinsically anti-enchantment aspect of life (such as politics, bureaucracy, mass media, or corporate life) - as if it was some kind of sauce! This never works, but achieves the opposite. 

Enchantment is either integral to the creative process, to Life; or else it is absent   

Now, although enchantment is still discerned and valued by a few people, and can still be found and still arises (but almost exclusively outwith professional and official sources); our civilization lies on the far side from it - the nature and trend of our whole world is systematically and pervasively hostile to enchantment.  

This is apparently what I sensed fifty years ago, back in 1975; although I didn't realize how far the process had yet to go. 

And, as usual, we can't go back. The future of enchantment in the arts, or anywhere, must be something essentially unprecedented; because it can only arise from the large perspective of a lived enchanted life - more exactly from that part or aspect of a Man's life which is enchanted. 

Note: Exactly the same problem of disenchantment happens in churches, and over much the same timescale. There is near zero enchantment in church services, or in any aspect of church life - even when the Christianity is sincere, the atmosphere is as mundane as an office. And probably a majority of serious modern Christians have set their face against many of the manifestations of enchantment - which they reject vehemently as demonic. The truth his the opposite: enchantment is a manifestation of the divine, is indeed Heavenly, and the hope of resurrection. Whatever its intent; mundane Christianity does the work of Satan, quite literally.