Confessions of a Conjuror

by Derren Brown

  My three-card trick, performed with some diners in a restaurant, was not a realistic vehicle for this kind of involvement. Finding cards in pockets did not easily engender other-worldly wonder. It did not fit my ideal for magic. Yet it allowed for unthreatening fun, and the impression of skill and professionalism, which, if my little groups found themselves engaged, might serve as the start of a journey towards greater depths as I continued my performance. Mistaking mere solemnity for seriousness is an equally disastrous error commonly made by those who search for meaning in magic.

  Magic means nothing. It has the potential to connect us to something wonderful, as does any performance, but it is not wonderful in itself, for it is inseparable from the particular performance in which it is experienced. A magician who is too fast, too slow, mumbles, shouts, smells, is unlikeable or incomprehensible will unavoidably taint his magic with his personal failings.

  As a conjuror of tricks and a reader of minds, I have sometimes found people quite moved by a performance I have given. Some have told me that they have taken real value from it. These are good moments, for my worries about the childishness of it all are momentarily alleviated. But I do not fool myself that meaningfulness is intrinsic to what I do. I would love it to be, but I imagine that the necessary fraud gets in the way of its integrity. Many within magic talk of it as an art, but do not really understand the differences between good and bad art, or art and craft. Art is a narrative that turns and twists through history, and means different things at each new divergence. A pretty and accomplished oil painting of a country scene may be beautiful, and may indeed be art, but it is no longer likely to be good art if painted today, for it does not fit on to the end of that ever-changing narrative that once valued lifelike representation of nature, but now scoffs at such bland aims. Art now makes us see the world differently, it slaps us and challenges us, and to produce good art that is relevant today we have to consider such factors. I imagine that a true artist using magic would be quite a different animal from a magician trying to perform ‘artistically’.

  Magic can, when performed well, be theatre, and rise above its usual confines of the ‘speciality act’. This is easier to aim for, and undoubtedly a more honest and useful aim than trying to force something into being art, purely for the sake of the label. To work as a piece of theatre, the magician needs to see beyond the reaction of ‘Wow!’ that magic aims to provoke and look at a more varied, richer experience for the audience as well as an overall arc or narrative for the show. He is also well advised to look at his own role in the proceedings, for most magicians are not human characters we can warm to, or empathise with in their efforts. The great magician and magical thinker Teller – the silent half of the Penn & Teller duo – has highlighted the need for drama in magic, and for drama to exist, we must understand the struggle of a hero. Magicians often substitute showmanship or self-inflicted jeopardy for drama, but the spectacle of a restrained Las Vegas performer hanging over flames, trying to make his escape, is quite empty unless we feel for him. Even done well, this sort of stunt tends to be a very thin and bawdy slice of what real drama might mean.

  Charlotte and Joel’s level of involvement in the performance had just altered a little. Charlotte was clearly a little embarrassed by Benedict’s sudden departure, as well as being pleased that he was out of the way. Joel was keeping quiet and revealing little. It was now up to me as to whether they would remain distracted by Benedict’s moody exit, or whether I could utilise it to draw them in further. So I leant forward and spoke a little softer, adopting a conspiratorial ‘We’re better off without him’ tone.

  I picked up the deck. Following the apparently random cutting procedure, I knew the first card I needed had arrived eighth from the top. ‘Watch,’ I said to Charlotte, and started to count slowly from the top into a face-down pile. At the fifth card, I said, with just a practised hint of irritation in my voice, ‘Just stop me wherever you like.’ I was counting on her thinking she may have missed an instruction, distracted as she had been by the exit of her boyfriend, and sure enough, she let me deal a couple more down before calling ‘Stop’, right on her chosen card. She had shaken herself of the distraction caused by Benedict and was engaging herself entirely once again.

  I turned the Two of Hearts over to show her.

  ‘Omigod!’ she squealed, laughing, and I noticed that Joel’s eyes quickly left the card and lingered on her face.

  Riding the reaction, I continued, ‘Joel, I’ll spell to your card.’ Dealing a card for each letter, I spelt ‘Jack of Hearts’ out loud, turning over the final card to reveal his choice.

  They both giggled with surprise, though I did not allow them to react for more than a second.

  ‘Give me a number between one and twenty for Benedict’s card,’ I requested, looking at both of them in turn.

  Joel looked across at Charlotte for an answer.

  ‘Oh, er – twelve,’ she said.

  They leant forward together as I commenced counting. I produced the Ten of Diamonds by a ruse on the count of the twelfth card, and flung it face-up on the table.

  Now I wanted them to react. Joel did so well: his feline face lit up and he laughed loudly, this muscular contraction propelling the upper half of his body into the back of the sofa. I noticed that Charlotte shot back as well, in easy rapport with him, her eyes darting between the upturned cards and the rest of the deck.

  ‘How do you do that?’ she asked, not really wanting to know.

  Whenever I am asked this question, I imagine trotting out a detailed answer, explaining every piece of duplicity and undoing every meticulously created presumption. The disappointment of having the bubble of mystery burst! This is largely why people do not like to believe that paranormal phenomena have everyday explanations, and why a playwright friend found himself in tears after walking in on Whoopi Goldberg taking a shower at the opening night of his first successful play on Broadway: if we are unprepared, the bubble (of the mysterious unknown/of the world of celebrity) can burst so cruelly.

  I laughed, swept up the three cards into my right hand and picked up the deck in my left. With my left little finger, I secretly pulled down on the corner of the deck and let three cards spring up, naturally holding a break beneath them. I had purposefully withheld Joel and Charlotte’s reaction until this moment, as I wanted them now to relax as much as was feasible to cover a series of sleights.

  Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This basis for classical mechanics has its use within conjuring. In order to create a window for a piece of sleight-of-hand, it is common first to encourage the participant to concentrate as much as possible on the trick. Then, when a magical event has happened (the card has been produced or the coin vanished), the once-attentive witness will relax his concentration for a few moments, his mind distracted with amazement or searching for explanations. He can only hold intense concentration for so long; eventually he must let up, and a magical climax is a cue for him to do so, as well as an ideal opportunity for some piece of legerdemain to occur, which will for the reason of its timing most likely be missed. Hence, the magician creates ‘off-beats’ in a magic trick, cleverly designed moments when the participant will release his attention, loosening the valve for a few seconds, and the principle is illustrated that the more a person is paying attention to a trick, the more he will need to relax in those instances, and the more likely he is to be fooled.

  I am reminded of the Newtonian Law every time a new Prime Minister is elected in my country. After vague memories of a bumbling, rural Callaghan, the first Prime Minister I remember clearly is Thatcher: a strong, domineering character. If she became too much so, then the safer, more lacklustre character of Major followed her. After a while, the bespectacled, leporine leader was replaced by another with a high level of charisma: Blair. At last, he seemed a relief from Major’s greyness. And after Blair we reverted to a blander figure with the premiership of Brown – another compar
atively unprepossessing character. Brown was heavily criticised, perhaps unfairly, for being boring; then, lit by the golden glow of Barack Obama, we looked again for a shiny-faced leader from among the paltry bunch on offer in the next round. And got two. And so on we will most likely continue, undulating between a desire for dominance and blandness in our leaders, criticising both for being what we sought once the desired effect of personality wears off.

  This back-and-forth preference for weak or strong personalities as leaders is quite different from the way we choose romantic partners, though we might wish the political context could be similar; sadly, the limited choice of political candidates means we can rarely choose those to lead us with a personality ‘type’ in mind, honed from previous mistakes. To swing back and forth between strong and weak partners in life would be a very confusing way to go about such things. Where we may try to refine what we’re looking for in life, learning lessons from previous relationships gone awry, we are in politics simply offered ‘same or different’, and thus we remain dissatisfied, constantly choosing ‘different’, bothered that they are largely the same, swinging to and fro without eventually coming to rest or gaining wisdom. Doubtless this artificiality is in great part due to the fact that each side in politics is required to accept the ludicrous notion that there is only one worthy viewpoint to an argument. If anything stops me from ever entering politics, it is my total inability to have such faith in my opinions.

  Attendant to my unsuitability for Westminster cowers another listless failing caused by an indecisive nature: the inability to order food from a menu without confusion, time-wasting and distress. As a child I was an immensely fussy eater: I would touch very few vegetables, and many foods made me squeamish. I retain a lingering distrust of runner beans, parsnips and a few others, and experience a strong repulsion in the face of mushrooms that seems to madden most of my friends who insist that the repugnant fungus is the most versatile of nature’s blossoms, and that to eat one covered in breadcrumbs or sautéed with garlic is to taste the substance of Heaven itself. To me they’re just slugs, and at best should be salted and left to die.

  As a schoolboy, I dreaded being cooked for by the parents of classmates when visiting their homes. As well as those foodstuffs already mentioned I did not like fish, beans, cabbage, peas, carrots, tomatoes, nuts, cream, coconut, salami, new potatoes, blue cheese, eggs or coffee. These are but examples which spring unbidden to mind – I’m sure there were many more.

  It took an accident as a university student to bring me out of the paralysing mental block that constitutes fussy-eating. I was in a friend’s car returning to halls at the end of a long evening and was hungry. We stopped at a take-away pizza place and one of my fellow passengers went in to order. Being so fussy, I was not prepared to let them choose a group pizza to share without my sanction, as mushrooms have a habit of creeping unannounced on to the base and hiding beneath the cheese. I insisted on having my own one. One pizza on the menu promised ‘sausage’ and, expecting pieces of British Pork Sausage, I asked for that, already embarrassed at my handicap and how it separated me from the simple bohemian pleasure of a shared late-night undergraduate take-away. The meal arrived, however, bearing Italian sausage: thin slices of the kind of spiced salami I had never been able to consume. They, like the unexpected mushrooms that make the mycophobes among us shudder and start, had insinuated themselves between strata of cheap melted mozzarella/cheddar mix and were impossible to disconnect from the filling without ruining the whole thing. So instead I played a trick on myself, which was to lead to a hugely rewarding process of reacquainting myself with erstwhile rejected foods, and to the discovery of many new favourites from their ranks.

  I decided that much of fussy-eating was a result of expecting not to like something, and presuming that certain tastes were going to be unpleasant. Thus, a process of anticipating the disliked taste, as if awaiting confirmation that the food cannot be enjoyed, maintains the childish, finicky response to food. It is rather like deciding one does not like a particular musical instrument and training one’s ears to pick it up during a symphony; then, the moment it is faintly detected, announcing that the piece is unlistenable. I knew I had to block that process, and that the most effective way to do such a thing would be to fill my mind with the pleasurable noises I might make when eating something I was really enjoying. So, rather than search for the salami taste I knew I did not (historically at least) like, I took a bite and made enthusiastic ‘Mmmm, that is gorgeous’ sounds both out loud and to myself. It worked very well. I actually found myself enjoying the slice of pizza, and with each new slice it took less effort to block my practised reinforcing response of old, so that by the time the pizza was consumed, my loathing of the peppered sausage had passed entirely.

  Shocked by how easily I had undone years of loudly professed hatred, I began a personal project of undoing all my dislikes, one by one. Coffee came next, for I had always enjoyed the idea of coffee-drinking and related paraphernalia quite disproportionately to my uneasy tolerance of the drink itself. I drank espresso and filter variants, playing the ‘Mmmm!’ trick for the first cup or two until I found I was genuinely enjoying the taste. By playing this game with every food I had loathed, I was able to distinguish between foods I genuinely could not eat and those towards which I had unnecessarily built up a negative response. Today, I still gag at Gorgonzola and fetch up at all things fungal, but a more enthusiastic and eager dinner guest you could not find.

  When scrutinising a menu, a lingering aversion towards a few offered items does sometimes limit my choices a little, but this is only a partial cause of the rabbit-in-headlights dithering and vacillation that beset me when handed the carte du jour. This infuriating lack of resolve over such a simple decision as what to eat for dinner stems more from a reluctance to choose between items that sound equally appetising. Barring a small handful that have been ruined by the unholy inclusion of trompettes or Dolcelatte, many of the descriptions fill me with such pleasure that I find it extremely hard to step back and choose any one over the others.

  There is also the quandary, in a familiar restaurant, of whether to return to a regularly ordered favourite or try something new. There are pros and cons to both options, which cause further impediment:

  Eat a familiar favourite Try something new

  Pro

  It will be very good, and I know it.

  I like the idea of visiting different restaurants for particular meals. That appeals.

  It helps develop a relationship with the staff who might one day ask me if I would like my ‘usual’. I dream of such things.

  It is likely that the other meals will be at least as good as the favourite.

  I should always try to explore new opportunities, even with food.

  I can gain a better appreciation of the restaurant by trying different meals.

  Con

  I am avoiding new opportunities. There may be even better meals on the menu not being sampled. To always stick to what you know is not a good mantra for life.

  I have a safe choice to fall back on at any time. I’m not exploiting that. I’m equally denying myself the pleasure of returning to the familiar meal at a later date and enjoying it even more.

  The staff might be laughing at me for always ordering the same thing.

  If I keep ordering the same meal, I’m likely to get bored of it, and therefore deny myself the pleasure of that particular meal.

  If the new meal is not as good, the comparison with the better, favourite meal that I could have had will make the disappointment even harsher. I’ll kick myself.

  I would be experiencing regret with my meal, and it is an unhappy thing to eat food reluctantly, especially when one is paying for it.

  It is unusual to find something that is immensely enjoyed, and arguably perverse to deny oneself that pleasure for the sake of variety.

  This inability to surge unquestioningly forward with a decision or opinion makes expressing sceptical opinions abou
t pseudo-science and the paranormal rather tricky. As an erstwhile believer in God, a discussion with an enthusiastic Christian apologist on the street or over dinner involves the oddly schizophrenic experience of both vocalising my reservations while simultaneously annotating them with imagined objections and counter-arguments by the believer, before the latter has even uttered a word. When I was a Christian, I was fed many pat responses to the sorts of quite sensible objections people usually came out with. For example, when asked ‘Why is there so much evil in the world?’ one could offer an answer along such dizzyingly inadequate lines as ‘Because what’s the alternative? That God would make us like a bunch of robots unable to do wrong?’ For that reason, I know not to bother with raising such familiar objections nowadays. Equally, I can hear how I must sound from the position of a believer who is likely to have his own clear and very specific filter in place,* and am aware when what feel like watertight and irrefutable statements to me sound like the worst forms of reductionist, narrow-minded scientism to him. Quickly it feels pointless to engage. It seems silly and churlish to attack others for their private beliefs, unless one is entirely convinced of the greater view that harm is caused by the persistence of that belief in society; but when pressed into engaging on the matter, I recall the question I asked myself many times until I found my own faith breaking down:

  Bearing in mind we can all utterly convince ourselves of things that are not true – and that therefore important truths about the universe must surely always be based on more solid foundations than what my easily fooled, fickle feelings tell me – what is it that supports this belief other than my own already-existing conviction?

  Clearly an answer that reverts to ‘I believe ultimately because I know my belief to be true’ is no argument: such a statement is merely another indication of how deeply the believer believes, which is already accepted as a given. There may, however, exist a good reason to privately believe that stands up perfectly well, and which could run as follows: ‘It may not ultimately be true, but to be honest it gives me enormous pleasure and confidence to believe, and that’s enough for me.’ This is one perfectly valid and sensible argument, although one that is rarely heard.