The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
My New Year’s resolution was to learn close-up card magic. Now, here we are at least a month past the point when most people let their good intentions fall by the wayside, and I can cut to the aces or find your Gemini twins in a deck of shuffled cards. I can make your iPhone’s Siri function “roll dice” until the card you picked at random finds its way back into your hand.
I can even make a stack of (fake) baby bunnies materialize in your hand.
Let it not be said that I faltered . . . but a tiny part of me kind of wishes I had.
I knew it just two weeks into my wonderful class at the gorgeous Chicago Magic Lounge, which is decked out in giant posters of magic legends like Harry Houdini, Harry Kellar, Howard Thurston and Carter the Great.
My classmates and I were gathered around a bar for a preparatory demonstration of close-up coin, handkerchief and small-object magic (this is where the bunnies came in). As the instructor blew our minds not one foot from our faces, breaths were held, jaws dropped, grown men gasped audibly.
And then we filed into the small theater where class was held, and the teacher unveiled the tragically simple secrets of the tricks we’d witnessed. Then came the deconstruction and practice with our clumsy, graceless hands.
I cannot overstate the beauty of the moment in which you are presented with an alternative version of reality being played out right before your eyes, the feeling of knowing what is in your very own hand and then opening it to find something you couldn’t have even anticipated.
Similarly, the disappointment in learning that the magic was merely … well, I can’t tell, because I signed a magician’s oath to never reveal the secret of any illusion to nonmagicians. But suffice it to say that I died a little inside when I found out how all those little bunnies appeared.
This is not to say that I didn’t love the experience — it absolutely enriched my life in ways I probably can’t begin to quantify. Wonder is underrated in our day-to-day existence.
If we’re lucky, we can gaze upon a stunning sunset, inspect a big, swollen super moon, or watch a video of a deaf baby hearing her mother’s voice for the first time in awe.
But wonder?
With YouTube always at the ready to explain everything under the sun and beyond, and the actual rate of technological innovation making even the most fantastical science-fiction schemes come to life (bilateral hand transplants, anyone?), it’s not often we are happily amazed and left to marvel, “How did they do that?”
Legendary card man Al Leech — who was a journalist for Newsweek in addition to an accomplished magician whose wife, Esther, served as his lovely assistant — noted this phenomenon in 1949 in his book “For Card Men Only”: “Jay Marshall was watching a magic act on television once when he was struck with the thought that nothing the performer could do could match the miracle of TV itself. For that matter, you can throw in your self-cleaning oven, the refrigerator, air conditioner, automatic can opener, plus a basement full of laundry and other machinery.”
I beg to differ.
Go onto YouTube and look for a card trick called “The Chicago Opener,” and you can get a small taste of what it must be like to sit so close you could touch the card handler and not detect any sleight-of-hand.
It’s, well … magical. And that carries its own rewards.
In his new book “Mainspring: How to Handle Playing Cards,” card expert Alex Hansford writes, “There is a beautiful dichotomy at work here; the audience believes something has happened, when in fact it hasn’t. They believe it so strongly that they question their beliefs in other avenues of the world … and (it) makes people question a totally ingrained and vital belief that they’ve had for as long as they can remember.”
I don’t know about you, but it seems like anything that could have the power to make us soften, get curious and reconsider our viewpoints is powerful — and vitally important — magic. Go find some.
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