Here Is Real Magic

by Nate Staniforth

  When I was a young magician I couldn’t explain how something as simple as a coin trick could inspire such a powerful response. There may be such a thing as inherent wonder in distant stars or towering redwoods, but I knew better than anyone that there was none in the simple coin vanish—it was just a trick I had practiced in the bathroom. But now I considered that maybe the illusion gives us the experience of wonder because something in the act of beholding it scrapes away whatever has obscured this central mystery of our own existence. For just a moment we get to see it, and it fills us with fear, and also with joy.

  At the end of our visit, the teacher led us out to the courtyard and we stood under the Rudraksha tree. He held out a bowl and presented Andy and me with the Tears of Shiva, small, hardened pods from the tree, considered valuable and holy in his tradition, in which they’re used as prayer beads. Unfortunately, they also look very much like blackberries. As the teacher held the bowl toward us, Andy thanked him and popped one of the Tears of Shiva into his mouth.

  “No!” the teacher cried. “They are holy!”

  For the rest of the day I tried to turn Andy’s mistake into an incident on the level of, say, being chased down an alley by a one-armed monkey, but whenever I mentioned the Tears of Shiva, Andy would begin to impersonate a monkey and then dissolve once again into laughter and that would be the end of it.

  NOW WE PUT THE RIVER TO SLEEP

  The next evening Laksuri, Andy, and I drove a few miles downriver to the city of Haridwar and sat on the banks of the Ganges, watching families arrive for the aarti ceremony. Thousands of men and women led their children to vendors’ stalls to purchase flowers and candles for the evening’s proceedings. Bicycle rickshaws shuttled back and forth over a bridge, and on the other side of the river the tents of overnight pilgrims stretched along the bank. Slowly the occupants left the tents and joined the others at the water’s edge. We sat far enough away that all of this solidified into the background, one with the setting sun and the high hills rising up from both sides of the river. Our corner of the riverbank was quiet. People sat in twos and threes to talk or silently look out over the water. At river level you can feel the immensity of the Ganges and it’s easy to let your mind go far away as you sit and watch the current.

  “First of all, we don’t even consider the Ganga a river,” Laksuri told us. “We worship her as a source of energy. She is the mother, and she feeds the entire north of this country. High in the mountains she is like a little girl, jumping and being very rough, running, skidding, and by the time she has reached us here she has grown up a little and is more calm.”

  A young girl of four or five years broke free from her father, ran to the river’s edge, and lifted a handful of water into the air before letting it spill from her hands back into the river.

  “You see that little girl,” Laksuri said. “She’s offering water to the river. It’s a lovely gesture. What else can she give the river but the water she borrows from it?”

  This was great, I’m sure, but I didn’t really get it and I think she could tell that the meaning of this gesture, and perhaps of the river in general, was lost on me.

  She spoke about her former life as an attorney in New Delhi—the good salary, the parties, the expensive car. A dream job—a dream life. And then she left it all behind. One afternoon on a business trip to Rishikesh she was driving home after a long day of meetings and had the overpowering impulse to swim in the river. She pulled over to the side of the road, took off her clothes, and waded in.

  “It felt like an electric current was coming toward me from the river. The energy was just unbelievable, and at that time I was a complete nonbeliever in the power of the river to change or heal.”

  When she emerged, her life had changed. “I came back home and tried to eat the meat and drink the wine but I just couldn’t touch it. In the river I had the clear vision, ‘My life could be changed by one hundred and eighty degrees.’ And now it has. And whoever comes to the river can change in the way they want. This is the magic of the Ganga.”

  As Laksuri spoke, a small audience gathered to hear her testimony, and maybe also because Andy had the camera out and was crouching and maneuvering for the best angle and looking very much like a one-man TV crew. A young man of nineteen or twenty approached. Laksuri bowed toward him and said, “He is a Brahman—a priest—and he says he wants to bless you.”

  “What? Me?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Hold still.”

  He raised his hand to my forehead and whispered something. I didn’t know what to do. I bowed. “Namaste,” I said, hoping this was appropriate.

  Laksuri said something to him in Hindi, and I caught the word jadugar, which I have discovered means “magician.”

  “Go on,” Laksuri said to me. “Show him a trick.”

  I hesitated. When I made the coin vanish on the playground as a young boy, some of the parents of the kids at school were concerned—“One of the boys at school is practicing magic!”—and one evening at a schoolmate’s birthday party I was summarily cornered by the boy’s youth pastor and sternly warned about the dangers of the magician’s craft. “It’s the work of the devil,” he said, and I could tell he really believed that. A handful of times since then I have been approached after a show by members of one church or another who want to discuss their spiritual concerns with my work. And in one sense, I understand.

  I understand because I’m aware of how easy it is for someone in my positon to abuse the power of appearing to do the miraculous. Think of the spirit mediums in Houdini’s day. Think of the Godmen. The history of magic is filled with those who have been willing to use their craft to dress themselves as gods on earth, and we are all the poorer for it. But in a larger sense, equating magic with sacrilege misses the point.

  If a common ground exists between the worlds of faith and reason, of theism and atheism, it lies in the experience of wonder. A true believer and a committed skeptic can both gaze reverently at the night sky, or the towering redwood, or the screaming infant just new in the world, and find in that moment the humble, open sense of awe and interconnectedness with the universe that exists at the heart of both the religious and scientific traditions. Both skeptic and believer are capable of getting lost in the weeds of their own certainty, and both are capable of rising above it to stare unflinchingly at the brute fact of our own existence and to find in that awful and joyful reality the experience of gratitude—despite everything—and wonder.

  Admittedly, this has nothing to do with card tricks. Magic can be used in a number of ways, some good, some bad, and most often, neither good nor bad. You can use magic tricks to entertain, to baffle, to deceive. But you can also use them to share the experience of wonder. There’s an ongoing battle between magicians as to whether magic tricks are inherently artistic. I don’t think they are, but they can be. Learning someone else’s coin trick and doing it on the playground as a nine-year-old didn’t require much artistic vision, but I spent years creating the lottery illusion. Magic can be art, and art can be sacred, and therefore magic can also be sacred. Magic may not have had its version of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or Jackson Pollock’s Mural yet, but that’s not to say it couldn’t happen. And if it did, it probably wouldn’t be bombastic or overblown. It would be simple and direct. It would be honest and straightforward. And it wouldn’t feel like a magic trick. It would feel true.

  By this point an audience of maybe fifteen people had gathered to watch the Indian priest and the American magician. “Go on,” Laksuri said again. “It’s okay.”

  I showed him the rubber band trick three times. After the first time his face remained blank and impassive. I did it again, and a slow smile spread across his face. No one in the group yelled or screamed, but collectively they leaned in, moving closer, watching carefully.

  One last time. Two rubber bands—one here, one here, then—

  Magic.

  I heard Laksuri react with the rest of the crowd but I was watching the priest.
He looked at my hands and then into my eyes. He bowed his head.

  “Namaste.”

  Earlier in the evening Laksuri had told me what I should expect from the aarti ceremony. Aarti is a word from the Sanskrit language that means “remover of darkness,” and she described the ceremony as a way of thanking the holy river.

  “People will buy flowers, put a little lamp on it, and release it into the river. Showing a light, burning a candle—these are symbols that say to the river, ‘This is my energy and I got it from you. I offer it back to you in thanks.’ And then because it is night and we all must sleep, we sing to the river. We sing the river to sleep, like a lullaby.”

  I am a secular magician performing secular magic and the aarti ceremony is an explicitly religious event. My evening in Haridwar was not unlike an Indian magician unaware of the tenets of Christianity traveling to America and wandering unknowingly into a Christmas Eve nativity service—the candles, the incense, the singing of “Silent Night”—and finding in that moment the experience of wonder. I lacked the language, the knowledge, and the context to take in the aarti ceremony as it was intended. I missed many things and misinterpreted the rest. I saw it all as an outsider.

  But it was pure magic.

  In the years since that night I have wondered if this outsider perspective allowed me to appreciate the power of the moment more viscerally than someone who knew the meaning, because anyone who knew the meaning would have to decide how they felt about it, making their experience at least partly analytical instead of purely emotional. I think of this at the Nativity service every year. I know the Christmas story and the theological claims presented by the story, and so my experience of that night depends as much on my relationship with that story and those claims as it does with the service itself. As we pass the candles and sing the familiar carol, I have to consider what the story means to me.

  Contrast this with our imaginary Indian magician, still stunned and disoriented from the culture shock of traveling from India to Iowa and thankful mostly to sit in the dark in peace for a moment and take in the spectacle of Christmas Eve. Peace be with you, his neighbor in the church pew says, and though he can’t understand the words, he senses the welcome in the phrase and accepts with thanks and solemnity the lighted candle passed to him. As the lights are dimmed and the candles cast shadows on the vaulted ceilings, this gathering of farmers, doctors, teachers, and factory workers stands and sings together the quiet, stirring melody of “Silent Night.” What would our Indian magician take from this moment? The theology would be lost on him, certainly, and some of the elements of the service would likely baffle him—the crucified Christ on the wall, for instance, and the taking of wine and bread in communion—but even when the particulars of the moment are removed the overarching, overpowering sense of the numinous remains.

  This, at least, was my experience that night when I joined the thousands and thousands of pilgrims who had traveled across the country to the banks of the Ganges in Haridwar to sing the river to sleep. That night the mythology behind the ceremony was invisible to me, so all I saw was the ceremony itself.

  When the setting sun disappeared behind the hills on the opposite bank the first fire sprang up in the darkness, and within five minutes every candle, torch, and bonfire for half a mile on either side of the bridge was burning. The river glowed in the firelight. As we joined the throngs moving toward the ceremony I could see thousands and thousands of people crowding closely along both sides of the river. In many places the bank had been stair-stepped down to the water with stone platforms, accommodating the massive audience like an amphitheater rising from the river’s edge on each side.

  We got separated almost immediately. Andy disappeared with the camera. Laksuri vanished into the crowd. I was in a throng of people rushing to get close to the river and allowed myself to be swept along without knowing where I was going or what I would find. I quickly abandoned my initial hope of working my way to a raised platform to view the proceedings from above. I was down in the middle of it, on the ground, one of the thousands moving toward the river. The air was hot and thick with the smell of sweat and burning oil. The crush of people, the heat, the sounds, and the smells all joined together like an intoxicant. On my right, a loudspeaker blared the prerecorded wail of a woman singing a warbling melody, high and pleading. On my left, a man about my age dressed all in white stood with his eyes closed, face upturned, his voice rising and falling in a deep, rhythmic chant.

  Above it all rose the sounds of the crowd, which appeared both as a churning mass of moving candlelight and song and also a series of distinct individuals, cast in my memory as a progression of fantastic images. A man struggled with a large torch overloaded with fuel oil and dripping liquid fire on the ground as parents pulled their children out of his way. The crowd surged and he was gone. A grandmother carefully carried a bowl made from folded leaves and filled with flowers and a burning ghee candle. She knelt to present it to her delighted grandchildren. They carried it away together toward the river, each reaching in over the others to position a hand under the bowl, not wanting to miss out. The crowd shifted again. When it opened I stood directly before a girl of nine or ten holding a large silver tray covered with coins and a burning flame rising four or five inches from a small bowl. An old man bowed before her and she anointed him with the fire, passing her fingers through the flame and then pressing them into his forehead. He raised his hands in thanks, and she turned to me. Again she passed her fingers through the fire. I bowed and felt her fingertips press firmly into my forehead. Then she was gone.

  Eventually I reached the river.

  On either bank the crowd pressed so closely to the water that the first few rows of people were partially submerged, some to their waist, some to their knees and ankles. A handful of children shepherded a fleet of leaf bowls filled with candles and flowers from the banks out into the river, celebrating each time the current took a bowl from their outstretched hands and carried it downstream. Dozens of these burning bowls floated down the river, and as they disappeared beyond the bend the children replaced them with others, creating an unending procession of floating candles sailing away into the darkness.

  On both sides of the river a profusion of upraised torches and towering bonfires amid the crowd reflected off the flowing surface of the water, scattering the light in every direction. I no longer stood on the banks of a river; I was suspended in space, with light above, below, and around me, flickering in the darkness. The moon hung low in the sky—a final light above the bonfires, torches, and candles, as if the universe had conspired to create one perfect moment and decided at the last minute to go all out and include the moon.

  I was standing near the edge of the water when the singing began. Until then the music had been scattered, with some people singing one song and some another, and others not singing at all. But then everyone—some five thousand people—began singing the same song, quietly, and a current passed through the crowd.

  This was magic.

  I don’t know how else to say it. This was one of the most magical moments of my life. This was the meteor shower in the night sky and the sound under the piano. This was awe. This was wonder.

  A family stood next to me—a boy, maybe four, his older sister, and their parents, all quietly singing the death knell of everything I had ever done as a magician. This was more amazing. This was better. Take my best moment onstage, the lottery illusion at the bar, or the coin vanishing on the playground, and this night raised up with song and moon and fire wins every time. This felt the way magic should feel. This felt true.

  I had been trying for years to identify exactly why so much of the magic in my culture disappointed me, including my own. The real issue is that so often, magic doesn’t feel true. It doesn’t make you say “Aha! Yes! I remember that! I knew that once.” Years ago I came across the idea that truly great works of art instruct less than they remind. When you listen to Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind or walk through Frank Lloyd Wr
ight’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, or watch old videos of Michael Jordan at the height of his powers, the experience is not one of discovering something new but rediscovering something old within yourself. These pieces of art and feats of athleticism are bigger than the artists’ personal experience. They resonate on a universal human level, and we find in them pieces of our own selves that we may have forgotten in the daily business of living.

  I didn’t understand the words of the song. I didn’t know the meaning of the lights or the candles. None of the specific theology of the moment was available to me. It didn’t matter. Whatever it was that rose up from that particular combination of sound, fire, darkness, and water transcended theology. It was bigger and more fundamental. Like real magic.

  At some point someone handed me one of the bowls. It was heavier than I expected, folded together from thick green leaves and filled with loose flower petals and a narrow burning candle at the center. The man who gave it to me was thin and old, with a white beard and a bald head. He nodded and motioned to the river, smiling. I bent down and pushed the burning bowl into the water. It clung to the shore, moving slowly downriver, until a young boy splashed over and piloted it out into the current. I watched it join the other lights, floating, bobbing, rushing away, until it curved around the bend in the river and disappeared.