To be sure, I don’t have magical powers, and the college reporter was right that my show was, in one sense, totally fake. So are the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. So are the pirates in Peter Pan. Tinker Bell isn’t real either. But the universe is not made only from facts—take, for instance, kindness, loyalty, love, or wonder—and treating information as the only thing that matters makes it impossible to see the rest.
As I traveled across the country doing my show, I wanted to understand how my craft had become synonymous with Las Vegas glitz when every night onstage I could see the obvious potential for it to be more.
Magic is ancient. Every culture in the world has its own version of the Magician, an archetypal figure who has been around as long as anyone can remember. The Westcar Papyrus in the Berlin Museum describes the story of an Egyptian named Dedi who lived around 4000 B.C. and was renowned for his feats of magic. The Pharaoh summoned Dedi and ordered him to demonstrate his powers, so Dedi took one of the Pharaoh’s geese and pulled off its head. He put the head on one side of the room, the body on the other, and then stood between them to cast an incantation and say his magic words. The headless goose stood up. It began hopping across the room toward its severed head, and when it arrived the two were rejoined by magic and the goose began to honk. Magicians still perform this feat today.
But long before the magicians of ancient Egypt came the shamans, the witch doctors, and the medicine men of tribal cultures. Their names vary from place to place and each carries its own nuance, but broadly speaking, their roles are some combination of healer, prophet, magician, and priest. Some use sleight of hand and ceremony in their work—an engraving dated to 1896 shows the shaman of the Menomini Native American tribe producing and vanishing snakes from a cloth bag, for instance, and I was fascinated that someone could use magic tricks for such a wildly different purpose than how they’re commonly used today.
But I wasn’t interested in the anthropology of tribal magic for its own sake. I was trying to solve a problem. I wanted to understand how a shaman could perform the same type of magic—snakes vanishing in a bag, as I mentioned—and do it in such a way that the audience and the community embraced the experience instead of dismissing it or explaining it away. I had discovered the discrepancy between the strong response I’d get from the audience during a show and the indifference most people have for magic everywhere else, and I thought that someone who understood both magic in the modern world and the shaman’s work in the tribal world would at least be able to see the problem in its entirety.
David Abram is an ecologist, author, activist, and—this last point is a source of boundless pride for me—a magician. His book Spell of the Sensuous blew a lot of minds in the magic community, mine included. In it he discusses the role of the magician in tribal and traditional cultures, opening with the story of his adventure into the rain forests of Bali and the mountains of Nepal where he pretended to be an actual, supernaturally gifted magician to see if he could study the work of the indigenous shaman from the inside. His book was a constant companion with me on tour, and if you wanted to identify the source of my conviction that climbing on top of a table in a bar in Chicago and challenging the entire audience to a fight was acceptable behavior for a working, professional magician, Abram’s book—with his vision of magic as a natural, wild, irrepressible force within the human experience—would be it. There, far more than in the caricatures of magic so ubiquitous in pop culture, I saw a reflection of my own experience as a magician.
Abram argues that the tribal magician’s main role was as an ambassador between the tribe and its environment, an intermediary between the immediate and the infinite who used the craft of magic not as an end to itself but as a way of ensuring the tribe’s good standing in the world around it. The tribal magician worked as an emissary to ensure friendly relations between the tribe and the sky, the rain, the forest, the world. For a magician whose early interest in magic came from the night sky, this was a revelation. Magic was a tool, to be used not for the pleasure of the audience or the ego of the magician but as a way to maintain balance and equilibrium between the local community and the rest of the universe.
In the shaman’s work, “magic” was a tangible, practical force as necessary to the daily life of the tribe as hunting or agriculture. The shaman worked to ensure a good crop, or a good rain, or a good catch of fish when the tribe went out to sea. When the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski studied the way the Melanesian people of New Guinea use ceremonial magic to aid them in their fishing, he noticed that they never used it when fishing close to shore or in the safety of a lagoon where they were shielded from the danger and uncertainty of the open sea. There they didn’t need it, or it didn’t work. Their magic helped them only when they ventured out farther into the danger of the open ocean, past the point where their skill could ensure a safe and successful voyage, and there they relied on it extensively. The shaman was there to intercede on their behalf, asking the ocean for safe passage and a successful haul of fish and ensuring that the tribe and the ocean remained on good terms.
The contrast between this tribal shaman and the modern magician of today was obvious. The tribal communities had a different understanding of the relationship between “magic” and “reality” and had not drawn a line between them. The work of the shaman was not all that different from, say, the work of the fisherman. Both were a part of the daily process of living and each was connected to the other. But the Western magician operates in a culture where magic has no place in the daily movements of society, so it exists in the face of civilization rather than as a natural expression of it.
“Most magicians end up performing somewhere like Las Vegas,” Abram elaborated in an interview after he published his book. “They see themselves as ‘illusionists’—as people trying to create the illusion of magic. But they themselves don’t believe in magic. What a sad state the craft of magic has fallen into in the world. It would be as if most musicians and concert artists didn’t really believe that real music existed. Then you would have pianists who had pianos with flashing lights all over them and women dancing in sequins around them as they played their flashy music. Magic has been reduced to that in the West. It really doesn’t exist for us anymore.”
A few weeks after the performance in New Jersey, I was in the middle of a show in Pennsylvania and I could tell that the audience had gotten away from me. I lost them a few minutes into the performance, and even after a prolonged struggle to regain their good faith, I began the last act of the show knowing I still didn’t have it. On this particular leg of the tour I was closing the show with an escape from a straitjacket, and when I asked for volunteers to restrain me, eager hands shot up throughout the theater. Two massive young men vaulted up to the stage and they spent the next five minutes binding me so tightly that I couldn’t stand upright. I was at their mercy. As they wrapped the straps around my body, the jeers rose from the audience, one after another.
“You’ve got him!”
“Get him!”
“Make it hurt!”
This last one got my attention. I caught the heckler’s eye—front row, just a few years younger than me. He had his fist up in the air. He looked right at me as he shouted again.
“Get him!” he called. “Make it hurt!”
The show hadn’t been great, but this was too much. I had been amazed before at the way a simple magic trick could create so much wonder and joy. At this show, I witnessed the other side. These people had seen what I had to offer and some of them had genuinely hated it.
The music began.
I’d been using part of the rondo from Beethoven’s Sonatina Number 2 in F—a thin, eerie melody—to contrast with the brutality of the escape from the straitjacket. The secret to the straitjacket escape is simple. You just do it. There is no secret method other than the agonizing, inch-by-inch struggle to slowly extricate one hand and then another before unbuckling the rest of the straps. As I writhed on the floor, fighting for each inch of slac
k necessary to free my first hand, the audience drowned out the music. Maybe half of them were with me, but half were very much against me.
Where had this anger come from?
Afterward—after the eventual escape, the ending of the show, the drive back to the hotel—I thought about the enmity my show had created in that audience. It wasn’t new. I had seen it before, expressed differently but still there. But that night it had reached a fever pitch, and I saw something there I hadn’t seen before.
The antipathy and resentment felt toward magicians is not just because magicians are ridiculous. Sometimes we are, but our society is filled with ridiculous people doing ridiculous things. It doesn’t come just from the hype, the bombast, the over-the-top showmanship so often associated with the magician’s craft. Hype and bombast are all around us. Look at the music industry. Or reality TV.
The anger—and I do believe it is anger—toward the modern magician comes from the way even a simple magic trick done well can reach uninvited into the deepest hopes of a person. Sometimes this can be an uncomfortable reminder. People have hard lives, and something like magic that promises a moment of real joy or even a new way of seeing the world threatens to unseat whatever insulation they have managed to erect between themselves and that hardness, whether it’s cynicism, nihilism, escapism, or elitism. The cultural resentment toward magic comes from the sadness found in the space between the universal human longing to believe in magic and the overwhelming evidence all around us that there is no such thing. It’s not that a modern audience doesn’t want magic. It’s that they want it so badly but have already decided it’s not out there, and dislike being told that maybe they were looking in the wrong place.
HOW TO LIGHT YOURSELF ON FIRE
As a touring magician I lived a strange dual life, and I’m not sure my neighbors knew quite what to think of me. Katharine and I had moved to a quiet neighborhood in Iowa near the edge of town, and for six months of the year I operated like a relatively normal freelancer working from home. I spent my days designing magic in my studio in the basement, but I could have been editing wedding photos, creating websites, or doing whatever it is that self-employed people do when they work from home. In the evenings I walked the dog with Katharine, and on Sundays we had a bonfire and a standing invitation to friends and family to come by for dinner. I ran. I mowed the lawn. I went to the grocery store.
But then I would disappear, and for months the only clues to my existence were the cabs idling in my driveway at four in the morning to take me away or, occasionally, the ones that brought me back from the airport days or weeks later. I would emerge, haggard and pale, wearing dark sunglasses and a motorcycle jacket instead of my usual blue jeans and T-shirt, and haul two enormous suitcases out of the trunk of the taxi and drag them to the front door of my house before going inside, closing the blinds, and sleeping like the dead.
Originally, coming home to see Katharine on my days off had seemed like a good idea, but the exhaustion of flying back to Iowa from the East Coast or the West Coast or wherever the last run of shows had ended just for a day or two at home before setting out again wore on both of us. One evening I arrived home at six o’clock for what amounted to a ten-hour leave from the tour. We ordered Thai food and went to bed early, and when Katharine woke in the morning I was already up and on an airplane headed out for the show that night.
“Goodbye, Katharine,” I had whispered earlier that morning, already dressed, when the bedroom was still dark and the taxi waited with its lights off in the driveway.
She stirred. Her eyes half-opened, and she said, “We sure have a lot of goodbyes in our life, don’t we.”
“We do.”
“More than most people.”
“More than almost anyone.”
“Except the president, probably,” she said, stretching her arms above her head, arching her back, and then burying herself back into the sheets and falling asleep.
I turned and walked down the hallway. I closed the front door as quietly as I could and clipped my house key to its ring inside my bag, where I wouldn’t see it again for another week.
Two hours later Katharine’s alarm would wake her. She’d get up, make coffee, feed the dog. She’d get ready for work and take the bus to the hospital, where she’d enter a world completely unknown to me. Then she’d take the bus home again, make dinner, feed the dog again, and maybe see her friends in the evening. We’d talk by phone before the show or maybe after, and then she’d turn out all the lights in the house except the one by our bed so she could read until she was too tired to see the words on the page, and then hopefully she’d fall asleep and not think of me again until her alarm woke her the following morning.
Occasionally we’d be out together for dinner and someone would ask her what it’s like to be married to a magician. This is what it’s like.
That night—homesick, angry, and stricken with the fear that finds me about an hour before every show and stays with me until I go on—I walked onstage in Reno, Nevada, to find 750 people crammed into a gorgeous red velvet jewel box of a theater. The next ninety minutes were almost incandescent. By the second act the momentum had become a tangible, palpable force to be gathered carefully one moment and cracked like a whip the next. The audience was wild and exuberant. They leaned forward in their chairs, dead silent and watching everything, and then the magic happened and they shouted like the room was on fire. In this crucible of my efforts onstage everything else in my life burned away—the travel, the strain, the time away from home—and all that remained was one untainted moment of exhausted, exultant joy.
“Good night,” I said, and the entire room was on its feet. But what I really meant was Thank you. All of a sudden I was in the cornfield on the edge of the world again, and there, for just a moment, I felt I could see forever.
The hour and a half onstage each night was the only thing keeping me going, but even that wasn’t enough, and I knew I was wearing thin. At first I don’t think anyone else noticed, but by this point the strain was beginning to show. When I pulled in to the hotel later that night I sprang for valet parking—a minor luxury made large by the twenty-hour day preceding it—and on the way inside I passed a gaunt, haunted-looking man wearing an immaculate white suit and fedora. He leaned against a cane, like a displaced aristocrat, smoking a cigar and looking very much like the devil, or Kevin Bacon. He tipped his hat as I approached the door. “Cheerio, Desperado.”
What the hell? Did he just call me Desperado?
I didn’t say anything. I was tired and ready for bed. I disappeared into the hotel, checked in at the front desk, and found the elevator, already half-asleep and running the math for the next few hours as the doors closed—ten minutes to get ready for bed, four hours until the alarm, twelve minutes to shower and dress, fifteen minutes to—
A black cane with a golden cobra head for a handle snaked between the elevator doors just before they closed. The doors opened. There stood the devil/Kevin Bacon.
“I was just heading up myself,” he said. He spoke with a vaguely Southern drawl, as if he had traveled to Reno from South Carolina, or Hell.
I stared at him, speechless. He was sixty, maybe sixty-five, with bright blue eyes and a thin white mustache carefully trimmed to turn up at the edges. He looked like a wolf, smiling and hungry. The elevator doors closed behind him. We were alone.
He leaned against the wall of the elevator and held up one finger, as if silencing an entire room. Then he delicately pressed the button for the top floor and turned his attention to me.
“Reno is a strange town,” he said.
“Yes,” he continued, “Reno is a very strange town. But can I tell you something in confidence? We are not in Reno. Do you know where we are?” He leaned closer. “We are in the Twilight Zone.”
For some reason I agreed. He smiled and leaned back.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a magician,” I said. Usually this elicits surprise or, at the very leas
t, incomprehension—Did you say musician? What instrument do you play? But the devil/Kevin Bacon didn’t react at all. He looked at me, studying, uncertain of something. It was the only time in my life I have actually believed in mind reading. It felt as if he looked all the way through me and saw something everyone else had missed.
The bell rang and the elevator door opened to my floor. He held up a finger, unmoving, unblinking, blocking my way and peering at me, still searching.
“No,” he said finally, just before stepping aside. “You are not a magician. You are a desperado.”
Desperado. It stayed with me for the rest of the night. Desperado, from the Spanish desesperado. “One without hope.”
In a way, I had seen this disillusionment coming for years. Every child has the experience of looking up at the adults of the world and wondering What happened to you? You were my age once. What did you lose between there and here? And as a young boy learning magic I saw this loss everywhere. The napkin levitated, the playing card changed color, the coin vanished, and suddenly the contrast between how people usually act and their astonishment in those moments was impossible to ignore.
I came to see this loss—or whatever it is that causes this loss—as an enemy to be fought and repelled at all costs. One night as a child I lay in bed, awake. “You will not get me this year,” I said quietly to the darkness. “You will not get me next year. You will not get me the year after.” One by one I went through the years ahead—eleven, twelve, thirteen, and on—anticipating the coming struggle without even really understanding the enemy.
But even as a kid some part of me knew it was a losing fight. Houdini was my hero: a titan, a giant, a larger-than-life colossus who dreamed of becoming a master magician as a child and then bent the forces of the universe to make it happen. But even he succumbed to this enemy eventually. “My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion,” he wrote as an adult—words I highlighted in yellow, seeing them as a warning—“and many things that seem wonderful to most men are the every-day commonplaces of my business.”
Here Is Real Magic Page 6