On a long plane ride home to New York from Las Vegas, a man and a boy are playing with cards. Only their hands are visible to the people sitting near them, so that, as they shuffle and reshuffle and fan and deal, they seem to be engaged in a game of gin rummy that never quite begins. The hands move, first large and crabby, then small and soft, in example and imitation, and all through the night, hour after hour—while everyone else on the plane sleeps or dozes or watches DVDs on a laptop—their hands move and their voices murmur.
What they are doing is magic, and, because it is magic, it requires hour upon hour of hard work. A magician is teaching an apprentice how to do a card trick—a trick so complicated and subtle that it will, when finally shown, be almost too subtle to enjoy. It is called Twisting the Aces: the four aces are shown face down; they are counted out, still face down, one by one; the packet of cards is twisted, and each time the aces are counted out one of them, a different ace each time, appears face up. It’s as though inside the packet the cards, untouched by human hands, were somehow turning over.
The magician and his apprentice are believers in the deep and narrow art of closeup card magic. A few nights earlier, they had gone, with a dozen or so other people, on a rare late-night tour of the illusionist David Copperfield’s warehouse, which contains the world’s greatest collection of magic paraphernalia. All of Houdini’s most important boxes—the Water Torture cell, the Metamorphosis Trunk—were there, but the magician had walked over to a wall where a tiny book was kept under a false cover. “It’s Malini’s Erdnase!” he said, as one might say, “It’s Lincoln’s Bible!” The magician’s face came alive as he looked through it. The boy watched, rising up on his toes to gaze at the small old-fashioned engravings of hands, neatly turned with late-nineteenth-century cuffs, manipulating cards, hands and cards, hands and cards, page after page.
The boy is one of the tribe that you will find every Saturday afternoon at Tannen’s Magic, a windowless shop on the sixth floor of a nondescript building on West Thirty-fourth Street. All afternoon, the magic boys step into a tiny elevator that takes them to Tannen’s. They are often searching for relief from a needle of worry in their minds. They go to buy tricks, “gaffs,” that will lend them magic. An acute boy might sense that Tannen’s once was greater, or at least bigger. On a back table, he can find, half discarded in a big tub, faded old blueprints for illusion boxes—instructions for making magic cabinets of a kind that no one makes anymore. “Girl in a Dream: Illusion Plan No. 1223,” one boy reads out to a friend, as they decide to buy a plan as a memento of the old magic. (Actually, it’s “Girl in a Drum,” but they find out only when they get it home.)
The magic boys often go for a Saturday meal to a Mexican restaurant around the corner, where they show each other their tricks. Some of them have heard of a better magicians’ dinner in the back room of a little restaurant and sports bar off Ninth Avenue called the Joshua Tree. The gathering takes place in the small hours, after the last curtain of “Monday Night Magic,” a lovely chamber session of magicians that has somehow survived for ten years in various theatres around the city. One of the luckiest things that have happened to me in New York is being able to go to the Joshua Tree and watch the magicians work and listen to them talk.
“Do you recall the Miser’s Dilemma?”
“Wasn’t that the version Al Flosso did?”
“Well, Flosso did a version of it, but it was Vernon who had the real work on it, and he announced it in Harry’s book. He used to do it at the summer table at the Castle, but meanwhile Craven was doing a similar version except with the aces reversed, and with a different handling, at the Witchdoctor’s table in New York. You know, the one that met around the corner from the Palace when Blackstone Junior was headlining?”
“Was that the table that Max was a regular at?”
“No, you’re thinking of the Witchcraft roundabout that Vernon ran . . .”
And on and on like that, in dreamlike composite. Magicians have the most rapturous and absorbed shoptalk of any artists I know. This is partly because magicians have leisure between gigs, and partly because much of the pleasure of being a magician is membership in a subculture, where methods and myths can be appreciated only by initiates. Magicians are, in their relations with one another, both extremely generous and extremely jealous. Just as chefs know that recipes are of little value in themselves, magicians know that learning the method is only the beginning of doing the trick. What they call “the real work” isn’t the method, which anyone can learn from a book (and, anyway, all decent magicians know roughly how most tricks are done), but the whole of the handling and timing and theatrics of the effect, which are passed along from magician to magician and from generation to generation. The real work is the complete activity, the accumulated practice, the total summing up of tradition and ideas. The real work is what makes a magic effect magical.
If I had to choose one moment where I have sensed myself in the aura of the real work, it might be the night I watched Jamy Ian Swiss, over dinner at the Joshua Tree, perform thirteen versions of the pass in about as many seconds. The pass (it is sometimes called “the shift,” and card cheaters call one version “the hop”) is among the glories of advanced sleight of hand. Diagrammed by S. W. Erdnase, in “The Expert at the Card Table,” a treatise he published in 1902, it involves moving a packet of cards invisibly from the center of the deck to the top. Judging the quality of any magician’s pass is inherently difficult, since the better it is done the harder it is to see that anything has happened. To watch Jamy Ian Swiss perform thirteen versions of the pass is to see this: The cards in his hand, then one card—say, the three of clubs—inserted somewhere, anywhere, in the middle of the deck. His hands burp and hiccup for half a second, merely squaring the deck, and then the three of clubs is disclosed, right back on top. He runs through a number of variants: the riffle pass, the stroboscopic pass, the dribble pass . . . The other magicians nod, knowingly, like bird-watchers seeing an unusual find in the middle distance.
Swiss is widely thought to have one of the masterly sleight-of-hand techniques in the world today, and the pass is one of his accomplishments. Seeing him do thirteen versions of it is therefore a little like seeing Yo-Yo Ma practice scales in rehearsal at Carnegie Hall. On the other hand, it is not at all like watching Yo-Yo Ma practice scales, since the audience is likely to include someone like Chuy, the Mexican Wolfman, an amiable sideshow artist with a very, very full beard, or The Great Throwdini, the knife thrower, and his target girl Tina, not to mention Simon Lovell, an underfed, pale-green-and-white-complexioned Englishman who is a master card cheat—I have seen him make whole decks disappear and replace them with other decks in less time than it takes to describe it—and Todd Robbins, who is now perhaps the last remaining sideshow artist capable of doing the Human Blockhead act (a six-inch steel nail goes into and up the nose) while giving a scholarly account of its origins.
The few civilians who do come around as often as not have no idea of the quality of what they’re seeing—the magician’s eternal plight being that of a Yo-Yo Ma who, after he plays, has people come up onstage and tell him that they know how he does it, he scrapes that bow thing across the strings, and, anyway, they have an uncle who used to play the cello a little, has he ever met him? Most cellists, in those circumstances, would do what most magicians do—nod politely and say yes, I bet your uncle was a real music lover, and retreat into beer and diffidence. Perhaps one cellist in a generation would say no, scraping a bow against a string has nothing to do with making music, you don’t know how it’s done, you actually have no idea how it’s done, and your uncle was no more a cellist than a man with a stereo is a conductor.
Jamy Ian Swiss is that cellist. He is as absolute in his passions and prohibitions as a Zen master, albeit one with a Vandyke, a small potbelly, an earring in his left ear, and a taste for Hawaiian shirts. Most nights, he maintains a note of conspiratorial mirth, leaning in toward a listener to share outrage over some stupidity—“Can you believe that guy!”—and breaking into a wolfish grin. But at times he lowers into a kind of set-faced gloom at the things the world is willing to watch and praise. Tender in his connections, a gentle and inspiring teacher of young magicians (he has performed a marriage ceremony for at least one, the young closeup man Matthew Holtzclaw), he can be brutal in his beliefs. In an old-fashioned, barking Brooklyn accent, part Bogart hiss and part Art Carney howl, he produces at the table a flow of interrogations, exclamations, verdicts, and interdictions. “Magic only ‘happens’ in a spectator’s mind,” he puts it emphatically. “Everything else is a distraction. Magic talk on the Internet is a distraction. Magic contests are a distraction. Magic organizations are a distraction. The latest advertisement, the latest trick—distractions. Methods for their own sake are a distraction. You cannot cross over into the world of magic until you put everything else aside and behind you—including your own desires and needs—and focus on bringing an experience to the audience. This is magic. Nothing else.”
A producer and collector of practical aphorisms—“In every other art, technique must be transparent; only in magic must it be invisible”; “Don’t run when they’re not chasing you”; “Don’t make unimportant things important”; “Magicians have taken something intrinsically profound and made it look trivial”; “Closeup magic is an art looking for an easel”—he is perhaps the most feared (and resented) intellectual in the world of magic, with the saving ironic awareness that almost no one knows that there are in his world any intellects to be feared or resented. (“Mimes were invented to give magicians someone to look down on,” he said one night.) He is a true intellectual in that he cannot help arguing about ideas even when it would be in his own interest, narrowly conceived, to stop. When someone says something stupid about magic, or sells something fake, or performs derivatively or cynically in some way, he just can’t abide it—just cannot accept it—and uses whatever forum he has to denounce the offense. In regular columns in the magic magazines Genii and Antinomy, he launches impassioned assaults on phony magic, on “street magic,” on Internet magic, and on any other kind of magical practice that seems to him to have brought shame on his profession.
The world at large, of course, is not particularly interested in hearing why someone is wrong about magic, or doing magic the wrong way—it’s all most people can do to turn up once a year at a magic show for their kid’s birthday—and the magicians Jamy thinks are wrong certainly don’t want to hear it, and so, like all intellectuals, he probably exasperates as many people as he enlightens. There are those—especially on Web sites and among YouTube magicians—who believe that Jamy is a man out of time, defending a dying tradition in the face of a renaissance of new and edgier sorts of conjuring. Jamy writes to attack them, and they respond in kind. (Even his enemies call him Jamy. It’s a small world.) People who don’t like him find his relentless search for the meaning of magic tiresome or just pretentious. Those who follow and admire him find something gallant, and Cyrano-like, in his quest to make magic matter, not as a redoubt of nostalgia but as a living art that might cross over with the other arts. Yet even his triumphs are shaded by the rueful knowledge that often all he has to prove his convictions is card tricks, and the handful of people who care.
On the plane, Swiss’s voice rises a touch: “You’ve got to—no, you’ve got to relax your wrist just then, you have to—you want it to look more casual. You’re making too much of the moment. The ace is no big deal. Don’t force it. Let it happen.” The boy’s hands go flat, and turn and start again.Magicians like to say that magic is as old as civilization, stretching back to Egyptian priests and Greek oracles. But stage magic, performed magic, in which conjuring is acknowledged as craft and entertainment—in which, in one of Swiss’s favorite aphorisms, the honest magician promises to deceive you, and then does—is probably a few hundred years old. In his essay “A Millennium of Magic Literature,” Swiss accepts the significance of the date 1584, when Reginald Scot’s book “Discoverie of Witchcraft” and Jean Prevost’s “Clever and Pleasant Inventions” were published. Scot and Prevost, he explains, write similar things, slightly at cross-purposes: Scot is “discovering,” that is, debunking, witchcraft—there are no witches, he says, and he explains how the make-believe witches achieve apparently magical effects. Prevost’s book presents itself as a book of tricks, to be done for pleasure. From the start, then, the history of magic-as-fun is interwoven with the history of magic-as-fraud, more or less the way the history of chemistry is bound up with the history of alchemy.
Modern magic may begin around 1905, in Ottawa, when the very young David Verner read S. W. Erdnase’s “The Expert at the Card Table.” Appropriately, it’s a deeply mysterious text. Who Erdnase was and why he wrote, and self-published, his book are two abiding enigmas of modern magic. No one of that name has ever been found, and the general agreement is that it is a pseudonym, probably for someone named Andrews. (Turn it around.) He seems to have been a cardsharp rather than a magician; most of the book is taken up with cheating techniques, daintily not always called such. (As for why he gave away his craft, William Kalush, the founder of the leading magic library in New York, suggests that Erdnase may have been suffering from the perpetual fantasy among nonwriters that writing books is a way to make money.) In Erdnase, you see the same relation between display and deceit that has always been part of magic, only instead of doing things that could get you burned alive at an auto-da-fé he is doing things that could get you shot dead at a card table. But his inventory of closeup skills—the cull, the break, the shift, the color change—became the foundation of twentieth-century closeup magic.
David Verner, or Dai Vernon, as he became onstage, is the protagonist of modern magic, the Jesus to Erdnase’s John the Baptist. Improbable though it seems for a closeup card magician who spent much of his life in residence at a private magic club, he has been the subject of two full-scale biographies, one of them a multivolume scholarly work, not to mention a huge commemorative and annotative literature within the magic world. Trying to explain his stature to civilians, magicians call him “the Picasso of magic,” but Vernon is really something closer to its Marcel Duchamp. Like Duchamp, he responded to the drying up of the natural niche for his art form in his lifetime not by trying to compete with the new media—with the revolution that the photographic image and movies had wrought—but by seceding from the outside world, making magic into a secretive coterie art rather than an expansive public one.
Vernon worked at a time when movie palaces were pushing out magic venues and theatres. The great illusionist shows were slowly going out of business, while closeup magic went on mostly in night clubs. By the nineteen-thirties, as Vernon’s biographer David Ben writes, “amateur magicians, with stars in their eyes, had little idea of how unsatisfying the work could be. Performers traveled great distances and performed numerous shows before unappreciative audiences. . . . Those who presented large-scale illusions, ‘Tall Grass Showmen,’ were shunted to the hinterlands and focused their efforts on the cities, towns and villages that received little entertainment—of any sort.”
Throughout the twenties and thirties, Vernon alternated magic shows, some successful, with long periods as an itinerant silhouette cutter. Yet during this discouraging time for magic he began the work that led to his greatest routines, among them Twisting the Aces and Triumph, in which a deck mixed up face up and face down suddenly straightens itself out, producing, as a bonus, a selected card. Triumph is to magic what “I Got Rhythm” is to jazz, the basis of innumerable variations.
Two stories shape Vernon’s myth. The first is about how, in Chicago in 1922, he fooled Houdini, who boasted of being able to figure out any card trick, with a version of the routine called the Ambitious Card. Vernon was put off by Houdini’s bad grace in the face of his own perplexity, and this helped create a divide that can still be found among magicians: between those who see Houdini, perhaps the most famous name in entertainment history, as essentially a tourist trap—a Salvador Dali, there for the flash and the obvious effects, but not even a competent closeup man or illusionist—and those who see Houdini’s fame as proof positive that he did the first thing a magician needs to do, which is to grasp the mind of his time.
The second story is about how, in the nineteen-thirties, Vernon embarked on what became the legendary quest of modern magic, the search for the center dealer. (Karl Johnson tells the story beautifully in his book “The Magician and the Cardsharp.”) Vernon had heard rumors of a cardsharp who was able to deal not merely the bottom card or the second card of the deck, in the usual way, but from its center—meaning that a chosen card could be dealt at will, no matter where the deck was cut—and, after years of looking in the hardscrabble gamblers’ underground of Depression America, he found him, just outside Kansas City. Vernon learned the move, and taught it to a handful of other magicians.
The story, as usually told, emphasizes Vernon’s search for “naturalness,” for methods of card manipulation that would look entirely real, even under scrutiny. The deeper meaning of the myth, though, is that the magician is one of the few true artists left on earth, for whom the mastery of technique means more than anything that might be gained by it. He center-deals but makes no money—doesn’t even win prestige points—because nobody knows he’s doing it.
Vernon grasped that there is an imbalance between the spectator’s experience and the performer’s, greater even than the normal imbalance in the arts between the insider and the outsider. We could watch Horowitz’s fingers on the keyboard as we listened to the music; if we could admire Vernon’s fingers on the deck as he did the trick, he wouldn’t be doing it right. This makes insiders’ experience of magic distinctive, a clinging together within a charmed circle of knowledge. Erdnase’s genuine criminality became, in Vernon’s hands, a kind of symbolic criminality—an aesthetic of the clandestine.
Vernon’s insistence on “natural handling,” on making every move look casual rather than “presentational”—like a man handling cards rather than like a magician handling props—is a precept of modern magic. But magic, like novel writing or acting, is always bending toward naturalism, and, very quickly, the forms of naturalism become rigidly stylized. The nineteenth-century magician Robert-Houdin insisted on magicians’ wearing gentleman’s evening clothes, instead of the elaborate sorcerer’s and Chinese costumes that conjurers usually wore onstage. The white tie and tails and top hat became the magician’s regalia well into the twentieth century, long after everyone else had stopped wearing them. Like the Polish Hasidim, whose move toward spontaneous religion kept them in the ordinary clothes of the eighteenth century, magicians wore a costume that had first been meant as camouflage. The task of making magic seem natural must be perpetually renewed, and is more complex than just making it look offhand.
One night a year ago, a young magician came into the Joshua Tree and auditioned while Swiss sat having grilled salmon and a microbrew. He did a “torn and restored” bill trick—tearing up a dollar bill and then making it whole again. Swiss took him aside, and could be seen talking to him, sharply but intensely, explaining, teaching. Someone asked what was wrong with the trick; it had seemed very neatly done.
“He was appealing—he did have a nice persona,” Swiss said, leaning into the table. “He could do the moves. But he tore the dollar up slowly, like this.” Swiss replicated the young magician’s careful, studied action. “Why? Why would you tear it up slowly? Nobody tears a dollar bill up in the first place, but, if you’re going to tear up a dollar bill at all, you’d tear it up quickly, in a sudden fit, zip-zip-zip.” He demonstrated. “The only reason you would tear a dollar bill up slowly is if you were doing something else to it at the same time—if you were doing a goddam magic trick. So right away we’re off in the magic land of ‘I have in my hand an ordinary deck of cards.’ But, O.K., let’s live with that. Why are you tearing it up? Are you doing it angrily? Gaily? Why are you asking me to watch you tear up a dollar bill? The method is not the trick. The method is never the trick. Once you’ve mastered the method, you’ve hardly begun the trick.”
All grownup craft depends on sustaining a frozen moment from childhood: scientists, it’s said, are forever four years old, wide-eyed and self-centered; writers are forever eight, over-aware and indignant. The magician is a permanent pre-adolescent. At least, all lives of magicians begin with a twelve-year-old at a place like Tannen’s. “Jamy Ian Swiss is actually my name,” Jamy said at another dinner. “And I grew up in Brooklyn, in Flatbush and then in Sheepshead Bay. My mother gave those names to me because ‘Jamy’ couldn’t be shortened, and ‘Ian’ sounded elegant and English somehow, high class. The ‘Swiss’ is a Jewish name that got changed somewhere along the road.” Often battling with his mother, he loved his father, who got him started in magic. “I was an awkward and shy kid, with bottle-glasses and a horrific speech impediment,” he said. “Then one day my father brought home, to amuse me, a Color Vision box that he had bought at Tannen’s.”
The Color Vision box is one of the simplest of self-working tricks. The magician gives you a cube with a different color on each side and a box; you put the cube in the box with the color of your choice facing up, and replace the lid. The magician discerns your choice without seeming to open the box. “I thought it was wonderful, amazing, and he taught me how to do it,” Swiss said. “And then we started going to Tannen’s together, taking the train in on Saturdays, all the way from Sheepshead Bay to Times Square.
“In those days, Tannen’s was in the Wurlitzer Building, behind Bryant Park, where the Verizon Building is now. You just can’t imagine the effect Tannen’s could have in those days on a shy kid with a speech impediment. It was a scene! Everyone would be there! There were photographs of magicians from floor to ceiling, and shadow boxes filled with effects, and Tannen’s symbol, a hat and a rabbit, was inlaid right in the linoleum. And so full of light! The magicians were everywhere, and they were such elegant and resourceful men. They would all drop in and do work just for the pleasure of it. Lou Tannen himself was there, a kind man who loved magic and sympathized with kids. He actually taught me a version of the cups and balls. Whenever anyone asks me how I started, I say, ‘Just the same way you did. When I was awkward and twelve and bought a trick.’ ”
It was around then that Swiss had his first epiphany about the power of magic and its risks. “We had a mixed-up family, often at odds with each other, but there was one cousin, I’ll call her Sharon, whom I adored. I would show her the Color Vision box, over and over, and she loved me for doing it. She couldn’t get enough of it. But she kept begging me and begging me to show her how I did it, and at last I did. And she was furious—absolutely furious! The trick was so simple, even stupid. I learned a huge lesson that day, and not just not to tell civilians the secrets. It was more complicated and ambiguous than that, and it’s taken me years to work out all of its meanings. It was”—he paused—“it was that the trick was not the trick, and that it was the interchange between us that was the source of the effect.”
At the age of twenty-nine, after short flings in the pet trade and the telephone business, Swiss took a year off, while his wife at the time supported him, and spent it doing nothing but sleight of hand. “Mastering magic at twenty-nine is as late to begin seriously as it would be if you were studying violin. I felt that I had hands like stumps. It’s why I still so envy closeup men like Prakash, who has such soft hands. By the end of the year, I had begun to get very good, technically, and I had heard somewhere that you could work as a magic bartender. So I went to bartender school.” He looked across the table. “I loved being a bartender. Loved it! There was a blue-collar side to it, I suppose. I didn’t talk with an accent like this, growing up. It was a rebellion against my cosseted middle-class upbringing. Magic was for me partly an art thing, partly a blue-collar artisanal thing, so being a magic bartender was ideal.” He barks his bark. “Ha! It turned out that the whole idea of magic bars was dying even as I entered it.”
In 1985, Swiss went to see a magician-and-juggler act he had been hearing about for a couple of years, called Penn & Teller. They were in the middle of their legendary stand at the Westside Arts Theatre. “The night shook me up completely. I mean, beyond completely! They made fun of magicians, and still did brilliant magic. And they refused to say that they were magicians doing a magic show, although that was obviously what it was.”
Two years later, Swiss went to work at the Magic Castle, the famous club in Hollywood. “I was arrogant enough to call the Castle and say that I was free to lecture or perform,” he says, shaking his head, “and they let me do some work there. Naturally, I was desperate to see Vernon, and we sessioned together.” Sessioning is the magicians’ equivalent of jamming. Dai Vernon, who died in 1992, just shy of a century, had been the magician-in-residence there since the late sixties. “I can still recall everything he did. I did some things for him, one of them a slow-motion coin-vanish routine. That Friday, I did the afternoon lunch shows in the Close-up Gallery. Two shows. When I walked out for the first show, there was Vernon sitting in the front row, a little to my right. He was mere feet from me, and my hands began to shake. I almost dropped a gaff. Afterward, I came out and saw Vernon at the bar. I approached and apologized for my shakiness. ‘You scared the hell out of me.’ He waved me off.
“When I entered for the second show, there he was again, much to my surprise. I was calmer this time and the show came off without a hitch.” On Sunday, Swiss gave a lecture and Vernon was there again: “I asked Vernon, ‘So, Professor, did you see anything you liked?’ He said, ‘What do you mean, did I see anything I liked? I stayed awake for the whole thing, didn’t I?’ ”
On the plane, the hands move. “Now, this is called Twisting the Aces,” the boy explains to his father, who has put down his book, curious. “It’s a Vernon trick, isn’t it?” the boy asks the magician. He nods. The boy keeps a picture of Vernon as the screen saver on his computer, still young and dapper, cigarette in hand, all smoke and cards.
The boy’s hands move, trying to conceal something.
“Make it natural, make it easy,” the magician says.
Swiss befriended Penn & Teller, and began working with them on illusions, ideas, and routines. (“Penn taught me to drive. I’m a New Yorker, you know. Who drives? Penn put me in a car and said, ‘My ability to speak quickly and clearly is the only thing keeping us alive.’ ”) But his friendship with Vernon led him in another direction as well—backward, in a sense, to try to define what it was that made magic matter, why the tradition counted, and what it meant. He began to think about magic as an entertaining form of skepticism rather than as a debased form of mysticism.
In one way, this was de rigueur for magicians. Houdini had unmasked psychics. But it challenged the way Swiss understood his own work. A lot of magicians saw stage and closeup magic simply as fake “wonder,” reproducing, in admittedly artificial ways, old rituals of death and restoration, giving people the hope, for half an hour, that real magic was possible. Even Edmund Wilson, an amateur magician, insisted that magic’s most enduring effects came from its imitation of ancient mystery religion. Vernon, though, knew better. As he put it, “A spectator never or rarely was fooled by what a magician performed for him in the way of tricks.”
As Swiss wrote the series of essays that were eventually collected in his book “Shattering Illusions,” he arrived at the idea that magic was, in his words, “an experiment in empathy”—a contest of minds, in which the magician dominates by a superior grasp of the way minds work. The spectator is not a dupe who gets fooled but a rational actor who gets outreasoned. When the aces are twisted, the viewer doesn’t think, That’s supernatural! The viewer thinks, I know it’s a trick, but my mind is unable to imagine how any trick of the fingers could alter the cards when they’re obviously still right in the middle of the pack.
In a recent summing-up essay in Antinomy, Swiss observed that, whereas a juggler like the young Penn Jillette doesn’t have to imagine an audience to experience his effects, the magician must: “From the very start, the moment a magician looks into his practice mirror, he is envisioning an alien awareness—a mind other than his own, perceiving an illusion that he is creating but cannot actually experience for himself.” Only by a command of intellectual empathy can the magician lead the viewer down an explanatory highway from which there is no exit, or, better, from which there are six exits, all of them blocked. Magic is imagination working together with dexterity to persuade experience how limited its experience really is, the heart working with the fingers to remind the head how little it knows.
“The one thing I can do that Steven Spielberg can’t is to say, ‘Take a card, any card you like,’ ’’ Swiss says. “And I can have you sign it, so that it’s unique in the world, and then I can make it disappear from the deck and find it in your pocket and hand it back to you. That one card. Your mind and mine.”
“At every moment in the history of magic, there is an anti-magician to go along with the mainstream magicians,” Swiss says. The opposition between Vernon, the chamber genius, and Houdini, the charismatic star, goes on. The anti-magician of the moment is David Blaine, the patron saint of street and YouTube magic, the prophet of the new illusionism, but also its subverter.
Close up, Blaine is beautiful, in a fifties, Actors Studio, young-Brando way, a perfect Jewish sheikh: hooded eyes, a high forehead, and a steady gaze, which he knows how to avert in awkward vulnerability. He wishes to press the edges of the form, and he believes that the future of magic lies in a naturalism beyond even Vernon’s. In his next piece, this fall, he will attempt to stay awake for a million seconds (or 11.57 days), as a comment on both endurance and, obliquely, the practice of psychological torture: he will be sleepless for our sins.
Blaine first became famous for doing tricks on television—some old and simple, some new and radical—but with the emphasis always on the faces of people, mostly girls, reacting with screams and gasps and semi-sexual eye rollings. (“Blaine saw something that we all saw, how people looked when they got ‘fried,’ ” one old-timer says, “and then just turned the camera around.”) Meanwhile, he never broke his air of moody, cool detachment.
He has a two-floor studio in Tribeca that is lined with magic posters of the great illusionists and seems usually to be accessorized with beautiful women, Nadias and Anyas. It tends also to be filled with a posse of purposeful young magicians in black, who both learn from Blaine and teach him—“He saved magic,” one of them, the brilliant card man and street magician Daniel Garcia, said flatly—and is the center of a small, flourishing new enterprise, a kind of merger of magic with performance art. David Blaine has become best known for what he calls “endurance art,” genuine, ungaffed daredevilry: standing on a pole for thirty-five hours, living in a water-filled plastic bubble or encased in ice. Not long ago, he claimed a record for the longest time spent underwater by a mammal, not counting a few species of whale.
“It’s something I’ve been working my way around to,” he murmured, one Friday evening in December, in his studio, talking about his sleepless project. “It started out just with lions.” He shows an image he had Photoshopped of himself as Daniel in Rubens’s “Daniel in the Lions’ Den,” a swarthy Brooklynite among the Baroque roarers. “But just being in a room with lions isn’t about anything. So then I thought, What’s the worst torture someone can undergo? And I realized it’s going without sleep. So I researched it, you know, and found out what the record was. The guy who set the record didn’t train for it, and he went kind of crazy afterward. I know I’ll start to hallucinate and everything—but my idea is to do it outdoors and let people do anything they want to keep me awake. Stay awake for five days, and then bring out the lions.” He makes his half smile. “All my work is about honesty. Magic card tricks—we have to get beyond that. If magic is just magicians doing card tricks to impress other magicians—I’m not interested in that anymore. I don’t want magic that looks real. What I want are real things that feel like magic.”
His stunts are not stunts; they actually take place. His way of staying awake for a million seconds is to stay awake for a million seconds. There is a famous, and dangerous, illusionist’s effect called the Bullet Catch; it is, of course, an elaborate and dangerous trick. Blaine insists that if he caught a bullet he would catch a bullet. “That’s what Chris Burden did,” he says, referring to the pioneering performance artist of the seventies, who did once have himself shot (in the arm) for art. “David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear, but then it came right back. My ideal magic would be really making the Statue of Liberty disappear, so that it never comes back, even if I have to go to jail afterward.”
Las Vegas, at the MGM Grand: Swiss is about to go into David Copperfield’s show, while the banked drill of slot machines whir and ping nearby. It is sometime in the middle of the night, in a casino with no clocks or windows. Las Vegas is the last place in America where magic thrives in the normal American way: people get paid a lot to do it, and a lot of people pay to see it. Not as many as once did, perhaps—“I liked Vegas better when the Mob ran it” is the constant, semi-ironic complaint of the old-timers. They mean that the Mob’s Vegas derived so much of its profit from gambling that the fun (and the food) could be given away more or less free, and a lounge could sponsor a closeup magician just because the owner liked him. These days, many show rooms are “four-walled,” leased out by the owner and expected to be profit centers in themselves. Nonetheless, Big Magic, at least—the modern version of the splashy disappearing-girl shows that were once magic’s mainstay—continues to flourish. Performers such as Lance Burton, Penn & Teller, and David Copperfield have successful shows that have run for years.
Swiss is talking about the recent past of Big Illusion: “After ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ ended, and before Doug Henning, there was nothing. There was always some guy out there somewhere sawing a woman, but that was it. Doug Henning did what Robert-Houdin set out to do—he presented magic in the dress of the time, only now it was tie-dye and long hair and hippieness. That saved illusion, at least on television. And then Copperfield came along. Copperfield—I remember when he was still calling himself Davino, at Tannen’s.” He shakes his head.
A stranger comes by and greets Swiss, a little warily. They exchange some magic shoptalk. Swiss laughs as the man walks off. “I got into a bitter argument with that guy at the Magic Castle last month. He was telling a young magician about the necessity of being pragmatic, making compromises for your art, and I said, ‘What the fuck do you know about a work of art, or what it takes to make one!’ ” He smiles sheepishly. Like many combative souls, he takes his feuds and eruptions as part of the weather in his world, and assumes that his disputants do, too.
Copperfield’s show turns out to be much more loose-limbed and intelligent than his reputation for big dumb-stunt illusions suggests. He does the expected things—levitates through a steel plate, and makes thirteen audience members disappear (and reappear, at the back of the auditorium, where they giggle slightly in ways suggesting that their disappearance was less confounding than it seemed). But his oddly touching pièce de résistance is a confessional number about his father’s failed career as an actor, and his own estrangement from his grandfather, and the old man’s dream of one day winning the lottery and buying a green Lincoln Continental—probably the only case of a sad-bad-parenting memoir that ends with the thumping appearance on a Las Vegas stage of an actual green Lincoln.
After the show, over omelettes at the Peppermill, a Las Vegas institution and show-biz hangout at the older, northern end of the Strip, Swiss meditates on the difference between the way audiences experience an illusion show now and the way they did a century ago. “It’s a good show, a fun show—who can deny it? But what do people come to a Big Magic show for now? Celebrity? To be amazed? What did they come for then? Of course, there was less to see in the world then. They weren’t going home to watch television. But I think they were there for beauty, too. A lot of what magicians did then was just meant to be beautiful. It got that Ahhh sound you hear when Teller does the goldfish.” He meant a signature Penn & Teller piece in which Teller turns water into silver coins and the coins into goldfish. “David Ben does an illusion show set in 1909, and, because it’s set then, he does it much slower than we do now. And that kind of stage slowness turns out to be the right speed for magic. It isn’t a high-speed art. The beauty lies in the unfolding, not in being zapped to the finish. It does for me, anyway. Onstage, it takes me three minutes to say my name.”
The next night, David Copperfield takes Jamy Ian Swiss, and the twelve-year-old, and a mysterious family of Russians to his warehouse of magical paraphernalia. As they ride there in a limo, Copperfield explains the origins of his collection—it is a much larger version of the famous Mulholland collection—and hints at its treasures, largely, it seems, for Swiss’s benefit. In photographs, Copperfield assumes a manner of chilly mastery; in person he is open, bending, almost needy, reminding the world of his triumphs—his renown, his Emmys—as though the scale of his accomplishments still surprised him, too.
“Jamy? You’ll be amazed when you see what I have at the warehouse,” Copperfield says. “You were at Tannen’s, too, right? Of course you were! I loved it with Lou. Did you know Lou? Did you see me in the Jubilee the year I was eighteen, when they gave me the whole second half?”
The warehouse is the size of an airplane hangar, windowless and fluorescent-lit in the Vegas night. Copperfield has been building it for years, and has no intention of making it public; he offers tours, guided by him, as he thinks they are merited. Upstairs, he shows Swiss one beautiful piece after another, in spotlit cases. Everything is here. There are boxes of off-the-shelf magic sets for boys, a century’s worth, stacked high into the air. There are the great monochrome posters of Alexander, the Man Who Knows; and posters of Charles Carter, in Egypt, being hanged, fighting the Devil himself. There is the complete outfit and wiring of the performer Mr. Electric, an “Ed Sullivan” regular. And there is nearly everything of Houdini’s that matters: the original milk can that Houdini escaped from; one of the Metamorphosis Trunks (a fragment of the True Cross); and, on wax cylinders, the only recordings of Houdini’s voice, high and hectoring and European-sounding as he does his patter.
There is the gun with which the great Chung Ling Soo (actually an American named William Ellsworth Robinson) was killed onstage at the Wood Green Empire, in London, in 1918, when his Bullet Catch number hit a snag. (“Oh my God. Something’s happened. Lower the curtain” were his last words onstage, and the first ones he had spoken there in English for almost twenty years.) The apparatus for a Carter number, where a girl was pulled up in a chair, and then disappeared, shows the way the little chair gets hoisted into the framework of the machinery, leaving the damsel suspended. There is the sawing table where Orson Welles sawed Marlene Dietrich in half. Then, there are the automatons that Robert-Houdin built in the mid-nineteenth century, tiny clicking cogs and wheels and whirring clockwork: a brass Chinaman actually does the cups and balls, and each time the cups come up something new is underneath them. And books, wall after wall of bookshelves, with not only Max Malini’s original copy of Erdnase but also a first edition of “Discoverie of Witchcraft” and the writings of Méliès, the French magician who invented special effects (dissolves, double exposures) in early movies—the effects that doomed Big Magic.
And then there is a wall of old, signed publicity photographs of magicians: magicians with top hats, magicians resting their hands sapiently on their bearded cheeks; magicians grave and sage and, sometimes, witty and waggish, in top hats and tails, rising from floor to ceiling.
“Jamy? Do you see what it is?” David Copperfield says, triumphant.
“It’s the wall from Tannen’s,” Swiss says softly, looking up at it as he must have done as a twelve-year-old. “It’s the original photographs they had up, intact,” he tells the twelve-year-old with him. The magicians, shining and unchanged since the sixties, beam down on their protégés, as though Lou were still behind the counter below.
Finally, in a small, crowded space upstairs, Copperfield carefully displays a legendary apparatus: the flower vase of Karl Germain, the great Cleveland-born magician. The vase stands up, music plays, a pass is made—and a whole rosebush slowly rises from inside, higher and higher, the petals of the roses unfolding as though waking up. The music plays, the roses grow and grow, higher and higher still, petals unfolding, and Copperfield cuts them off and gives one to each woman in the room.
How does it work? Where do the roses come from? One difficulty in writing about magic is that it is considered a cardinal sin to reveal methods, even when you are an outsider who barely grasps them—particularly when you are an outsider who barely grasps them. “Exposure” is a hanging crime in the magic world. In the eighties, Penn & Teller provoked hack magicians to attack them for doing the cups and balls in transparent glasses. (Of course, they did it so nimbly and surprisingly that they exposed nothing but the absurdity of “exposure.”) About all an outsider may say is that the surprising thing about most magical methods is not how ingeniously complex they are but how extremely stupid they are—stupid, that is, in the sense of being completely obvious once you grasp them.
The trick to Swiss’s Color Vision box, to engage in an exposure that is surely harmless, since his cousin Sharon knows all about it (and has had forty years to tell her friends, indignantly), is that the lid of the box is secretly moved by the magician to the side of the box; that is, the magician has revolved the box so that the top is now the back, and the lid is on what is now the side. He sees what the color is just by looking at it. What this teaches us is not that people are stupid but that the concept of rotating an object, though obvious, is in some way defeated by our familiarity with boxes and lids—a lid always goes on top. The move is not outside our imaginations but remote from our experience.
Most big illusions, similarly, involve a remarkably limited, though resourcefully manipulated, arsenal of mirrors and lights. We will ourselves both to overlook the obvious chicanery and to overrate the apparent obstacles. Or we imagine that an elaborate bit of trickery couldn’t be achieved by stupidly obvious means. People participate in their own illusions. That is why a magician’s technique must be invisible; if it became visible, we would be insulted by its obviousness. Magic is possible because magicians are smart. And what they’re smart about is mainly how dumb we are, how limited in vision, how narrow in imagination, how resourceless in conjecture, how routinized in our theories of the world, how deadened to possibility. The magician awakens us from the dogmatic slumbers of our daily life, our interactions with cards and hoops and things. He opens a door by pointing to a window.
Why does it matter? “Magic is the most intrinsically ironic of all the arts,” Teller is saying. “I don’t know what your definition of irony is, but mine is something where, when you are seeing it, you see it in two different and even contradictory ways at the same time. And with magic what you see collides with what you know. That’s why magic, even when merely executed, ends up having intellectual content. It’s intrinsic to the form.”
Onstage, Teller’s character is mute. In his own house—twenty minutes outside Las Vegas, an Expressionist concrete box, a stone fortress with trapezoidal windows cut in it, Dr. Caligari’s remake of the Whitney Museum—over excellent cornmeal waffles, he is voluble, articulate, opinionated, and exact. Small and curly-haired, he looks like Harpo Marx released from his vow of silence and given tenure.
His is one of those houses perfectly shaped to the needs of their fastidious and eccentric owners: it is hung with his father’s paintings; there is a beautiful coffin, given to him by a close friend for his fifty-fifth birthday, and a handsome dining table with a skeleton embedded in its glass top, its arms and feet shackled to a rack. (To extend the table for company, you turn a crank, which stretches out the skeleton, causing moans and screams to sound through a concealed speaker.) Bookcases revolve and reveal secret passageways to the next room. The Christmas tree is still up, and decorated with skulls and metallic-red devil’s heads.
“There is a more romantic way to do it, to calm down the intrinsic irony, but that can get schmaltzy,” he goes on. “Many magicians do that, but it tends toward the sentimental.”
In Las Vegas, Penn & Teller have not compromised their act. They do a flag burning onstage—or, rather, seem to do it—before restoring the flag completely, in a variation of the torn-and-restored dollar; it’s a heartfelt libertarian tribute to American freedom. And they end with a staggering Bullet Catch, the stunt that killed Chung Ling Soo. (Someone remarks to Teller that the Bullet Catch seems to be the “Macbeth” of magic, the bad-luck piece, and he says, dryly, “Yes. You’re standing onstage firing bullets at the magician with a live gun. That might be bad luck.”)
Swiss tells Teller about the tour of the Copperfield warehouse and his rediscovery of the wall from Tannen’s. Though Teller grew up in Philadelphia, he recognizes the key moment memorialized by the wall. “There’s a moment in your life when you realize the difference between illusion and reality and that you’re being lied to,” he says. “Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. After my mother told me that there was no Santa Claus, I made up an entirely fictitious girl in my classroom and told my mother stories about her. Then I told my mother, ‘You know what—she isn’t real.’ ” He smiles with somewhat Pugsley Addams-like glee, and goes on, more soberly, “If you’re sufficiently preoccupied with the power of a lie, a falsehood, an illusion, you remain interested in magic tricks.”
The subject of the Germain vase comes up, and Teller says, “You know the funny thing about that? A friend and I did the Germain flowers last year. We put the music on, the right music played at the right time, slightly off speed, and we prepped the illusion properly, you know, had the buds set right so that they would open when you fanned them—the fanning is part of the piece—and we watched it emerge. This lovely music was playing, and we just wept at the beauty of it—tears streamed down our cheeks at the lovely apparition of it. That was magic.”
Of all the arguments that can preoccupy the mindful magician, the most important involves what is called the Too Perfect theory. Jamy Ian Swiss has written about it often. Presaged by Vernon himself, and formalized by the illusionist Rick Johnsson in a 1971 article, the Too Perfect theory says, basically, that any trick that simply astounds will give itself away. If, for instance, a magician smokes a cigarette and then makes it pass through an ordinary quarter, the only reasonable explanation is that it isn’t an ordinary quarter; the spectator will immediately know that it’s a trick quarter, with a hinge. (Swiss wrote that once, after he performed the Cigarette Through Quarter—perfectly, in his opinion—a spectator responded, “Neat. Where’s that nifty coin with the hole in it?”)
What makes a trick work is not the inherent astoundingness of its effect but the magician’s ability to suggest any number of possible explanations, none of them conclusive, and none of them quite obvious. As the law professor and magician Christopher Hanna has noted, two of the best ways of making a too perfect trick work are “reducing the claim” and “raising the proof.” Reducing the claim means roughing up the illusion so that the spectator isn’t even sure she saw one—bringing the cigarette in and out of the coin so quickly that the viewer doesn’t know if the trick is in the coin or in her eyes. Raising the proof is more demanding. Derek Dingle, a famous closeup man, adjusted the Cigarette Through Quarter trick by palming and replacing one gaffed quarter with another. One quarter had a small hole in it, the other a spring hinge. By exposing the holed coin, then palming that one and replacing it with the hinged coin, he led the spectator to think not There must be two trick coins but How could even the trick coin I’ve seen do that trick? Or one might multiply the possible explanations, in a card-guessing trick, by going through an elaborate charade of “reading” the spectator’s face and voice, so that, when the forced card is guessed, the obviousness of the trick is, well, obviated.
At the heart of the Too Perfect theory is the insight that magic works best when the illusions it creates are open-ended enough to invite the viewer into a credibly imperfect world. Magic is the dramatization of explanation more than it is the engineering of effects. In every art, the Too Perfect theory helps explain why people are more convinced by an imperfect, “distressed” illusion than by a perfectly realized one. A form of the theory is involved when special-effects people talk about “selling the shot” in a movie; that is, making sure that the speeding spacecraft or the raging Godzilla doesn’t look too neatly and cosmetically packaged, and that it is not lingered on long enough to be really seen. (All special effects appear as such when they are studied.) The theory explains the force of the off-slant scene in a film, the power of elliptical dialogue in the theatre, the constant artistic need to turn away from apparent perfection toward the laconic or unfixed. Illusion affects us only when it is incomplete.
But the Too Perfect theory has larger meanings, too. It reminds us that, whatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is “dynamic,” unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information. We are always reducing the claim or raising the proof. The magician teaches us that romance lies in an unstable contest of minds that leaves us knowing it’s a trick but not which one it is, and being impressed by the other person’s ability to let the trickery go on. Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities. The trick is to renew the possibilities, to keep them from becoming schematized, to let them be imperfect, and the question between us is always “Who’s the magician?” When we say that love is magic, we are telling a truth deeper, and more ambiguous, than we know.
Swiss is talking over dinner about the Too Perfect theory: “What magic is out to do isn’t just to amaze you but to achieve what Whit Haydn calls putting ‘a burr under the saddle of the mind.’ ” He leaps up from the table and becomes a man on a tightrope. “Let’s say you do a Blaine trick, one he’s done on television, where you have someone choose a card and then find it in a sealed basketball. Well, if he sees it in the basketball he knows that somehow the card’s been forced on him. It’s too perfect. But if it’s got a torn corner—or it’s signed, or if maybe instead of being inside a basketball it’s behind a backboard—he thinks, It wasn’t there before, but he can’t get over there. The mind starts working. He can’t rest here, he can’t rest here, and he stays on the tightrope!” Swiss wavers on the imaginary wire.
“That’s not the situation of the passive dupe,” he says, sitting down. “It’s the situation of someone whose mind is alive! It’s the state of the scientist, or the artist—and magic is a fringe art, but it’s not a fringe subject. Truth, deception, and mystery are big material, and they’re the natural, the intrinsic subject of magic. And I propose”—he smiles briefly at the formulation, but goes ahead anyway—“that it’s the only art form where that’s the intrinsic subject. And that’s why, with all the indignities and absurdities of being a professional magician, we’ll always need magic.”
David Blaine is on a strict new regime as he trains for the sleepless piece. Once a week, he runs thirteen miles in Central Park, plays basketball for an hour and a half at Chelsea Piers, and then swims several miles in a downtown pool. It is his theory that a man in perfect form will be able to survive staying awake for a million seconds. He has already lost forty pounds, and this gives him a gaunt, spiritualized look, like the young Brando playing an AIDS patient. He is in his Greenwich Village apartment, showing a protégé a card trick and quizzing him, gently, on a book about the Holocaust that he had given him to read. The first vibe you get from him, of cool and insolence, is soon succeeded by a second, truer sense that he is a man trying to save magic not by making it more intellectual, or more raffish, but by making it potentially tragic, a high-stakes and risky endeavor that might end in grief. Seriousness is his keynote. He presses on his protégés copies of his favorite books, mostly classics of the fifties and sixties, which he keeps by the gross in a special closet: “Siddhartha,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “A Confederacy of Dunces”—tales of nonconformists making their way in a monochrome world. He seems to see “mainstream” magicians the way Holden sees his teachers. His bookshelves are filled with Heidegger and Nietzsche. He has decided to call the sleepless piece “Blaine’s Wake,” in punning homage to Joyce, and he has recently begun working his way through Finnegan’s dream with the help of Joseph Campbell’s skeleton key.
He still works intently on card tricks, of the more avant-garde kind that derive from the great Spanish magician Juan Tamariz, whom all magicians today, on all sides, uncritically revere. The card trick he is teaching his protégé involves no apparent skill, no card handling or card moving, still mind against mind, but without the interference of fingers. The effect is powerful, but the vibe is different from normal card tricks: melodramatic rather than clever, and deep rather than ironic. The odd thing is that, the longer one knows him, and the more time one spends with him, the more apparent it becomes that he is one more Tannen’s boy from Brooklyn. On his desk is a photograph of the adolescent Blaine collecting an award at Tannen’s summer camp, as nerdy and needy as every other boy of the tribe.
“My real work began when I was walking down the street, just practicing a one-handed shuffle, and all the guys in this garage I was walking by went Ohhhh!” Blaine says_._ “Ohhhh!—just for a shuffle! I started realizing that what I love to do is bring magic for one second—and that one second is enough. My endurance pieces are all about taking away the ego, putting yourself in a position so intense that the ordinary ‘I’ doesn’t exist anymore. You’re surviving the way a baby does—or it’s like just before an accident, when you see everything, the seats and the road, and the dashboard and your life, in slow motion. That heightened sense of awareness, the blinding flash of being shocked out of your logical mind—that’s magic for me.”
For Jamy Ian Swiss, as for Penn & Teller, the future lies in magic being remade in the light of the real but still in the shadow of the past, losing the false front while revering the traditional techniques. For David Blaine, it lies in an increasing encroachment into the real, so that magic will become indistinguishable from performance art, at the high end, and reality television, at the low. The choice, in a sense, is between the real work and the real thing.
I have seen Blaine and Swiss together just once. It was in October, before the annual auction of magic posters and paraphernalia at Swann Galleries, on East Twenty-fifth Street, an important occasion in the magic subculture. Swiss was once quoted as saying that Blaine’s best tricks could have been purchased for thirty dollars at a Times Square magic shop, a quote that was taken slightly out of context, and that had a gentler intention than it seems. Now, with the tough critic’s optimistic belief that it was all part of the game, Swiss went up to Blaine and congratulated him. Then Swiss mentioned a young student of his who had been hanging around with Blaine as well.
“I’m trying to get him to see some of the—some of the deeper psychological things, not just tricks,” Blaine said, in his Brando mumble.
“I don’t think I’m showing him tricks,” Swiss said.
“Not tricks, man. I mean—you know, techniques. Showing him something deeper than techniques.”
“I’m not showing him tricks,” Swiss repeated, quietly.
Blaine changed the subject.
Swiss went back to his seat, with his head down, his jaw set. I could see him struggling with the times—with the anger of feeling a protégé being fought over but also with the sense, which every writer knows, of helplessness in the face of the new thing, of suddenly knowing what the real fringe is like, and how it feels when you get there. We are all magicians now. The same feeling that novelists had when first confronted with movies is shared by closeup card magicians confronting television endurance artists—the feeling that something big and vital is passing from the world, and yet that to defend it is to be immediately classified as retrograde.
I saw, too, that David Blaine is absolutely sincere in his belief that the way forward for a young magician lies not in mastering the tricks but in mastering the mind of the modern age, with its relentless appetite for speed and for the sensational-dressed-as-the-real. And I thought I sensed in Swiss the urge to say what all of us would like to say—that traditions are not just encumbrances, that a novel is not news, that an essay is a different thing from an Internet rant, that techniques are the probity and ethic of magic, the real work. The crafts that we have mastered are, in part, the tricks that we have learned, and though we know how much knowledge the tricks enfold, still, tricks is what they are. I felt for Jamy, and for us, and for the boy caught between.
The hands stop moving as the plane lands, and the boy and the magician leave. The aces twist one turn and the boy returns to his father for the car ride home. He clutches his Las Vegas souvenir. The magicians have the boys for a moment, between their escape from their fathers and their pursuit of girls. After that, they become sexual, outwardly so, and learn that women (or other men) cannot be impressed by tricks of any kind: if they are watching at all, they are as interested as they are ever going to be, and tricks are of no help. You cannot woo anyone with magic; the magic that you have consciously mastered is the least interesting magic you have.
Yet, for the time being, what the magicians teach the boys is that some knowledge cannot be communicated; it is yours and can only be shown, and the range of things that fathers don’t know is larger than what they do. The most the father can hope to become is a stooge, a willing assistant, and a spectator with a bit of corruption. The boy has secret knowledge, which he will keep, even after life arrives and magic stops. Teach me a trick, the father says to the son, and the boy, his hands working his cards, on his way, says, “I can’t teach you a trick, Dad. I’ll show you an effect.” And then he does, doing passes, like his teacher, all the way home. The card always comes back to the top of the deck, and, the better it is done, the harder it is to see that anything has happened at all. ♦