Rowling Tweets Potter Fandom, Ickabog

Thanks to everyone who's bought a copy of The Ickabog, my charitable trust has so far donated over £8m to more than 70 UK and international charities to help alleviate the social effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Find out more here: https://t.co/4VzpDVHhsO
🙏💖🙏💖🙏💖🙏💖🙏💖🙏

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) January 31, 2022

I’m pretty sure Rowling, literally married as she is to conventional allopathic medicine, holds diametrically different views than I do on the cause-and-effect realities in play with respect to the “social effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.” Even without knowing the beliefs and work of the “70 UK and international charities” to whom Volant Charitable Trust has donated just shy of $11 million, however, a gift made by Rowling from proceeds of Ickabog sales, one is obliged to acknowledge The Presence’s generous philanthropy.

Her continued cash-support and concern for “vulnerable groups” and funding charitable “projects” for “the alleviation of social deprivation” shows once again that she puts her money where her mouth is as well as where it counts. The Fund’s determination to fund “the purchase of medical equipment or PPE in connection with the Covid-19 pandemic”? Not so much ‘Volant’ as ‘Murray’ there, I’d guess, but it serves as a reminder that Rowling-Galbraith is a Murray in the end.

Nothing like logging into Twitter and immediately bursting into tears. Emma, I'm so very sorry to hear about your sister, and so pleased to know Harry helped.
💔❤️ https://t.co/M5fsFjtNO2

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) January 30, 2022

The cynic feels it necessary to note that Rowling is, more than two years after her support of Maya Forstater, still engaged in a publicity campaign to regain her lost status as progressive icon. I think that is a cynical take — and one I disown – on the the timing of the author’s Ickabog online release and her subsequent generosity because, though it conforms to a certain ‘follow the money’ logic and the way Rowling, Inc., operates for better or worse, it requires turning a blind eye to the good, pure and simple, that The Presence has done in her charity and her fiction.

This is good that is not unalloyed, I’m sure, with some calculation of financial benefit and the favorable publicity it will generate; it is one that also corresponds truly and profoundly with Rowling’s core artistry and beliefs about “mortality and morality” that predominate in her work, the place of virtue in the soul’s journey to spiritual perfection in the face of biological death. I have no trouble imaging Rowling weeping upon learning that a reader recovered her capacity for speech, for her lost ability to communicate directly with those about her, consequent to her reading Harry Potter. The message from a once muted by grief reader speaks, if you will, to the transformative power of her fiction, which I would say testifies to Rowling have hit her intended mark.

I doubt — cynic again, alas — that the part of Potter Fandom which has libelously condemned Rowling as a transphobe and bigot ‘gets’ this power or understands how it worked in the life of Emma Harris. But work it did — and hats off once again from this sometime-skeptic to The Presence for this remarkable achievement.