Dear Friends in Magic,
I hope that your 2024 is off to a great start! In the spirit of letting old things go, I want to share…
A BIG IDEA
There is a widespread idea—a verbal meme—that's commonly used to deflect non-magicians who ask about our secrets. It goes something like: “Oh, you don’t want to know; it would only disappoint you.”
The most elegant version of this idea has been offered by Jim Steinmeyer in Hiding the Elephant (16-17): “Magicians guard an empty safe. In fact, there are few secrets they possess that are beyond the capacity of a high-school science class, little technology more complicated than a rubber band, a square of mirrored glass, or a length of thread… .”
To be fair, Jim uses this set-up to emphasize the finesse, ingenuity, and theatrical skill of excellent magicians, and he's right to do so. The problem, however, is that the set-up is not really true. The “safe” is not empty. Just the opposite: it's overflowing with countless hidden layers and levels of natural, mathematical, and psychological phenomena that never fail to astonish.
Let me ask: on that day when the magic dealer vanished the red silk and shared the Thumb Tip… did you say, “Oh, that’s stupid”? Heck no: you couldn’t get your money out fast enough! That’s because the dealer had just thrown open a door to a whole new world about perceptual concealment. Boom!
Forget the “Twenty-One Card Trick”: when Max Maven blew your mind with a Gilbreath performance, were you bored? On the contrary: you were probably astonished by the depths and possibilities of secret mathematics.
When you discovered that a magnet could make something float… that one black surface would vanish against another… that a bill could be reversed by passing it through a small hole in its center… that Crossing the Gaze works every time… were you like, “junk… moving on”?
You get the point: magic is a thrilling doorway to the secret sciences behind the science we were taught in school. Perception, natural science, spatial relations, topology, psychology, mathematics, optical principles, attention, logical games: all of this is far weirder and wilder and more counter-intuitive than we had any idea. Getting to explore these endlessly surprising domains is one of the deep pleasures of magic. Why wouldn’t non-magicians want to get in on the fun?
So, count me OUT on the oft-repeated meme. To say our secrets are mundane or disappointing is simply false, and it devalues and diminishes everything we do. So much better for us to stress, without exposure, the amazing, often paradoxical complexities of “the many worlds” behind the world that make magical art possible. As I like to say, “Oh, there is always more going on than we think.” Which has all the virtue of being true.
More on our Secret Sciences next time. |
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