When I told him of my misadventures, Ferdinando commented, ‘When I’m performing, the last thing I want to feel is a sense of wonder. What I want to do is give a gift of wonder to my audience. But I cannot feel any myself, not in that specific moment.’ He explained that he needs to be entirely in control of himself, very aware of the technicalities of methods and effects, and of the rapport between himself and the audience, for the show to be a success. Professionals like Ferdinando train wonder out of themselves, as far as magic is concerned, to make it happen for others. When the spotlights go out, the music fades and the public go home, the nitty-gritty of their craft is every bit as gritty as for any other craft.
‘And I’ll tell you more. I love it when another magician manages to amaze me, but it doesn’t happen that often, these days. I know the basics, the perimeter, of what’s going on, even when I am not sure about the details.’
That was beautifully put. It made me think that is exactly how we all live: we know the perimeter of adulthood, even when we are not sure about the details, and that makes us very difficult to amaze. I asked Ferdinando, ‘What is it that you do, then? To give your gift of wonder to your audience.’
‘It is tricky to articulate,’ he replied, ‘and honestly, I would rather do it only to an extent. As Wittgenstein put it, what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence. There is a role for theory in magic, but after a certain level, thinking too much becomes a waste of time. Magic starts and ends in the performance. It lives in the moment.’
I was getting frustrated, as often happens to laypeople talking to specialists. ‘Yes, but how do you make it happen?’
I was making yet another mistake, as I realized later: I was looking for a quick fix. During my journey, I would learn the apparently simple truth that a journey takes time; it entails detours and pauses. Our sense of wonder is powerful yet subtle, and it quickly vanishes when you stalk it too openly. I had to learn a difficult lesson – the value of patience and sideways glances. But these were early days.
‘There is no one answer, a straight path. I need to practise the method until it is perfect, seamless, but that is only the beginning. Everyone can learn a trick, if they put in the hours. Gestures and words are important, and the way they come together. But you have some numbers that only have music, with not a single word, and they’re great. There is the personality of the magician to consider, and so many other factors. It all needs to come together in the moment, but you can’t tell how it comes together.’
It was all maddeningly vague. I had seen Ferdinando perform a few years earlier. During a quiet dinner with friends, on a tiny table in a Soho restaurant, he had happily smashed the laws of physics to smithereens.
‘What about the audience?’ I asked. ‘What about us, the people who receive the gift?’
‘The audiences at magic shows are tough. They don’t want to be fooled, and they put their shields up. They won’t willingly suspend their disbelief for me, not in a thousand years. What I do is, I force their disbelief with a crowbar. You guys have to believe whether you like it or not, because a wondrous thing is happening there in front of you, under your eyes, and you just can’t deny it. Magicians are like stand-up comedians, in a sense. When comedians tell a joke, and the joke is good, and they are good, you laugh. You don’t decide to laugh, you don’t go along with them because you wanted to do so, you just laugh, you can’t help yourself. Maybe not at the first joke or the second, but comedians know what they’re doing. They string together one joke after the other, until they sweep you away. The impact is immediate. It’s the same for us. We create a show, an experience for you, and we string together one number after the other until you can’t help yourself. When the magician is good, the performance becomes a privileged door to wonder.’
And yet this awesome power must have some limits. In order to go home with a gift, you still need to accept it. You might not need to ‘suspend’ your disbelief as such, but you shouldn’t actively sabotage it either. And we tend to do that a lot.
At every magic show I have seen, whether it’s a performance at a market stall or a sumptuous theatrical extravaganza, there’s a guy in the audience who, just seconds after the number begins, says: I know how this is done. I once heard a bloke scoff because, as he mansplained to his girlfriend, he could see perfectly well the magnets involved in a ‘Balducci levitation’ – an effect in which no magnets are involved. There is always a guy, and it is possible you have been that guy. Such guys are quite vocal about their (usually mistaken, Ferdinando assured me) understanding of how the trick is done.
‘They are seeking for reassurance,’ Ferdinando said, ‘which is not what magic is for. I show them that there might be aspects of our reality they don’t get. I’m telling them, look, you didn’t understand all there is to understand about the world. And some people like this. Some, though, take it as an affront, as if I am insulting them personally. It makes them,’ he paused for a moment, like the consummate performer he was, ‘afraid.’
It makes them afraid.
When I listened to our recorded conversation the next day, I realized that I had never questioned Max Weber’s notion that disenchantment is a direct consequence of modern science and technology. Science made us stronger, the theory goes, leaving us with no use for fairy tales. Weber’s narrative is convincing in its neatness. But rather than a by-product of our culture, disenchantment could in fact be an armoured wall we have built around it. The world is an incredible magician, and we are an audience too afraid to accept its gift.
‘Egocentrics make the worst audiences,’ Ferdinando said. ‘And self-assured people are the easiest.’
Disenchantment happened when we put ourselves at the centre of the world. We have become more egocentric, and less self-assured. A part of us never stopped believing that there are shadow creatures in our room. Once upon a time, myth, religion and fairy tales provided a context for that belief, an irrational context in modern terms, yes, but still a context, still useful, and still, from a practical point of view, real. That context made monsters bearable. Without it, we can’t deal with them any more. Our ancestral instincts tell us the monsters are still there, but our culture has made it impossible for us to have faith that there are any heroes to fight them, and we are left to fend for ourselves. So, we decided not to believe. We fooled ourselves into thinking that we have traded in our heroes in return for scrapping our monsters. But we have been ripped off: while the heroes have all gone, the monsters still remain in our room. Left on our own, we cannot cope with their presence, and we pretend that we can’t see them any more.
We are told that modernity dispelled our sense of wonder because it made us stronger – so strong, in fact, that we do not need wonder any more. The opposite is true. Modernity made us more vulnerable in some respects, and we had to renounce wonder because we couldn’t handle it any more.
Be honest. When you find yourself in the dark, alone, are you never, ever afraid, not even a little bit? You tell yourself that your fear is irrational, that monsters do not exist, that it is burglars who represent the real threat to your life and property, and that your front door is locked and alarmed against them. But before all that sensible thinking took place, something brief and powerful happened within you. You do not have to admit it out loud, but you know that sometimes you are tired enough or worried enough – or drunk enough – to entertain the possibility that some monsters are not imaginary. It is ridiculous, yes – and yet. Just occasionally, even if only for a fleeting moment, wondrous terrors arise from the depths of our soul.