Willfully Foolish Magic
If you’re like me, you’ve always been fascinated by magic. Whether it’s the smooth flash of David Copperfield, the humor of Penn and Teller, or the one card trick Uncle Justin always remembers once the bottle is empty, magic is a fascinating practice. Magic might be the purest form of the tacit agreement between performer and audience of what’s called the “suspension of disbelief,” or as I like to think of it, the willingness to be fooled.
The magic arts are a particularly useful example of this paradigm because of the extremes the discipline uses. In his book, “The Prestige,” Christopher Priest outlines this willingness rather nicely. “The second act is called ‘The Turn’. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled.”
Even the most skeptical of people want to be taken away by the magic. That sense of wonder, of being transported to another world, is why we go to magic shows. We want to be fooled because of how it makes us feel. Some have argued that it gives us hope or optimism for the real world. I don’t know about that, but magic certainly gives us an engaging alternative.
The fascinating part is that we know it’s not true. We know that man didn’t really make The Statue Of Liberty disappear, nobody really got cut in half, and Uncle Justin isn’t really psychically finding your card. We know that these things cannot be happening, but we willfully ignore that knowledge so that the performer can take us into another reality. We’re willing to be fooled because of the heightened state of existence performers present. The difficult part becomes that we can’t stay there.
Continuing the quote from Christopher Priest: “You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call ‘The Prestige’.”
If the magician never brought us back to reality, if Lady Liberty continued to be missing, we wouldn’t have given Copperfield a show in Vegas, we’d have put him on the no-fly list. We need “The Prestige.” Seeking out a heightened reality, or an extreme emotion, or a spiritual epiphany is great. That’s why we have magic and other art forms. We can’t allow ourselves to get trapped in “The Turn,” though. We need to bring those experiences earned and lessons learned back to the world.
That might sound initially disappointing. I’d like to share the words of one of my top five favorite authors to try and reframe “The Prestige.” This is from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy,” by Douglas Adams. The characters are discussing a planet that may or may not be the equivalent of Space Atlantis because this book has everything. "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
You can be baffled and mystified by disappearing rabbits, but the more you experience and question the real world, (remember Twain from a few weeks ago) the more the world puts any magic show to shame. How does mercury work? Why do mirrors flip text horizontally but not vertically? How can the sunset contain so many colors? Why do I love her so much?
I don’t need fairies to see that this garden is already magical.
