Re-enchanted: swimming with Charlie Mackesy

Fascinated by the astonishing success of the whimsical The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse, Belle Tindall probes at the deep wisdom of Charlie Mackesy’s enchanting, not to mention Oscar-winning, modern fable.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

An illustration showing a horse standing, sniffing a mole held by a boy while a seated fox looks on.

Macksey's modern fable.

BBC.

Four million of us dedicated half an hour of our Christmas Eve to watching Charlie Mackesy’s Academy Award-winning animated short film, The Boy the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, making it the most watched programme on that day. (Not to mention the five million of us who have streamed it since, making it the most watched film in its category at this year's Oscars).

More than two million of us have his illustrated book of the same name sitting somewhere in our homes, placing it firmly on both the New York Times and the Sunday Times best-sellers list.

Over one-and-a-half million of us have decided to make Charlie’s work a daily staple of our lives by following him on Instagram.

'Lives have been profoundly touched by the effect that Mackesy is having upon the world.'

And then, of course, there’s the impact of these lofty statistics, the depth of success that is running parallel to the breadth, the Mackesy Effect that can’t be quantified. I defy anyone to scroll through the online comments on his social media pages, browse the reviews of his book, or explore the Twitter hashtag pertaining to the short film, and not be struck by the stories of seemingly endless people whose lives have been profoundly touched by the effect that Mackesy is having upon the world.

My morning peek into the Twitter-verse shows that today alone, the animated film is being watched in schools as an exercise in mental and emotional well-being, copies of the book are being distributed to sufferers of PTSD and gifted to residents of care homes, while the distinctive drawings are adorning the walls of therapy rooms and hospital wards.

Fascination at such an impact can be reduced to a singular word: why?

This isn’t a question dubiously asked from a safe distance, surveying the astonishing success and scratching my head with scepticism. I am by no means unconvinced by the genius of it all. Quite the contrary, my copy of the book is one of the most well-thumbed books I own. I pull it off my shelf and open it up more regularly than I care to admit, each time utterly bewildered as to why it feels as though it was written just for that precise moment.

And so, to ask the question once more: what is it about this simple fable, in all of its various forms, that is continuing to captivate us? I have a theory. One that was somewhat hidden in plain sight all along.

There’s a phrase that has been whirring around my mind as I’ve been probing at Mackesy’s enchanting work: it is a fable in which children can paddle and elephants can swim. This phrase has been frequently used to describe a particular biblical book, the Gospel of John.

John’s Gospel has a reputation for being somewhat of a literary and theological enigma. Therefore, whether it be in pure delight or utter defeat, John’s Gospel has been described in this way – as a text in which children can paddle and elephants swim.

Far more than a whimsical-sounding review, this rather endearing visual very succinctly sums up the paradox that is the literary nature of the fourth Gospel. It can be read and understood at a surface level, each scene working together to create a tapestry of moments, curated to tell the tale of a life that caught the attention of everyone around it. And of course, a death and resurrection, painstakingly recorded to ensure that the impact of such a momentous life moves beyond the confines of first-hand witnesses. This is how the fourth Gospel has been paddled in for two millennia.

'This work is a text in which children can paddle and elephants can swim.'

But then there’s the ever-present invitation to swim with the elephants. In reality, this invitation is to sit and dissect every micro-detail, to delve into the intention undergirding every word choice, to pour over the precise placement of every narrative. It is an invitation to find meaning hidden within meaning hidden within yet more meaning, it is an invitation to surrender to the sheer genius of what John has produced and work out how to rightly respond to it.

And with this in mind, I return to the work of Charlie Mackesy. This is not to suggest that through The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, Mackesy has created, or attempted to create, some kind of Biblical text. Surely, he, more than anyone, would positively balk at the idea. What I’m suggesting is that this work is a text in which children can paddle and elephants can swim.

The pages of the book, the scenes of the short-film, the images on the Instagram account - they can be consumed at a glance, they can be paddled in. The simplicity of them offers an antidote to our crowded lives, the whimsical nature of each character appeals to our desire for escapism, and the relatable nature of Charlie Mackesy himself (a self-proclaimed ‘grubby artist’) allows us to feel that his content is a safe place. And then there are the words that accompany each drawing he offers us; in the animated film, actors such as Idris Elba and Tom Hollander have been enlisted to bring the voices of the four beloved characters to life. In the book, Charlie’s own handwriting is tasked with doing all the talking. These messages, presented as brief conversations between the characters, are notably short in length and simplistic in nature, but let’s not allow that to fool us into assuming that they lack substance. On the contrary, there is sufficient depth to be swam in, and the invitation to do so is present on every page.

'What can be found by those who are wading away from the shores?'

And herein lies the theory: the invitation to paddle in the waters of this whimsical world may be what is attracting the world to Charlie’s work, but the opportunity to swim in its very applicable depths is what is keeping us captivated. Therefore, a question remains: what can be found by those who are wading away from the shores? I have a suggestion: re-enchantment of the most theological kind.

We’re living in an age of ‘disenchantment’ in the West, a societal state that was predicted by Max Weber in the early 20th Century, and profoundly resonates with our reality today. Weber used the term ‘disenchantment’ to denote a time when society will have discarded our reliance upon, and appreciation of, the mysterious, the spiritual, and the transcendent.

But are we satisfied with disenchantment?

Our apparent captivation with content such as Mackesy’s, which is intent on re-enchanting us, would imply not.

The longer you sit with Mackesy’s work (or swim in it, to keep a hold of the Johannine metaphor), the more apparent it becomes that neither the boy, the mole, the fox, nor the horse are actually the central characters. Rather, the things that hold the entire body of work together are the exact things that disenchantment refutes: the mysterious, the spiritual, the transcendent. Things that, to quote the book itself, ‘sit beyond all things’. Perhaps our appreciation of such things has not been disregarded, but profoundly underestimated. It could be suggested that our reliance upon such things is more intrinsic than we ourselves acknowledge, and every now and again, something as unlikely as a talking mole makes a profound mark on culture and subsequently proves it.

Charlie Mackesy has ultimately provided us with an invitation into re-enchantment.

'He wanted to reach out to a loved one in distress, but words kept falling short.'

The thing to note about re-enchantment is that it is, by its very nature, a return to something familiar; a previous perspective or an ancient wisdom perhaps. The vehicle is intriguingly new, but the cargo feels ancient. Or to be more specific, the cargo feels biblical.

Mackesy’s relationship with his Christian faith is paradoxically complex and enviably simple. He’s spoken many a time about the way he both perceives and receives the divine love that is at the core of the Christian faith. He has also given us a glimpse into how it tends to fuel his work. In an interview with CBN, Charlie tells the story behind one of his more explicitly biblical pieces of art entitled 'The Prodigal Daughter' . He spoke about how he wanted to reach out to a loved one in distress, but words kept falling short, so he painted her a picture. He said ‘I was just trying to show her through imagery where, you know, to be held is something she always wanted. So, I said, “This is what God is like”’.

Whether or not he has the same intention when it comes to his more commercial work, as you flick through each page of his best-selling book, that is exactly what you sense the characters within the book, and the man behind it, to be saying: this is what God is like.

Whether it be the horse, who is ‘the biggest thing they have encountered’ and takes it upon himself to carry the other characters physically and emotionally through the wilderness. Or the constant re-iteration that love is the means and the end to all things. Or even the narrative detail of each character becoming known, deeply, and honestly known, on levels that they had yet to experience. You could write ten books of theology or philosophy in an attempt to expound each theme.

And I, for one, hope it’s a place where children continue to paddle, and elephants continue to swim for a long time to come.

Explainer

Culture

Digital

30 July 2024

5 min read

How tech harvests our humanity

The second in a three-part series exploring the implications of technology.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

In the first article, I painted a picture of the ordinary person using modern technology, for example, social media on a smart phone. I noted that advocates for modern technology seem to have two basic principles: that technology is natural and neutral. In this next article I want to introduce the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and show how he pushes against these two basic principles and invites us to think again about modern technology. Heidegger’s instinct, as a twentieth century philosopher, is to be suspicious that things are not as they seem, he casts his suspicious gaze over modern technology and sees a way of being that technology encourages that exists underneath the technologies that we use every day.

What Heidegger wants to show us about modern technology is not related to specific concerns about particular technologies but instead a general suspicion about the ‘essence’ of technology, or, you could say, the spirit of technology. He doesn’t want us to immediately jump to pragmatic questions about how to use technology, as if the primary question is how to make any given technology better or more moral. Instead, Heidegger wants us to take modern technology together as a whole and ask, “What is the essence of this?” Heidegger’s contention is that “technology is not an object or set of objects, nor a way of handling objects with tools, but a form of being the world. It is not something we choose to refuse, but the environment in which modern humans come into existence.”

Heidegger argues that underneath any piece of tech that we might use in our day-to-day lives, technology at its core has already completely changed the way that we as a society understand and interact with the world and everything in it. We live in a technological age and as members of a technological society and so we have been shaped by (to use Christian language, we have been ‘discipled’ by) the spirit of the age to see the world around us. Heidegger suggests that we now see the world as broken down into useable bits that can be categorised and reformed to suit our needs. As Mark Wrathall puts it, the essence of technology is to train us to “experience the world as calling on us or drawing us. To transform everything into stock pieces, so that they can be placed into a vast inventory of options.”[2] Growing up in a technological society means that we see the whole world as an Amazon warehouse a place of seemingly limitless options that can be called upon depending on our needs and quickly delivered.

A piece of technology such as the smartphone points to a wider ‘spirit’ of technology which intends to position everything, even human beings, as replaceable resources within a larger system.

The central word that Heidegger uses to describe the essence of technology is gestell which is not an easy word to translate into English, but two possible translations would be ‘positionality’, or ‘enframing’. His point is that the essence of technology is to remove objects, people, and things from their natural environment and position them so that they might become useful, a resource, available for our manipulation. When Heidegger says that the essence of technology is gestell he is pointing to the way that modern technology extracts objects from their contexts and turns them into a quarry to the plundered. There are of course obvious ways in which humanity has always extracted resources from the natural world: we have always quarried for energy (coal, oil etc) or chopped down forests for wood. By claiming that the essence of modern technology is gestell, Heidegger wants us to notice that in the modern world, it’s not just quarries or forests that we mine for resources but now anything and everything can be turned from being a singular object in the world into a recourse for extraction. Everything has become what Heidegger calls “standing reserve.”

Think again of a smartphone, it is just one of the billions of devices that sit on shelves or, having already been purchased, live in someone else’s pocket. Inside each device are thousands of transistors and circuit boards each of which again are stockpiled in warehouses ready to be replaced if needed or used for some other purpose. Your phone is connected to a network of nodes each of which can be replicated or replaced if needed, no node is unique. Your latest phone has no unique or prize relation to you, it’s just the latest upgrade which will be recycled in a year or two when the next upgrade becomes available. The person from whom you bought the phone is equally replaceable, just a faceless employee completing a set of controlled and pre-arranged tasks that are designed to be completed by anyone and no one in particular. Likewise, you as the consumer are considered to be little more than “standing reserve” by the companies that supply you with your smartphone and access to their networks. One of many millions of nodes in their system that has been analysed so that your preferences can be expertly mapped to the range of services that they provide. Within that system, you are completely replaceable. A piece of technology such as the smartphone points to a wider ‘spirit’ of technology which intends to position everything, even human beings, as replaceable resources within a larger system: “Every item within this standing reserve is reduced to a position, actively waiting to be called on. Heidegger insists this is no judgment on the radio, the internet, or the smartphone user. It is just the way in which the essence of modern technology interacts with humanity… Heidegger provides a diagnosis of our modern age and the way in which we humans have placed ourselves under the sway of modern technology, as a resource standing within a network which seeks, ultimately, to place, represent, and think of every entity as an object within an all-encompassing system.”

Let’s return to the original thought experiment at the start of the first article: a mother playing with her child, who immediately reaches for her phone to capture the moment when her child does something particularly cute. An advocate for modern technology, like Steve Jobs, may look at that interaction and see only the benefit: a mother wanting to remember a beautiful moment with her child extends the capacities of her brain using a digital tool to aid her memory. But Heidegger would be more suspicious, he would look at that moment and argue instead that the essence of technology is to turn everything, even a precious moment with a cute baby, into a resource to be used at a later date. The unique moment of joy and delight between parent and child becomes caught and codified such that it can be found and replayed at will or easily replicated to send to others. At the extreme end of the spectrum are so-called content creators who reduce themselves to just another resource to be harvested on social media.

So that is Heidegger’s diagnosis of our technological age, in the final article in this series we will consider Heidegger’s solution and consider what a particularly Christian response to Heidegger’s diagnosis might look like.