What Are We, If Not Kaleidoscopes?

A Guide to Enchantment, and Light

Around the winter solstice, when the Earth is tilted as far away from the sun as it will go and daylight thins and pales, we intervene. We string bulbs. We light candles. We build fires. I think it’s our most beautiful instinct, to create our own light when it wanes.

I think we’re gorgeous and silly animals who make wreaths from firs and light from poured beeswax. We spin sugar into candy, fry latkes and donuts, tell stories of elves and angels, make movies about miracles. We give each other little presents, things we wrap in paper and twine, tokens to keep us cheerful, we carol if we cannot choir. We incant, enchant, conjure. Produce something from nothing. To make light from the dark is magic. Hope is the act of kindling, reflecting and protecting a flame.

I made a playlist for this season, to go with you on your travels, and my friend Meghan said to me, “This made me think about the songs I listen to at the end of Christmas night when everyone else has gone to bed.” By that day there’s been four days of gathering more minutes of light, we know there’s a season ahead where it will be hard to feel those minutes, even harder to count them as victories, but for now, the people you love are sleeping, and isn’t it sweet that we all tried so hard to capture the sun for each other.

SPARKLE

Panna II Garden Indian Restaurant, 93 1st Avenue, New York, NY 10003

There are two distinct winter-decor belief systems.

One belongs to the Ralph Lauren Christmas people. They believe in small, elegant white lights on the tree. They believe in letting real snowflakes land on white cashmere mittens and the ends of ski-slope noses. They believe in matching wrapping paper for all the gifts beneath the tree.

And then there are the Panna II Garden Indian people.

We believe in construction-paper chains, chunky colored Christmas lights, cranberry garlands, and tinsel everywhere—on the tree, on the ground, on the dog, on the baby. To be clear, Panna II Garden Indian Restaurant is festooned in a truly psychotic amount of lights, a straight-to-jail level of maximalism.

To each their own, but I am clearly a Panna II Garden Indian Restaurant Christmas person. I want to eat too much with the people I love, ensconced in lantern light, firefly-ed by chili-pepper bulbs.

Panna II Garden Indian Restaurant brings this spectacle to the East Village’s Curry Row each and every month—magic year-round, without crowds, without fighting for sidewalk space outside a Bergdorf window or trekking to Dyker Heights. The food is hot, spicy, buttery, so, so garlicky, really delicious. They’ll ask if you want naan, and bring it even if you don’t.

That’s the holiday spirit.

DRESS UP

Surrender Dorothy, 13 W. 17th St, New York, NY 10011

“What little girl doesn’t want a store?” Ruby McCollister asked me, glinting wolfishly. She’s right, of course.

But it’s not just any store.

The building is glossy black, punk in its refusal to play nice. Above a small square window, a sign in girlish script reads: Surrender Dorothy. The building has been owned since 1968 by Shakespearean actor John Cullum and ballet dancer Emily Frankel, who lived upstairs, raised their child there, and built a theater on the third floor for friends — because, what else did you do in the ’70s? Emily painted the hallways (pinks, reds, yellows, oh my!); made the collages lining the stairwells. The space feels feral, willful, hallucinatory — a lineage of people who kept it weird despite every incentive to sell out. That’s theater, darling. That’s commitment.

Up the stairs to the second floor, the shimmer of mylar leads you to Surrender Dorothy, in all its referential Emerald City fantasia.

“Leah is the real Oz-head,” Ruby told me. “She’s read all the books, loves the movie. What I bring to the table is knowing everything about Judy Garland.”

Shopkeeping is world building by another name. This whole endeavor began last year, in the midst of an impossibly hard winter, for a trio of electric, lifelong friends: Ruby McCollister, Leah Hennessey, and Arabella Aldrich. The three were grieving the loss of a parent. They organized a holiday market in the theater. There wasn’t a plan really, except to cheer themselves up. They didn’t advertise, but people came.

Ruby described the scene in The Little Princess, when Sarah and Becky’s attic is transformed by a Christmas miracle: fur-lined slippers appear at the foot of their bed, an impossible banquet blooms out of the dark. A group of women mourning their parents and making something splendid for their own inner children feels right. Timely. Maybe the only thing to do.

Come for the dollhouses, twinkling with fat Christmas lights, populated by Marissa Zappas’ genius perfumes. Come for the marvelous contemporary designers, (Simone Rocha, Zoe Whalen and her Lady Guinevere downtown drag), come for the expertly chosen vintage with handwritten hangtags (on a psychedelic brocade shift set - “obviously commissioned in British Hong Kong by an ambassador’s wife. That’s not sexist, it’s realist. Exquisite tailoring, what?!”) I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a metallic, front buckling knit, an ‘Armor’ Vest Costume circa 1960s.

These days we’ve moved the majority of our shopping online. An activity so linked to sensation, history, materiality, tangibility has been flattened into illusion. To insist on a physical space, on presence, on being the proprietress of your own strange kingdom, that’s counterculture. To do something commercial so anti-commercially, so second floor inefficient, that’s magical. I believe the end of truth online will usher in an age of gaudy authenticity, super-reality, where excitement is the only true currency. The highest prize will be to be somewhere, to know someone, to have something real, something to believe in. The wizard will see you now.

OPEN A DOOR

Rudolf Steiner Library, 351 Fairview Ave #610, Hudson, NY 12534

I found the Rudolf Steiner Library by accident, but it felt like fate. I was on Fairview Ave, Hudson’s least romantic corridor — AutoZone, ShopRite, Taco Bell / Long John Silver’s, a Bitcoin ATM — when I saw a small sign and turned into a snow-piled parking lot. Inside a shared vestibule (chiropractor, all-gender bathroom, and I guess…anthroposophical headquarters) I opened a door and stepped into lazure-painted walls and a library organized according to a deeply considered philosophy of what is worth knowing.

The Rudolf Steiner Library does not pretend to be neutral. It is not organized by Dewey Decimal or the Library of Congress. Its shelves radiate outward in concentric circles, each area assigned to a branch of the practical, practiced world of today.

This is a place that believes knowledge should serve a human life, that there are cosmologies of understanding, and that questions of being should be pursued with the same rigor we grant medicine, politics, law or empirical science. A library is a place of deep relief for me – I go blank at a search bar. I live in a state of near frantic curiosity, but confronted with the infinite, veiled quality of the internet, I’m not always sure what I want to know. I want to be prompted, and guided, led somewhere by happenstance and luck, rather than have my wonder clipped by a blinking cursor.

I got a library card, for free, that never stops being fun. I can now check out 25 books at a time and I maxed out this round on magic books. Not theatrical magic, or sleight of hand, not Etsy-witch spell books, but real magic. The Magicians of the Golden Dawn by Ellic Howe, Wielding Power by Charles R. Tetworth, The History and Practice of Magic by Paul Christian, Ritual Magic by E.M. Butler, A History of White Magic by Gareth Knight. Magic that can be understood as a discipline.

True magic is about alignment: learning to govern what is closest to you — your attention, your motives, your thoughts, the texture of your inner life — before that power can be applied elsewhere. Over and over, in every introduction, the warning rings out: Magic without truth, clarity, and ethics is dangerous, user beware.

Like folk music, spiritualism, yoga, and other periodic fashions, Magic has very deep roots in the human psyche, and the best antidote to the perverse and underground is a clear, accurate statement of what is true and what is false.¹

I’m obsessed with how solemn these books are. They are deeply skeptical of the reader’s ability to access them, regardless of the wisdom of the pursuit. They’re suspicious and disappointed in a culture that has lost its way; its romance, its beauty, its grasp on true meaning, and then reaches for magic as a costume, or a toy, maybe worst of all — a shortcut.

It matters that this library exists here. In a strip mall, next to a ShopRite. Not far from a region of New York once called the Burned-Over District, rife with utopian experiments, fundamentalist fervor, occult practitioners, a quintessentially American attempt to reconcile religiosity with democracy. Serious belief can be found in unserious containers. You have to stay alert, because there are often gifts waiting behind the unlikeliest of doors.

READ THE TEA LEAVES

McNulty’s Tea & Coffee, 109 Christopher St, New York, NY 10014

Tea is the most popular drug on the planet. I love it.

I loved getting high tea with my Aunt Jill at the Ritz Carlton when I was a little girl, she and I would both wear gloves. I loved my friend Meghan perfecting a classically Angeleno chagaccino because she couldn’t believe we were spending $9 a day on hot morning mushrooms. I learned to steep fresh mint leaves in water in the mountains of West Virginia, and later burdock root in Tennessee — a process that will forever make me feel like some sort of home-spun witch.

I once spent weeks on a tea farm outside of Nairobi after missing a flight and being unable to afford another ticket home. I’ll always remember the showy chai wallas of Tirumala, the spicy comfort waiting at the end of a barefoot pilgrimage up a mountain lined with leopard warnings, and tales of children being snatched by them in the fog. There was milky black tea in the early mornings of music festivals, and Rwandan tea with hot milk and cinnamon at the end of acid trips.

My roommate Tsukasa in Berlin used to make a tea that became a memory for a whole group of friends: an entire knob of ginger chopped roughly, the life squeezed out of 2-4 lemons, sometimes pith, sometimes rind, scoop in a few spoonfuls of honey, let it boil together until pouring the brew over a Barry’s tea bag. My dear friend Cormac later told me that in Ireland, you’re either a Barry’s family or a PG Tips family. We, were, in that friend group, a Barry’s family.

In New York City, McNulty’s has been the place to get your brews since 1895. There’s a row of teas that have single note flavors: anisette, apricot, banana bread, blood orange, caramel, chocolate mint, Jamaican ginger. There’s strawberry with roses, snow sprouting green tea, downy pearls of jasmine, pu-erh stored in tangerine peels. My favorite came as a recommendation from the purveyor, David: Golden Monkey, harvested only in the Spring from the Fujian province in China, it’s a golden tipped black tea that blends tannic, grassy, spicy and buttery notes into a perfect anytime tea, the perfect, this and a newspaper tea. I also got a quarter pound of a Russian blend because I dream of a samovar in the corner of my kitchen the way others dream of a Berkey. It almost doesn’t need saying but the storefront itself is bewitching — the shelves lean, custom stamps with red ink pads mark each bag of tea, glass lidded apothecary jars, oxidized tins, the floors crowded with burlap sacks of coffee beans.

They still use a scale from Dayton Ohio called “The Computing Scale,” the date of production still on it — 1903.

INHALE

Fueguia, 21 Crosby St, New York, NY 10013

Scent isn’t vapor or impression, it isn’t merely an idea, it’s matter. When you smell something, molecules of that thing break off — plant, resin, flower, wood, fruit — and travel through the air until they dissolve in the upper chambers of your nose.

I’ve been reading the 1970 printing of Magic: White and Black, or The Science of Finite and Infinite Life Containing Practical Hints for Students of Occultism by Dr. Franz Hartmann, M.D. which defines magic as “science which deals with the mental and moral powers of man, and shows what control he may exercise over himself and others.” Properly investigated, Hartmann writes, we discover that “the elements which compose the essential man are identical with those we find in the universe; that is to say, that the universe is the Macrocosm, and man — its true copy — the Microcosm.”

Let me explain. Each molecule has a unique structure — shape, charge, vibration. Your olfactory receptors are tiny proteins shaped to recognize specific molecular forms, and when one of these molecules fits — when its shape ‘matches’ the shape of the receptor, the neuron fires. The moment of “match” is the moment the macrocosm recognizes itself inside the microcosm. A molecule of magnolia leaf, or amyris, or palo santo, literally finds its corresponding receptor inside you. Your body is built to know it. You are built to receive the world. The world is designed to speak to you.

What does it mean to know amyris, a genus of plants known as torchwoods, used in perfumes for its woody, balsamic scent, to layer massoia, and musk and ambrette seed in order to achieve the sensation, the felt stirring of a story, one of a freshly cut tree branch, a lingering blue about to vanish into darkness. What else would you call that if not magic?

In Fueguia the lights are dim, a kind of high aperture, chiaroscuro lighting that allows the glowing underlit bottles to catch like sun through leaves. There’s a neutrality to the air, something clean, like the vacuum of outer space, all the botanic expression trapped in the beakers capping the bottles. The staff are beautiful, exclusively, and I’ve been enough times to know.

The scents are arranged in a kind of ephemeral periodic table, a solar system of lighter to darker compositions; florals, powders, citrus, greens, resins, musks, ouds, leather, wood — spinning clockwise and counterclockwise around each other. One could enter only where they’re called to, let the wand choose you.

The scent that I chose, or that chose me, is called Humboldt, I have always wished I was sweeter, or richer, more resinous or powdery, that I could carry woods or leathers, tobacco or gunpowder, but I am primarily citric with an undercurrent of amazonic; I like to float in the passionfruit, quince, green mandarin of it all and then roll in the unctuous sweet sweat of bergamot, jasmine, neroli and oakmoss. Finding a scent forces you to calibrate yourself, and what I learned choosing my potion is, despite my occasional forays into self doubt, frustration, drippy despair — I’m a good witch, I’m forest and flowers.

I once heard that aromatherapy is nothing but the relaxation that comes from taking a pleasant moment for yourself to turn off, tune in, breathe and find yourself at the other end of a rabbit hole, somewhere else, new, but you know it. You’re made of the same things.

SIT A SPELL

David Lynch Foundation, 228 E 45th St, 14th Fl, New York, NY 10017

It’s a strange building on 45th street, a few doors down from the Comfort Diner, with their big neon clock. The lobby is floor-to-ceiling black-and-white marble, so densely mottled it looks like television static. It feels like entering a clean room before wherever they’re dismembering an alien craft. Every surface is covered in bouquets of bodega flowers, brought by new initiates for the teacher, maybe for themselves, a traditional act of commitment, symbolic resolve, ceremony. It’s like a comfortingly uncool therapist’s office, one who’s been doing it a long time.

I went for the first time in 2018, and I remember my teacher saying that TM should feel effortless, when all mindfulness meditation had ever been for me was effort, the practice of putting my wandering puppy of a mind back in its pen, over and over again. But here my teacher took me to another room, put her hand to my ear, and whispered my two-syllable mantra to me. I felt a shiver go down my arms.

During my recent refresher course, despite remembering in some more effortful part of my consciousness that meditation would help and despite how tough this year has been, how much I craved a kind of smooth, golden field of nothing, I couldn’t make myself sit, couldn’t bring myself to invite the “innocence” of TM back into my life. I was asked to close my eyes, the city humming below me and there it was again, a marigold light behind my eyes, a deep belly breath, then nothing...till a bell.

I was sure it was a mistake, that we had been meditating for a maximum of five minutes.

I don’t know. I guess sometimes one doesn’t want to feel better. Sometimes it feels more honest to stew, to steep in what is, to be convinced that nothing could change in 20 minutes, because if it could, then what? But the bell is this wonderful quotidian fact. 1,200 seconds, a little golden light, and then it’s over, ding. Welcome back.

CHANGE THE MIRROR

The World’s Largest Kaleidoscope, 5340 NY-28, Mt Tremper, NY 12457

The Emerson Kaleidoscope is in Mt. Tremper, a four minute drive from the Phoenicia Diner, home to a spectacular breakfast burrito and the DINER sign used in Severance, which everyone photographs all summer long. I arrived cold, stomping the snow off my boots. A smiling group of women asked if they could point me in a direction. I said I’d like to see the World’s Largest Kaleidoscope. Teresa McCarthy led me through the Kaleidostore and into the silo where she promptly proceeded to blow my mind.

I’m having trouble writing about kaleidoscopes because I love them so much but also because the more wonderful something is, somehow the simpler the language needs to become.

I’m a photographer so I know intimately how the lens you use changes the way you see, how it shapes the world, and eventually what you think is real.

A camera is a box that catches light in order to remember how the world looked. A kaleidoscope is simpler, and stranger. It’s a tube lined with mirrors, set at precise angles. At one end is the object cell: bits of colored glass, fragments, ingredients. The mirrors repeat whatever they are given. Change the angle and the repetition changes. Change the materials and the colors change. Introduce motion and the image becomes subject to time. It was one of the first things Teresa said to me, an explanation so literal and profound that it ricocheted through my head for days afterward:

“When you change the mirror, you change the picture.”

Visitors can lean their bellies on angled supports, but since I was alone I laid down in the center of the silo and looked up. Above me the image bloomed into a vast patterned sphere, complex and perfect like snowflakes.

The first show I saw was their debut piece, “America, the House We Live In,” which opened on Fourth of July weekend, 1996. Jimi Hendrix plays beneath Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Images of founding fathers, eagles, turkeys and congressional garlands, fracture, multiply and recombine, into giant psychedelic orbs. It ends with the piercing cry of an eagle, and then darkness.

I asked if I could see another one.

Teresa played the holiday show, my favorite visually. In the end, the earth became a heart and then the heart, filled with the earth and became the word PEACE.

She asked if I’d like to see another. Uh, yeah. Yes. Why not?

She played a newer show, Stardust² which follows the life cycle of a star. Light entered the kaleidoscope. It split and turned, multiplied until it became a pattern. What reaches your eyes is light that has been broken open, remade, reformed, a collaboration between you who is made of the universe and the universe. When the show ended, the lights went out and the narrator’s voice said, “Thank you for taking this journey with me across this noble universe, and remember, we are all stardust.”

1. From the new introduction to Magic, White and Black by Leslie Shepherd

2. Created in 2016 by Alicia Ramirez, Shea and Austin Johnson