Why Ripping Up Playing Cards Is A Beautiful Thing

In my first post I mentioned spending a couple of hours ripping apart playing cards in order to practice magically putting them back together. Some people may think you have to be out of your mind to spend hours doing such a thing, but that’s because they don’t see the beauty of it. There are indeed many ways to waste the hours of ones life, but most people would agree that responding to beauty is not one of them.

It always makes me sad when I encounter the occasional person in an audience who hates magic. Usually this is because they view it as a challenge: the magician is out to fool me, but I am not a person easily fooled and I’m not going to let him fool me. This attitude possibly stems from a previous encounter with a magician who tried to do just that – fool the person. There are, unfortunately, plenty of magicians out there for whom magic is an ego boost, who want to use their tricks to “conquer” the spectator, perhaps even demeaning and embarrassing the spectator, or at least projecting a condescending attitude. A sad business indeed.

There are also a few people who cannot handle magic no matter how it is presented to them, because they cannot tolerate the loss of control and the mental confusion that a good magic effect introduces into their otherwise neatly controlled and compartmentalized life. I actually had a spectator walk away in the middle of a close-up routine that I was performing for a small group, uttering the words “I can’t handle this. This is messing with my head.”

I find from my experience, however, that almost everyone loves magic. It cuts across generational, racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. Even without speaking a word, I could perform a trick for a child in America and a grandfather in China – and it would have the same appeal to both. Both would react with amazement, and both would smile because they are amazed. There is something beautiful in that. To get that amazement and that smile I find it worthwhile to spend hours ripping up cards and magically restoring them.

I also find it beautiful for another reason. Sleight-of-hand is beautiful in a way similar, at times, to mathematics. Lovers of math can and do spend hours working out problems. It’s a form of contemplation. They enjoy the search, the hunt for solutions. But they also fall in love with the beauty of those solutions when they are elegant, efficient, and clever. A solution to the problem of how to simulate the miraculous with a deck of cards or a handful of coins can have a similar beauty. I admire the oh-so-clever solutions magical thinkers sometimes come up with, incorporating a deviousness that just has to make me smile. In sleight-of-hand, as in math, less is usually more. One searches for elegance: the less secret moves one needs to resort to, the better. It’s a beautiful thing to contemplate how someone has constructed the illusion of a torn and restored playing card, eliminating awkward moves, introducing misdirection to cover necessary inconsistencies, using natural movements as a cover for secret maneuvers, and so on.

Of course, the beauty of method is something the average spectator never gets to see, because letting them in on it would spoil the illusion. And it is important that the magician never lose sight of the goal of the art: to give the spectator the gift of astonishment. It is possible, at times, for magicians to get too caught up in methods, perhaps preferring a particular trick because one is enchanted by its modus operandi, even though the illusion that trick creates does not generate much astonishment for spectators and cannot be made very entertaining.

Maybe at the end of the day magicians – at least working magicians such as myself – are engineers. Whether the method is elegant or not, we have to build the bridge. Magic for me is the art of astonishment. When someone hires me to entertain they will get humor, yes, and they will get audience participation, yes, and lots of fun: but what they’re paying for is an experience of astonishment. That is not true of all who perform magic. Some of them are comedians who do magic, and they are willing almost to throw away the amazement for the sake of the laugh. If laughter is main thing you’re looking for, don’t hire James Warren. When you hire me, there will be laughs, of course; but I’m going for the juggler – I want to blow your mind. It’s a beautiful thing.

If you're reading this, stop right now and take a moment to remember something you love to do that gives you a sense of beauty, something that might make a stranger think you've gone daffy. Then go out and do it on this Thanksgiving Day, and be grateful!