Here Is Real Magic

by Nate Staniforth

  Before the show I called Katharine to tell her how badly everything was going and she gave me the best pep talk she could, but you go into something like this on your own no matter what anyone else says to you beforehand.

  The theater at the University of Idaho was in a Gothic stone cathedral of a building and I walked onstage just before nightfall. The setting sun glowed through the stained glass windows and you never get used to walking into a room and having five hundred people start shouting and applauding. It’s overpowering. The difference between this moment and the one just before it stunned me to silence. For a moment I didn’t know what to say.

  When I launched into the opening speech I could feel the strength coming back and the illness draining away and for the moment I had everything I needed. I abandoned the new set list and threw myself into the performance with everything I had, and I couldn’t believe the vast reservoir of energy at my disposal. I used all of it. The audience rose to the occasion and I felt I had reached a new level as a performer—as if whatever I had felt under the piano so many years before was close, hovering somewhere ahead and just out of reach.

  During intermission I threw up in the garbage can backstage. Then I went out and finished the show, and at the end the audience stood up in one motion and cheered for a long time. I felt like a runner at the end of a long race—ready to fall down, but grateful. I went back to the hotel with a fever and slept in my stage clothes on top of the bed without ever climbing under the covers.

  Aside from the very modest living I was scraping together from these shows, the true benefit of the tour was the time I got onstage in front of an audience. This is the real difference between professionals and amateurs. A number of extraordinarily gifted magicians support their love of magic with outside careers as lawyers or bank managers. For some people—and maybe most people—learning and performing magic is a way to scratch an itch that can’t be scratched any other way. Inventing and building new illusions is a rigorous exercise in lateral thinking and problem solving, like chess, but sometimes you get to play with a soldering torch. Also, the amateur magician has a tremendous advantage over the professional. When you buy a ticket to a magic show, you know you are seeing a magician, and this context—We’re going to a theater to see a show—fundamentally shapes the way you perceive the magic. An amateur can go under cover. An amateur can weave impossibilities into the fabric of daily life and create wondrous, unimaginably strange moments for friends, family, and co-workers who will not be able to dismiss them so easily as magic tricks performed by a professional.

  But if you want to perform your magic in a theater, there’s no substitute for putting in hours and hours onstage in front of an audience. You learn the difference between doing magic and performing it, and then you learn that the actual difference is between performing magic and communicating it. Magic is a social experience as much as a sensory one, and the only way to learn how to take an audience and lead them by the hand to a place where they actually believe in magic is to first go through all the wrong ways of doing it and learn from those mistakes. It’s like Churchill said: “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.” This is how you learn to be a magician, by trying everything and finally doing it right.

  So as I crossed the country doing shows in lecture halls, auditoriums, and student unions, I learned things about magic I had never imagined. I learned how to do a card trick so that even the people in the back row of an eight-hundred-seat theater could follow the action. I learned how to turn hecklers into allies and allies into anchors I could lean on during a performance if things got rocky. I learned when to be loud and when to be quiet, when to build momentum and when to slow down, and how to use comedy like a tactical strike to disarm, distract, or dominate as the situation required.

  I learned other things, too. I discovered how elusive and unpredictable the experience of wonder could be. You really can’t create it. Other responses, such as fear, shock, suspense, surprise, and laughter are created through the building and releasing of tension in an audience and can be reliably reproduced from night to night. On tour I’d record each show and play it back afterward to study the constant ebb and flow of tension running through a performance. With time you could learn from each show and make changes the next night: hold the pause here, speed up there, store up as much tension as possible in one moment so you can burn it all like rocket fuel in the next. Stand-up comedians do this, too.

  But wonder was far less predictable. You could deceive, inspire, or entertain an audience all evening without ever coming anywhere near the sense of still, silent majesty I associate with the word “wonder.” Sometimes it would show up and pass through the room like an electric current, and sometimes it wouldn’t, like a flighty, unpredictable friend who stops by unannounced from time to time but can never be trusted to keep an appointment. I learned to structure a show to accommodate this unpredictability, giving the moment room to breathe if that sense of wonder took hold of an audience but always having a backup plan if it didn’t make an appearance.

  More than anything else, I learned that this goal of giving people the experience of wonder was as important as the tools you used to do it; that intent mattered as much as ability. An audience who sensed you were just there to deceive them would turn on you, but an audience who understood that you were there to share something valuable with them would hang on every word. You couldn’t just do one trick after another. You had to build something. Build a castle. Build a cathedral. And then invite the audience inside.

  The exhaustion of being on the road was overpowering, and mostly there are strange moments I only half-remember, distinct but unconnected to anything around them, as if they were never anything more than a dream even as they happened. One night a man climbed up onto the arms of his chair in the theater, pointed at me onstage from across the room, and shouted, “To hell with you! You’re the devil! I’m out of here!” Another night at a college in Florida, campus security barged into the dining hall in the middle of a show because they thought a riot had broken out.

  I vaguely remember driving out to a glacier after a show one night in Juneau, Alaska, to look for bears with a group of college students before they dropped me at the airport for my midnight flight to the next show in the next city. Sitting at a Denny’s eating pancakes and drinking coffee at two A.M. and writing Katharine an email on my laptop before getting back in the car and driving on to make the six A.M. flight from somewhere to somewhere else. Sleeping in my car at a campsite along the Pacific Coast Highway one night because I couldn’t make it all the way to San Francisco. Walking New Orleans alone at night, past rows of fortunetellers with tarot cards and a woman behind a folding table who said she could read the lines on the palm of my hand and tell me the future. I can still feel the weight of the air and the warm wind blowing down the street like a courier from another world. But then it all disappears, or maybe it never happened.

  Here’s what I know. The combination of travel, performance, caffeine, and adrenaline muddled the days and nights of the tour schedule into one unrelenting blur. I’d arrive at the airport after hours of driving and then sleep while my body hurtled across the continent, curled up in my window coach seat with my hood up, sunglasses on, and earplugs in. I’d wake on the other side of the country with no spatial understanding of where I was or where I had been. Then I’d spend the day in the depths of a sunless theater preparing for the show. Then I’d do it again and again and again. I was never really in Georgia. I was never really in Tennessee. I was on Tour. And Tour was its own place—a secret nation of airports, hotels, rental car counters, loading docks, and theaters—where you’d leave a hotel at three in the morning, cross the country, do a show, and then check in to an identical hotel at midnight. Same design. Same lobby. Same carpet. Outside the world rushed by the windows of the planes and the cars while I hung on, incredulous, and tried not to fall off.

  At first, it all felt like an a
dventure. I couldn’t believe I was actually pulling this off. Before I started touring, I had never been east of Chicago. Now, in the busiest times of year, I’d connect through Chicago’s O’Hare airport seven days a week. Every morning I’d get my coffee at the Starbucks by the C concourse and one morning the barista asked if I worked in one of the terminals. “No,” I replied. “I just fly through every day.”

  I felt like I had been everywhere—Savannah, Georgia; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Havre, Montana. One day I was in Pocatello, Idaho—a town nestled in a valley ringed by high hills and mountains capped with snow. The air was cool and crisp and the sky was deep blue and I thought I had never been anywhere as beautiful as Pocatello.

  “This place is incredible,” I said to the promoter of the show when we met outside the theater.

  She looked at me curiously. “Pocatello? Really?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We don’t have mountains in Iowa. This is amazing.”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “You just kind of get used to it.”

  FAKE

  On tour I discovered the thrill of a standing ovation, but I also learned the sharp sting of an indifferent audience and the lingering humiliation of a bad show. Often this was my fault. Maybe I didn’t connect with the audience, maybe an illusion fell flat. Sometimes I could blame the venue—one night at a college somewhere on the East Coast the student activities board arranged to have twenty or thirty pizzas delivered during the middle of the show for everyone in the audience. You can imagine how that disrupted the performance. But frequently I felt the resistance of something else, larger and more stubborn, like an invisible wall, and I didn’t know how to get around it.

  I had learned by this point that some people do not like magic. For many, the word brings to mind laser beams, smoke machines, and tight leather pants. It conjures images of Las Vegas showmen, of style without substance, of overblown, underwhelming spectacle heavy on cliché and light on actual ideas. In the 1920s, Houdini was a mainstream star and magic was in its golden age. Now magic is largely seen as something for children. It’s ignored by adults, or derided, or tolerated for brief periods of time now and then—for really, everyone loves to be amazed—but only rarely, and ideally with a thick protective layer of irony wrapped around the experience.

  Good magic isn’t cool. It can’t be cool. Cool is divisive. Cool is exclusionary. Cool does not sit next to the new kid at lunch, and good magic is all about sitting next to the new kid at lunch. So I expected a certain amount of indifference. But as I traveled the country with my show I came to understand the great divide between my understanding of what a magician could be and the popular perception held by the general public. For most people, magic was cheap. Magic was low. At its best, magic offered a brief moment of light diversion. At its worst—and in the eyes of many it was frequently at its worst—magic was a vapid, frustrating, even pathetic waste of time.

  One night during a college tour I was scheduled to appear as the opening act for a poetry reading. I was thrilled. I thought a group of people who had gathered to hear poetry might be more open to the experience of magic than an audience who wanted nothing more than a good time. Wonder is a delicate, fragile state, and while I had become good at using my craft like a wrecking ball to knock a hole in the perception of a belligerent audience so they could look through and see it for a moment, I was excited to discover what I could do with an audience who had shown up already looking for a meaningful encounter with an artist’s work.

  When I got to the venue I could tell something was wrong. The organizer of the event stood onstage talking to a man in his midfifties—the poet, I would later learn—who peered at me when I walked in the room and then returned to the argument. I caught the words “magician” and “ridiculous” before he raised his voice.

  “I just don’t think it’s appropriate,” he barked.

  Even now I think about the sting of that moment frequently. He had never seen me work, but to him it didn’t matter. Magic was just magic, after all. Certainly it wasn’t poetry.

  Modern society’s antipathy toward magic is perfectly embodied in the fictional character of Gob Bluth—a mocking, derisive caricature of a magician from the hit TV series Arrested Development—and the American public embraced him with glee. Gob personified the stereotypical magician completely: the clueless bombast, the bravado, the self-absorbed overconfidence unsupported by any actual talent, and—this more than anything else—his conviction that magic was a serious art form deserving of respect and attention. In one scene from the show’s first season a group of magicians held a protest rally and one raised a sign reading WE DEMAND TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY! The joke, of course, is that the idea of taking a magician seriously is laughable.

  At first I took it personally. My show has none of the Las Vegas stereotypes. I don’t tell jokes or use smoke machines, and I had seen enough audiences respond well to my work that I knew it was at least possible for an intelligent audience to lose themselves in amazement during my show. Night after night I’d watch individuals in the audience begin the show with their arms crossed, heads down, obviously skeptical, as if they had come for no other reason than to figure everything out. Over the next ninety minutes many of them would thaw out and respond with the same astonishment and wonder as the children in the next row, but then the show would end and they would close back up even before leaving their seats, as though they had bumped into an old friend while walking down the street but now had to hurry along on their way. Sometimes they spoke with me after the show. “I just want the answer,” they’d say, forgetting that I had seen them during the performance, laughing, wondering, eyes wide. They didn’t just want the answer. They wanted the mystery, too.

  Here was an enigma, I thought, and one reaching far beyond the response to a magic show. Every night onstage I witnessed a tension in the human spirit between our longing to revel in a mystery and our impulse to destroy it. I came to see the modern resentment toward magic as a clue to some larger struggle in our culture, like a small ripple in a pond revealing the monster lurking just below the surface of the water.

  One night in New Jersey a group of people gathered at the front of the stage after the show for pictures, and a woman in the group kept insisting I tell her how one of the illusions was done. I think she was a reporter for the college paper—nineteen, I’m guessing, and not even trying to be nice.

  “Why are you doing this?” she finally asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s all fake,” she said. “I know it’s fake. So you can tell me how you did it.”

  I wanted to explain that magic is fiction. Like a writer of fiction, a magician does everything possible to make an illusion feel real in the moment. Good books feel real. Good movies feel real. Good magic feels real, too. I wondered if she was upset with J. D. Salinger for inventing Holden Caulfield, as if any of the power of Catcher in the Rye depended on its being the story of an actual teenager.

  But she was having none of it.

  “So why can’t you tell me? If it’s not real, are you just keeping it a secret because it makes you feel powerful?”

  “Do I look particularly powerful to you right now?” I asked. This was not going well.

  “Whatever,” she said. “I’m just going to Google it.” And she walked away.

  I’m just going to Google it. There. In one sentence she had identified something new in the world—some new way of seeing things, or of thinking about things. Here was the cynicism of our modern age, and I despised it. Information is now so easy to find that few of us are strong enough to resist the temptation of presuming we already know more than we actually do. Our worldviews are still built on the foundations of our own limited understanding, but we now live under the dangerous illusion that they are reinforced and supported by all of the knowledge that has ever existed. If I don’t have the answers now, I can find them, the thinking goes, and without even noticing we shrink our world down to the size of our certainties.<
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  Here is a blind spot in our culture, created both by the habitual, almost systemic mistaking of information for understanding and by the assumption that a complete understanding of anything can be attained with enough information. This view of the world reduces everything and everyone to bits of data—some known, some still unknown, but all knowable—and reduces wonder to a mere absence of information, as if the simple brute fact of our own existence isn’t mystery enough to keep you up for a week if you really consider it. “Oh that,” we so easily say about anything we don’t understand, “I’m sure we have that all sorted out.” And in doing so we insulate ourselves from any facts, opinions, and ideas—those pesky things—that ask us to venture away from our own view of reality.

  I suppose we have the right to remain ignorant, but we are in the world. And in the world, our actions have an impact on others, so assuming that you understand something you don’t becomes an ethical issue more than an intellectual one. There is a danger and maybe even a violence to the belief that you already know something—or someone—completely, when you do not, and will not, and cannot. Knowledge does not allow you to understand the world. Knowledge dispels the illusion that you understand the world.