THE SPECIOUS MOMENT OF MAGIC

In every magic trick there is an illogical moment: Why did you bring sponge balls to my table? You’re tearing up paper just so you can put it back together again? Let me get this straight, you can turn one-pound notes into fifty-pound notes and you’re working here? That may be one reason card tricks are so popular. People own cards, carry cards, shuffle them, look at them; the logic is generally good with a card trick—you take one; I’ll tell you what it is. The illogic comes in the sometimes-elaborate handling that occurs before the ‘big moment’: that I’ll-just-put-these-behind-my-back-for-a-second thing that (in one way or another) occurs in even the more logical set-ups.

One of the primary goals of the ‘bizarrist’ mystery entertainer is to avoid the illogic of magic ‘tricks’ and create an internal reality in the atmosphere surrounding the performance of an effect.

Our craft should be focused upon dragging our spectators into that ‘short story moment’:

He sat alone in the darkened room, a small object sitting on the table before him. ‘It is my purpose,’ he said, ‘my burden, rather, to tell this story. I have carried this thing with me now for a dozen years and, when I die, it will become someone else’s burden because its story must be told. It must never be allowed to be forgotten. I have watched you, does that make you uncomfortable? I have watched you all evening, and you are the one that must hear my story tonight.’ He slid the object across the table towards me using only two fingers. The look in his eyes was a mixture of resignation and bewilderment, he hated this thing and yet was obviously mesmerized by its power, and I had no choice but to listen . . .

We have all read this set up in one work of dark fiction after another: the beguiled stranger and beleaguered storyteller is at least as old as Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It represents the instant conflict between unwilling speaker, his hypnotized listener, and the unwanted-yet-spellbinding thing.

Now, suddenly that fictional moment rouses to life in the real world, and your spec is cast as the central character: Tonight you will bear witness to my extraordinary tale.

Suddenly, we have entered the world of pure chance—where fate has pointed to one person, a human being that will be forever changed in a brief encounter with an item so very unusual and yet . . . yet . . . so possible.

The unusual object is suddenly the point of the evening, the reason for the performer’s existence. No more ‘I just happened to leave the house this morning with a long rope, a short rope, and . . .’

Who now can say where the logic ends and fantasy begins?

This must be played well, in earnest. Eye contact is important, gravity in your pronouncements. The story must ring true, with the sound of the likely and the believable. It does not matter where or how we acquired this object so much as the fact that we have acquired it.

And this story must unfold.