talkmagic.co.uk

Thought this anecdote might amuse some of you.

I was just on holiday and I did some magic for one of the kids (girl, aged 9) because it was rainy and she was bored. She was very very excited.

Anyway, after a couple of ambitious cards, things got a bit out of hand with her card ending up in her bed, in her sandwich and in her pocket.

She so so wanted to have a go, and it was clear that she thought that the way to do it was to believe hard enough. Before I could discourage her, fearing much disappointment, she'd stuff her card into the middle of the deck and given it a good slapping. This is where matters got interesting.

Before I could get a look to check it had really gone (to who knows where) she'd started fanning the cards herself. So much did she not want to be disappointed that she purposely skimmed through, enough to make it look through, but not enough to check all the cards. It had gone. At this point, I had an opportunity to "check" myself and thus the card was allowed to travel on its mystic journey around the yurt we were staying in.

It may have been the case that she knew it was all about me and she was just playing along, but it seemed more. She seemed to want to make it work; thought it might not and purposely made strides to lie.

It was at tis point I wished I bought my "murder these cards" deck so I could have tossed her card into the flames of the wood burner and had it reappear somewhere.

Under normal circumstances, I would have just gone for it anyway, but this was the pack of cards we were using for other games, and given the amount of rain we had, I needed them all!

In all areas of magic from the sponge balls right through to fortune telling, there's a level of suspension of disbelief on the part of the spec. How deep this goes, and quite why a certain type of person will willingly surrender their rationality is the subject of endless debate.

Without it, of course, there could be no magic. Rather just a series of puzzles to be figured out. I think it also has a lot to do with the performer. The spec has to trust the performer enough to hand over their disbelief to them and expect them to take care of it for the duration of the performance.

Does that make any sense at all? A wedding in Solihull and a restaurant gig in Sheffield, and now it's late & I'm frazzled!

Having recently started Strong Magic, I was interested in the difference between intellectual and emotional belief. This girl was very definitely not in the class of intellect gone, emotions taking over. She was very much consciously participating. It reminds me of some hypnosis anecdotes, in fact.