The same thing happened to you at that market stall, when you saw that miracle, a young woman reading a stranger’s mind. You forgot you don’t believe in real magic, for a moment, a moment only.
Magic comes together in the moment, and no one can quite say how. There was something important here. Ferdinando had pointed me in a new direction.
And there I would find my spark, at last.
*
The magician Ken Weber says that an effect can feel either like a puzzle, or a trick, or an extraordinary moment. When it feels like a puzzle, you and I assume that we could do what the magician just did. We don’t know precisely how he knew that a random chap would pick an Ace of Clubs from a shuffled deck, but we do know there is a method and it can’t be that laborious. This is disenchantment in a pristine form, the polar opposite of what a magician is trying to achieve.
A magic trick is a display of consummate skilclass="underline" the magician accomplishes something that looks immensely difficult (although whether it is or not is another matter). On seeing the elephant vanish in a puff of smoke, or a chained and straitjacketed Harry Houdini wriggle his way out of a water tank, the response on the spectator’s part is to think: ‘How on earth is such a thing possible? I certainly couldn’t do that.’ This is what most magic is about, and it is exhilarating and a lot of fun.
But then there are the extraordinary moments, the moments of wonder that leave you dumbfounded, still able to feel, yes, but not to think. ‘The viewer,’ Ken Weber says, ‘gasps for air rather than grasps for a method.’6 Puzzles are boring, tricks are entertaining, extraordinary moments are true gifts.
As such, they are mysterious. Some effects lend themselves to extraordinary moments better than others, but you can achieve an extraordinary moment with very simple effects. And also, you can come up with a complex procedure that reaches, at best, the stage of a trick: as Ferdinando said, many elements need to come together for wonder to happen.
Ken Weber takes the example of David Blaine, who, with a deadpan delivery, very few words, an unassuming style, and mostly with effects that any good magician could perform with their eyes closed, often manages to create extraordinary moments. Look at Mr Blaine stopping random people in the streets. Suddenly he is levitating, here, where no cables could possibly pull him up, and the people jump, and you jump too. Extraordinary moments make you forget that a method exists, they make you forget that magic is not real. Disenchantment is not an option, because the disenchanted part of yourself gets clubbed on the head. You can’t figure out what is happening, can’t frame it within the boundaries of what you know and make it familiar, dull, safe. In the words of Jim Steinmeyer, ‘the purpose of the magician’s performance is, for a brief period, to reinvest life with a sense of mystery and wonder and strangeness. That is a great need and it is taken away from most of us at a very early age.’7
Note the word he uses: mystery. An extraordinary moment has a power of its own. Sure, you can go and look for the trick if you are one of those people, but that will not diminish the experience itself, in the same way that learning the truth about Father Christmas at an older age didn’t spoil the memory of those childhood Christmases. When you go through an extraordinary moment as an adult, you are as enchanted as you were when you found an empty glass, crumbs, and presents under the tree. It is a different sense of wonder, more mature and probably shorter lasting, but its intensity is the same. It is a fleeting state, which makes it even more precious. An extraordinary moment leaves you bursting with enthusiasm. It ignites something within you. There might be only one extraordinary moment, a few seconds long, in a ninety-minute show, but those few seconds are all the show is about. Those few seconds, as Eugene Burger put it, are the mystery.
Not only a mystery, but mystery itself.
*
Eugene Burger again, the philosopher-magician, the secret rock star. In a community not lacking sophisticated thinkers, Burger was the most sophisticated of all. He had a theory supporting his every single word, and he transformed humble routines into metaphors of life and death. His ideas still constitute a benchmark for other magicians, or an orthodoxy against which they react. And he didn’t even get into the game until he was almost forty.
Watching Burger perform on video, listening to his interviews and talking to those who have seen him live, it is difficult not to think that there was something priestly about him, though he was always very clear that what he did was create illusions. In an interview with Erik Davis and Maja D’Aoust,8 he described his calling to magic in subtly religious terms. When he was eight, Burger saw a magician perform in a theatre, and he decided on the spot that magic would be his life. Then real life happened, he went to college, where he studied philosophy and divinity, found a job, and let his passion slip into the background. Until, at the age of thirty-nine, he remembered his early resolution and took the leap. Bringing together manual dexterity, original thinking and an academic background, Burger became that rare thing, a successful hybrid between theoretician and practitioner of a craft – an Umberto Eco of magic, if you like.
At some point during the interview with D’Aoust and Davis, Burger said that, broadly speaking, there are two philosophies of modern magic. Think about the standard gesture of ‘passing the hoop over a floating object’ to show that no hidden wire cables are involved (as if!). Some magicians swear you must always do that, because magic must appeal to the intellect. You show your audience your pack of cards, you let them touch your hoop, you do everything it takes to convince them that they cannot possibly figure out the method. So you’d better pass the hoop.
Not at all, other magicians answer back. You should never set the audience the intellectual challenge of working out what the method is. Your mission as a performer is to send them a subtler invitation: you make them forget that a method exists at all. By passing the hoop ‘you are inviting people to think of methods and enter into a different frame of mind’. So better not to pass the hoop.
Burger was, essentially, an adherent of this second school. He accepted that magicians sometimes feel they have good reason to pass the hoop, but he was concerned that ‘passing the hoop takes you out of that state of wonderment’. Sense of wonder, Burger said, ‘is an experience of the present moment’. The audience should not think about the method at all, because the method should not be the point.
Magic is an ‘invitation to just take a vacation from your rational mind for a while’ – not because our rational mind is useless (it is not), but because ‘we don’t need it all the time’. The magician should not make the audience believe that what they see on stage is difficult; rather, she should make them feel it is utterly impossible. The best magic creates extraordinary moments, in which we stop being rational and allow ourselves to be enchanted. After enjoying this short holiday, we can go home and be sensible again.
This was Burger’s central idea. He often expressed it in terms of the difference between a problem and a mystery, borrowing his language from the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel. Such a difference is easily explained. A problem is something you can solve. You might not know the solution, and you might never find it, but you are entirely sure that there is a solution. Problems clearly belong to the sphere of disenchantment.