Dear Friends in Magic,
I have very exciting news in this installment, but first let’s explore…
A BIG IDEA
Like any good philosopher, Eugene Burger draws powerful distinctions to help us become better magicians. For instance, his well-known distinctions between magic and tricks, patter and script, practice and rehearsal. But I believe his most important distinction for our success is that between being able to do a sleight and being able to do it deceptively.
Eugene underscores this distinction from his earliest writings to his final reflections. Because, for him, it’s the brutal fact of sleight-of-hand magic. If the audience perceives anything fishy, much less sees the move, “then we have failed!” he would say. We have failed to create the experience of the impossible required for magic.
Much like the Emperor’s clothes, once this gets said, it becomes obviously true. Who could deny it? Yet, most trick descriptions in magic books and magazines continue to describe the moves as though they existed in a vacuum, without real people in different positions watching everything like a hawk. And how can we reconcile the obviousness of Eugene’s distinction with the fact we witness so many performances during which we see or perceive the sleight-of-hand? (We do, don’t we?)
Some of it must be that magicians don’t want Eugene’s distinction to be true. We don’t want to have work so hard and thoughtfully about our sleights. We want to do a trick right now rather than take the months and often years required to make a sleight truly invisible. Self-deception about this is a powerful, seductive force—for all of us. Which is why I try to keep Eugene’s distinction at the forefront of my mind at all times.
Another part of the challenge is that it’s so difficult to assess how we’re actually doing with a sleight. The very act of knowing we are performing one makes it impossible to be “utterly deceived” by it, even in the mirror or when watching a video. Those tools help eliminate obvious problems, but they can’t help us “see” if our moves are unseeable.
How then can we meet the extremely high bar Eugene sets for our sleight-of-hand? Interestingly, Eugene shares one answer in a story about his mid-teens, when he would ask Don Alan all these youthful questions about whether this or that would work. Over and over, Don Alan would simply say, “Watch their faces; their faces will tell you everything.”
I confess that the first few times I heard Eugene recount this story, it blew right past me. But one day, I woke up to the fact this wasn’t just a punchy story or a metaphor. It is one hundred percent literally true: their faces do tell us if our methods are deceptive. Because when we astonish people, their eyes are wide open, their jaw is slack, and they look dazed. They often babble or exclaim. If their faces are not doing any of that, then probably we have failed.
This is the hard truth about sleight-of-hand magic, and it’s a reminder to endlessly ask ourselves Eugene’s most pointed question in this area. That is: Right here, right now, with this trick or sleight, “Who’s fooling who?” |
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