The Place of Mystery

Most magicians, from seasoned (even famous) professionals to enthusiastic aficionados, share a single experience in common (though it takes many forms). Something once hit us. It might have been seeing a performance, reading a book, wondering at an illustration, standing spellbound for the first time in a magic shop, or learning a trick off of a cereal box—but it hit us:

The Romance of magic.

For me (and I do not think that I am alone) I was struck by what might be called the atmospheric-ornamental aspects of magic. Very early, I personally was drawn to magic’s strange blending of Victorian orientalism: Gold fringe, red velvet, carved wood, polished antiquity, and alluring objet d’arte set within a low-lighted room of heavy curtains and faded sophistication with just a hint of dust and an old-haunted-house vibe; picturing that, I fairly tingle with euphoric delight.

When I think of magic—my magic, any magic—this is where I go. Magic for me is a place. This place. I see it most clearly in my mind’s eye and feel it at my very core. I suppose I’ve collected together the images of it from many childhood experiences—a curious table from here, a bizarre ornament from there, a parlour room from the charming bed and breakfast I have once visited and mostly forgotten—and these I have crowded together into an impossibly tiny universe of one room inhabited only by me and . . . a feeling . . . the feeling of magic: comforting, secure, panoptic, gorgeous, antiquated-yet-dynamic, and mysterious. 

It might fairly be called my version of the Platonic Ideal of magic. It is where I want to take my audiences. Impossible, I know—or at least nearly so, for every so often it peeps into this world, and I recognize it. Moments in Disney’s Haunted Mansion simulate it, a winding New England road that I once drove in an autumnal dusk led there, a trunk that I opened in an Alnwick attic enfolded it.

But how does one bottle romance? Is it possible to transfer a feeling to the stage and share it out to a group like a fairground peddler passing out free samples of enchantment?

Ah! There is the rub! For who knows what dreams may come?

In a recent workshop, a magician asked me, if I could, what one trick would I perform that has never been done. It isn’t a question that I could answer off the top of my head (for who imagines on command, after all, a thing that has never been?) But here is a very tentative reply:

I would perform a full evening of my best, most appreciated effects, and finish by lifting the entire audience only a few inches off the ground on a pillow-soft mist, delicately scented, whereupon I would waft them out with the sweet-water taste of slumber in their mouths, their minds cleared of all concern, to return to homes made joyous in the brightness of their newfound vision.

I know. I get it. Woo-woo stuff. Sure. Roll your eyes. Laugh. Fair enough.

But what I mean is that, in performing, I would instill in my audience—somehow—that extraordinary, revitalizing atmospheric-ornamentalism with which the vision of magic enlivens me.

That’s the secret about mystery, though, isn’t it? It can only be experienced but not explained. Your first crush. That first kiss. The odd thrill you may get from the smell of fresh coffee, the sight of a locomotive, Christmas lights, the school football game, the sound of forest rain. Break any one of those down, and it is ‘just a thing’—perhaps even ‘just your thing’ that nobody else seems to share—but for you it has another reality, a deeper sense of importance, significance, meaning.

It is very much like trying to describe a wonderful dream that you’ve had. The moment it leaves your lips, even you can tell it is silly or, worse, mundane. Yet, while you were tucked up, warm and comfortably sleeping, that dream was an experience that filled you with delight. Even now, recalling it to yourself, you still feel the pleasure of it. Words, however, utterly fail the feeling.

Every magician worth the name, every genuine mystery entertainer, is a type of Don Quixote, clearly seeing a vision of that better world, that fantasy-cum-reality, and reaching for it with arms too short.

So, in my own professional scrabbling towards this goal—not perfection, no, but rather the enchantment of which I speak—I craft and devise, invent and build, memorize and practice in an attempt to express the gossamer outlines of my world to an audience that I can only hope is willing to take a step across the threshold.

And there are times. Yes, there are times when everything seems to fall into place. The audience is in the proper frame of mind. I am really on and performing well. And then, oh, then, we take a special trip indeed.

So, you see, magic isn’t buying a trick. It isn’t perfecting a move. It isn’t performing the effect. It isn’t even the standing ovation at the end of a hard-won performance. It is, quite simply, a place. When we reach it…that is magic.