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I’m working on a book that involves magic, all kinds of magic, from its earliest record in ancient civilization to the great showmen like Houdini, Blackstone and the like. No offense to David Copperfield and more contemporary conjurers, but my personal fascination with the performing end of magic ends somewhere near the dawn of television.
It’s kind of all-consuming, this subject. Like once you start asking yourself, ‘what is magic, really?’ and ‘what in the modern world can still be considered magic?’ it oozes across the lines of everything else you’re doing. What magic is ultimately, I think, is any instance that lets you see that there may be something more going on around you, behind you and before you than you originally thought. It’s anything that suggests the infinite and makes you feel that there are many mysteries in this life yet to be revealed, like an impossible coincindence that hints at a master framework. The mystery delivers hope somehow–in that night-before-Christmas kind of way, but bigger.
Sometimes clarity, the opposite of mystery, delivers the same sensation. I get that wonderful feeling of the veil being lifted often when I’m writing, whether I’m freewheeling it or drilling down to some place of precision. Interestingly, it doesn’t matter what I’m writing. It could be a company profile or a poem, but when you get to the truth of something, as sublime as a mystery, the universe seems more right, more functional.
What is magic to you?
