What is Magic?

David London

 

Searching in the words of other magicians, poets, and philosophers, I have spent the last ten years trying to answer that question. In fact, it was this question that led me to start collecting essays for Beyond The Smoke and Mirrors back in 1998, and though I sought answers, instead I was only led to more questions.

 

My quest to know and understand magic has often led to the creation of theatrical magic shows. Each of these shows emerged out of questions I was asking at the time about magic and its relationship to life itself.  After years of questioning and creating shows around what emerged out of the answers and further questions I                uncovered, I am still left with the same question:  WHAT IS MAGIC?

 

Magic, at its very least, provides for a novel experience in an increasingly regimented (yet chaotic) world. On the other end of magic’s potential, it can create an experience that can literally transform people. As magicians, the experience we offer generally lies somewhere in between these two extremes. Yet, you’ll notice that they are far from polar opposites. Even as just a novel trick, magic can alter someone’s day, and who knows what effect that slight alteration may evoke in that persons life. 

 

The way I see it, some people will always see magic as a puzzle. Others will always see it as petty entertainment. Still others will always want to “believe.”  Some may find it amusing. To others it may be obnoxious. To some, it may in fact be transformative. But no matter how people perceive it, or the effect it has on them, the fact of the matter is that magic exists. As something to be performed and encountered, enjoyed and thought-about, magic stands alone in the images it creates, the feelings it brings forth, the experience it offers and the questions it evokes.  Even down to the tools, the methods, and the lexicon, magic is a thing— another entity within a world of endless entities. That being said, it remains unique.

 

In my opinion, there is no greater reason than this for why magic should be created, shared, celebrated, and pushed to the farthest extremes possible. I firmly believe that the potential for  this art-form, like any art-form, has no boundaries, and (pardon the cliché) is limited only by the imagination itself.

 

If there was ever a mode of live expression that had fewer limits than magic has, I have yet to discover it. The magician’s ability to imagine literally anything, and have the tools to make it exist, live, in the present time and space, is unparalleled. The inherent creativity that magic demands is not only enormous, but seemingly endless.

 

Magic and imagination, even in their etymology, are inherently linked together. After all, what greater tool to explore the abstract world in our brains, then a tool that can also produce impossible and reality-bending dramas before us? For some reason, dreams come to mind.

 

I guess what I am trying to say here is that your interest in magic, whether you know it or not, is an interest in a unique and dynamic art-form with which you can do anything that you imagine.

 

Of course it can always be ‘just a trick,’ but even ‘just a trick’ is something more. What that more is remains up to you.

 

 

 

This essay was originally printed in “Daydreams” by David London. BSM Books, 2007.