by Derren Brown
* Ordering from Amazon, which I do several times a week, brings with it several instances of enjoyment that far outweigh the supposedly delightful but in actuality rather crowded, noisy and disappointing experience of browsing through real objects on real shelves in real shops. These three moments are:
Finding the item immediately
Much as the successful online retail revolution is supposed to have us rueing the declining practice of browsing through bookshops for desired titles, there is a deep joy in entering the name of an obscure book into a rectangular box on the screen, at an equally obscure hour of the night, and near-instantaneously being faced with a long list showing every edition available from anywhere in the world. In a second, my computer has connected with the records of bookshops all over the globe, as well as the gargantuan storage units of Amazon itself that are sometimes passed in the car, yielding extraordinary glimpses of minute, innumerable DVDs and books on endless shelves through their tall windows – an image reminiscent of the final scene of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. It has found the records, searched through them to see who has the title I’m after, and then has presented them to me along with dinky images of their covers and an option to flick through a few pages. And it will do this whenever I want it to, apart from when my internet is down. Life is astonishing.
Ordering the item
Unlike in a bookshop, online ordering allows us to enjoy the purchasing of a desired book, DVD or gadget as a quite separate joy-moment from when we first grasped it in our hands. We can experience the delight in securing the item as our own, and then, a day or two later, when it has slipped from our mind, the even greater glee of opening the package and finally handling it. Two joys for the price of one. As if this were not wonderful enough, there is also the extraordinarily appealing ‘one-click’ method of buying, which still makes me slightly giddy with delight each time I use it. Minor celebrity may bring with it an ever-present flurry of talented individuals devoted to keeping one happy, well groomed and topped up with coffee and sushi, but I don’t think anything makes me feel quite as pampered as causing a book to be selected from a shelf, wrapped up and posted to me with a single mouse-click. I barely even have to press a button: my finger is already on the mouse.
Receiving the item
DVD covers can now be read, and books can be smelt, before being put on the shelf and forgotten about entirely. On occasion I have known cellophane wraps, never removed, to entirely biodegrade on my shelf before the DVD inside has been watched.
Pick a card.
Joel, Benedict and Charlotte reached forward, while I faced away to my right.
‘Should we take them right out?’ Joel asked, and, thankfully, the more common pronunciation of ‘out’ answered the tricky Canadian question – here in the negative. Definitely American.
‘Please do,’ I answered, and noticed in my peripheral vision that he waited for Benedict and Charlotte to withdraw their own cards first. Benedict let out an involuntary sigh as he pulled himself forward. I noticed that he again looked for the gaze of the other two as he reached across. He was fiddling, I could tell, with a few cards before pulling one out. His girlfriend would have had the more uncomfortable reach down the length of the table. I could also check, from this angle, that none of them touched the Queen of Hearts on the far right, nearest Joel.
‘What part of the States are you from?’ I posed as I turned back round to face them.
‘Upstate New York originally, but I live in California.’
‘Where upstate? Near Rochester? Please, do look at your cards.’
Each looked at his or her card. Joel, as I was facing him, was most guarded, covering the back of his card like a gambler. Benedict checked his by lifting the index corner from the table with his fat thumb and middle finger, betraying again in that action a familiarity with cards: most likely he was a poker player.
‘Kinda. I have friends in Rochester though.’
An image flashed through my mind of my week in Rochester, an unremarkable city in my memory but for Park Avenue Books and Espresso, where I had spent every afternoon while my host friend was studying, and where I had enjoyed the noble pairing of the modest institution’s twin offerings in one of four or five comfy armchairs, listening to the jazz records played by the owner, whom I can still faintly picture as a smiley, jumpered blur, maybe called Bob. There was an old pony-tailed artist who looked like a country and western singer – I believe he was a photographer – who came in most days with his dog, with whom he travelled everywhere in a pick-up truck. I would have been a precocious twenty-one-year-old, and I’m not sure what we would have spoken about, but I remember now him saying I should visit his studio, and in the same breath, portentously, that he didn’t worry about the ‘whole man or woman thing’ when it came to sex. I remember hoping he drew a line before involving his dog. I didn’t, thankfully, visit his studio. Instead I listened to jazz I didn’t know and read and drank unusually good coffee for an American outlet. Those were the days before the Starbucks revolution here in the UK, and I came home missing the casual, intelligent mingling of laptops, literature and lattes; of hanging out and browsing shelves and no one being concerned you were going to stay too long or get coffee on the books.
The back of Joel’s card was still concealed by his cupped hand, a little like how a schoolboy hides his work from a neighbour he suspects might cheat. I used to cheat something rotten in exams. I would steal paper from one exam, take it home and write on it notes for a second, then arrive with the illegitimately annotated sheet flat against my stomach inside a zip-up cardigan. A little while into the exam I would unfasten, take a few papers from the table and lift them flat against myself as I pretended to be looking at something on a sheet underneath, and then, as I placed them back down again, I would bring with them the extra sheet from its hiding place. The notes were scribbled to look like I had made them openly during the exam, and the ploy was convincing.
For a while I studied Law in Germany, which was, as might be imagined from the combination, a densely turgid time. I was required at one point to attend an examination in the form of a spoken test in a lecturer’s office and cheated by having the textbook open on my lap as I sat opposite him at his desk. Moreover, there were two other foreign students accompanying me in the assessment, Chloe and Giuseppe,* who were reading from the same book, though it was my task to try to turn the pages unnoticed and signal the answers from beneath the edge of the desk. At one point the examiner asked if any of us had the textbook to hand him, in order for him to check some aspect of what we had been required to learn. I like to think, on reflection, that he had sensed our ploy and some innate Teutonic Schadenfreude encouraged him to toy with us by asking for the very book he knew resided illegally on my lap. If this was the case, he also displayed a kindness in not reporting us or even mentioning it. In fact, if I remember, he gave each of us a good mark. I grabbed the book in one hand and my satchel-bag in the other, held the book behind the bag and brought them both up with the bag in view of our assessor, and in pretending to reach into the bag to remove the book I actually pulled up the latter from behind, with what may have been an unnecessary magical flourish. Giuseppe, to my right, started giggling and couldn’t stop for some time. I seem to recall he had to stifle himself, in Italian fashion, with a handkerchief.*
I reassembled the deck with a sweep from right to left, and snapped it into a fan. Reaching for Benedict’s card, on my far left, I caused him to retract his hand a little, seemingly not wanting me to take the card. I hesitated and looked at him. He laughed a snort through his nose, and then almost tossed it at me, looking away to share his lingering smile with his girlfriend and Joel.
I took his card and placed it into the fan, near the bottom of the deck, with half of the card still extended. I repeated these actions with the others, inserting each one partway into the fan. I tilted the fan to show the faces of the cards, then brought it flat again, closing it with the three cards still
protruding from the front of the deck. Then, in a well-oiled move, I appeared to push the cards flush into the deck, lose them in the process, and then cut the deck on to the table. This sleight was invented by one Dai Vernon, a Canadian magician known and revered in magic circles as The Professor; an extraordinary magician, sleight-of-hand artist and thinker. This efficient and elegant move resulted in all three cards being stripped from the deck and then brought to the top in the action of the cut.*
As it is impossible to spot the deceit when it is carried out with fluidity, the satisfying conclusion was reached whereby the cards were presumed by the trio to be lost, but in fact were right under their noses. This was my participants’ first major false presumption. And an interesting one at that: clearly a second’s thought would suggest that I would not really lose track of those cards and make things so difficult for myself. But an action had taken place that perfectly resembled losing them, and the casual nature in which it had been carried out made it seem even more guiltless. This is, perhaps, where the suspension of disbelief starts; an interior monologue begins, and the spectator’s guard is first nudged awake. The cards are lost in the deck. Are they, though? He must somehow know where they are. But OK . . . let’s work on the presumption that they’re lost and see where that takes us. After all, I didn’t let them shuffle the cards themselves. Why not? If I really wanted them lost, it would have made sense to have them do it. Maybe the neatness of the move provided a reason for why I took it upon myself. If we had shuffled them into the deck ourselves, we’d have made a mess. He can do it better than we can, that’s why he did it. This guard is now alert, and it is the magician’s task to keep him occupied with menial tasks while the thieves slip by unnoticed.
With the placing of the deck upon the table before them, seemingly containing their three chosen cards at random locations, their attention was hopefully secured. I would only lose those cards in the deck if I were going to find, produce or identify them. The game we were now playing rested upon the hope that the seeming unlikelihood of being able to fulfil this unspoken promise would amplify their sense of curiosity as to how this might be nonetheless achieved.
Three cards: each brought secretly to the top of the deck. Most simple card tricks involve either this sort of control of a card to a particular position, or alternatively may rely on the force of a particular card, which once imposed upon the unwitting spectator might then be safely lost. In more complex diversions, the combination of force and control may achieve the desired aim.
A card can be forced to match a hidden duplicate or a prediction; much of the efficacy of such a trick depends upon how subtly and deftly the coercion takes place. The novice magician asks you to call ‘stop’ as he riffles awkwardly through a too-tightly-gripped deck: even if you do not spot the precise subterfuge, you can sniff the unmistakable odour of unnaturalness and deception. The experienced performer develops delicately invisible ways of having you arrive at a predetermined card, through a combination of psychological and physical means. You are asked to choose one of a small handful of seemingly random cards face-up in a line on the table. Eager not to pick anything too obvious, you avoid the cards at the end; the card right in the middle; the Ace; the only picture card; the only black card; the only card slightly misaligned; the only card mentioned by the magician as he laid them out; and you are left with only one card, which you happily choose, confident that you have picked the only card that is unpredictable. Which of course you were supposed to do. Or a deck is spread for selection, and you reach forward to take one, unaware that the spreading (and therefore the position of the force card) is being timed perfectly with your approaching fingertips: in effect you are bringing the inevitable pasteboard into an irresistible position through the naturalness of your own innocent movements. The finest forces are things of real beauty.
They are beautiful because they deftly play with aspects of our psychology with which we are not consciously familiar; because they use invisible skill and suggestion, and take place in a no-man’s land between free will and automation where the hypnotist carries out his work; because they speak of us as human beings, fallible and surprising. The force may be more beautiful than the trick that follows, which is likely to be showy and flawed in comparison. A card is beautifully, perfectly forced and shuffled back into the deck; then, after suitable gestures, the magician reveals a duplicate of the forced card, which resides far from the deck, across the room, in the pages of a book. An impossible flight of a chosen card, and the magician has done his job. The fairy-flight of an Ace to an unfeasible destination may intrigue the spectator for some moments, but the unavoidable triviality of the event means it will soon be dismissed with a laugh, or a request to ‘do another one’. The way in which the card was forced, never discussed, was of far more interest than the reason why it was forced.
Card Force
In a similar way, the appeal of a psychic’s reading, which holds our attention by playing on our self-interest, and which promises magic and impossible realms, is of far less value than the curious psychological forces and controls that are being used, knowingly or otherwise, during that reading to convince us. There is a cheat, like a card force, behind it, and magic methods may seem disappointingly prosaic alternatives to the supernatural, but a closer look reveals that the explanation of the psychic can be genuinely more fascinating than the effect. This is surely because it holds the ordinary and human up to the light and finds something extraordinary inside, rather than dealing in empty, misleading promises of other worlds.
Take the following exchange, a simple bit of standard stage cold-reading:
STAGE MEDIUM: I’m getting the name Jean, very clearly.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That’s me.
MEDIUM: And this was someone connected with your mother’s side that passed.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, my aunt.
MEDIUM: That’s right, she’s saying, ‘Hello there, luv.’ She’s quite a wild one, had a side that was very bubbly, but she had a lovely heart, didn’t she?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes.
MEDIUM: She’s showing me the hospital . . . something about a hospital.
AUDIENCE MEMBER [THINKS]: My husband is in hospital.
MEDIUM: That’s right, she’s saying it’s nothing too serious, you shouldn’t be worried. You’ve been concerned, haven’t you? Who is Paul?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: A friend of my husband.
MEDIUM: Yes, she’s showing me Paul, his friend, as proof for you that it’s her that’s coming through. She’s saying, ‘The house will get sold’ – what’s that about?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Don’t know . . . [thinks hard]
MEDIUM: Well, give it some thought, because she’s telling me it’s a house being sold, quite clearly, and she’s showing me a green or a blue door.
I have sat and watched mediums give this sort of information to people desperate to hear it, and been shocked by how well it tends to be received. The medium follows a pattern of throwing something out, letting the bereaved find a connection, then feeding it back as his own success. He can sound very specific in his declarations, for if the poor soul in the audience cannot find a link, she is blamed for not trying hard enough, left to work it out for herself, and then soon forgotten about. The pressure on the audience member to make the statements fit, in order not to have her connection with a loved one curtailed, is enormous. But most extraordinary to me is that there is nothing in what the medium is saying that is remotely extraordinary or even hard to explain, yet it will serve as proof for many of an afterlife, of psychic ability, and of the validity of such highly suspect performances. Of course this is due in the main to the eagerness of the bereaved to hear what they want to, and sometimes a show can be made more convincing by the medium ensuring that he already knows information about some audience members (‘hot’ rather than ‘cold’ reading), but for the most part people are ready to believe without asking for unbiased evidence.
Issues about the morality of mediumship aside,
it is quite fascinating that a conversation such as the above, transparent when read through a couple of times at most, can convince a mature and educated person that the dead are able to communicate with us from beyond the grave. The work we must put into our side of that dialogue to make the medium’s words appear convincing; the ease with which we can trick ourselves into finding substance in thin air – such things are far more fascinating and important in their beautiful, undeniable humanness than vapid non-sequiturs from the Happy Summerland. ‘Human’ is somehow always more interesting than ‘super-human’.
There is a common response from people when they hear that in the absence of evidence to convince me otherwise I don’t have any particular belief in ghosts, psychic powers or an afterlife. It normally runs something along the lines of ‘So you think we just live, die and that’s it? Come on . . .’There’s a clear implication there that this earthly life – the wonder of being human – is somehow worthless. That it’s cheap and disappointing enough to warrant that ‘just’ and the accompanying incredulous tone, which are usually reserved for sentences like ‘After all that it was just a little spider? Come on . . .’ I live, I am sure, in a fairly narrow band of life, and make an embarrassingly pitiful attempt to explore the world I find myself upon. I ache with guilt and conflict when I hear of people living as adventurers, abandoning mainstream lives and living each day with abandon. But I really hope I have a brighter vision for this life and a greater curiosity for its richness than one who can say, and mean, ‘You think we just live, die and that’s it?’
