FROM “THE MAGICIAN AWAKES”
THE POINT AT THE END OF A METAPHOR
Most people have no idea how a magician would operate. They look at old images and a few stereotypes, like costumes in a closet. A magician is a secret because people are blind to him and want to be blind to him. Being blind is an art form. It has rules; where to look and where not to look. What to see, what to miss. Being blind is a first cousin to android-ship, a condition many people would take pride in, if they could figure out how to slip into it. The fairy tale, for example, of genetic enhancement is an attraction. It appears to endow a human without him having to move one inch to the left or the right. He just lies there and receives the sacrament. And then confusions evaporate. Problems dissolve. He can do what he can do, and he doesn’t have to think about it. He doesn’t even have to put it on like a glove. It operates from inside him, moving him in explicit directions, into situations where he can display his wares. This is what most people think of as magicianship.
JUNE 19, 2011. People often are impaled by a metaphor.
They hang on the end of it, they dangle there. They’re swinging back and forth between something old and something changed, but they don’t feel that movement.
They look at the right hand, but they don’t see the left hand of possibility. They’ve never learned about possibility.
A bottle is a bottle until it becomes a prism, and then it is just and only the new thing.
If it was suggested that being able to carry around a sleek little case that gives him the ability to talk to another person a few thousand miles away is enough, that he never has to open the case, he would stare through the suggestion, as if it were invisible.
And suppose, just suppose that somewhere there existed a civilization whose language was nothing but possibilities. If you put him there, he would behave as if he were in an invisible place.
He might look for visible people who could help him set fires and burn down the invisibility. Or he would pray.
Perhaps after a thousand years, he would hear his first word there. And then he might have a thought, the sort of thought he’d never had before.
JON RAPPOPORT