June 10: What is Magic?
Animate Earth Dialogues with David Abrams and Charles Eisenstein
Charles Eisenstein:
Part of this myth is that change happens in the world through the exercise of force. This is basic Newtonian mechanics. If you don’t exert a force nothing changes. So, we have technology which is a highly elaborated system for the exercise of force. More and more precisely and with greater and greater energy. And that’s the way that the world is supposed to work. So, in that conception there’s this idea that “magic,” say like in Harry Potter, is simply an alternate unexplainable system for directing force. Instead of lifting something you wave a wand and it gets lifted through magical force.
But I think that magic is something else entirely.
David Abrams:
As do I.
Eisenstein:
So, for those who do not know, David was a professional magician. We call it sleight of hand. Basically, there’s this idea that it’s not “real magic.” It's “just tricks.” But if you understand magic as not some other way of exerting force but the technology of the direction of attention. Then, you might be able to say it actually is magic. And to take it a step further, if the world does not only operate by force, but if attention is also an organizing principle of the world, then magic has a potency that doesn’t depend on force.
Abrams:
What magicians are engaged in, whether they are traditional indigenous sorcerers or contemporary sleight of hand conjurers, is we all work with the very malleable texture of perception, or sensory experience. The activity of our eyes, of our ears, of our skin. The magician is someone who is awake to how malleable how fluid and shapeshifting sensory experience really is.
My own craft is to take an object, and to coax a person into paying closer and closer attention to this object and then have it do something that is utterly unexpected, and strange, and well nigh impossible. In doing this, a magician is loosening, startling the senses out of these stuck, static holding patterns, ways of seeing, that are so endlessly reiterated and deadening of the world that we experience. So that people actually start seeing, start hearing the voices of a much more than human conversation again.
When I was house magician at Alice’s Restaurant, that storied institution in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, I would work going from table to table doing these minor miracles for people. Over the course of an hour or so a sort of web of fascination would be spun within this whole dining room so that everyone was aware of which table I was working at and they were all very attentive. I would work, usually three hours a night, and at at least one point in an evening some people who had finished their meal or their cocktails and left the establishment would come back in, or one member would come back in, and would wait patiently and come up to me and say “what did you do? What did you do? We walked outside and all of the leaves on the trees were looking at us! What’s going on?” or “all of the grasses were sparkling.” What had happened, what the sleight of hand does, is it wakes up the senses. It startles them awake so we actually start seeing again creatively.