ENTERTAINMENT MAGIC
JULY 27, 2011. No, I’m not talking about movies or television. I’m talking about people who search out material that is supposedly about magic—and then sit back and watch it AS IF it were a movie at the multiplex.
It’s all part of the ever-increasing wave of spectatorship that dominates the world.
Whereas, in fact, magic is something you DO.
It can even be described by a loose equation.
Magic=the intense deployment of imagination over a long and sustained period of time which, as a side effect, yields up paranormal abilities.
But historical research does not offer that equation to scholars interested in magic. Instead, it’s all about rituals and ceremonies, arcane symbols and initiations, costumes and hats, myths, fairy tales, and legends. In other words, entertainment.
Something viewed from a comfortable distance. Something weird.
In fact, magic is about future. Future imported into the present.
The permanent commitment to normal perception of normal reality is the basic refutation of the possibility of magic, and that’s interesting, because it tells us what stands between a person and the paranormal.
A game.
“I can see normal reality and only normal reality in a normal way forever—so now prove to me that magic exists.”
“I’ll sit in a wheelchair if I have to, to avoid climbing the mountain and reaching the top—so now prove to me there is a top in the clouds.”
It’s a game.
And most people know how to play it well.
As well as they know how to avoid deploying their imagination.
Even artists know how to downplay their imaginations.
The exclusion of imagination is like starving people circling a table laid out with a feast and never picking up a single morsel off a plate. You could even shove their faces into the food and they’d refuse to open their mouths.
“I have no TALENT for eating.”
“I’ve forgotten how to eat.”
“Do I use a fork?”
“Is there a manual I can consult?”
And finally:
“Let someone else eat for me. I’ll watch them. I’ll enjoy it.”
Entertainment.
It turns out that civilization isn’t principally sustained by people coping, on and on, with normal reality. It’s sustained by bursts of imagination.
And that creates a problem, because if .00000001 of one percent of the people live through and by imagination, everyone else stagnates.
And then it doesn’t really matter what system is promoted as the very best system. The decline sharpens.
The counter-weight to elite control and fascism disintegrates.
Suppose a director created a movie which, somehow, miraculously, by its very nature, made every member of the audience leave the theater with the IRRESISTIBLE impulse to make his own movie, come hell or high water.
Then you would really have something.
Well, there are many movies like that, if you subtract the word “irresistible.” There is much art like that.
The tonnage of inspiration art brings to the table is shocking.
And so is the force of resistance against it.
And if you open up the definition of art to mean the invention of new realities, you can see how widely the refusal extends.
The force of it, though, is really nothing more than an indifferent shrug. Which, as a painter once said to me, vanished completely the first time he laid a brush to a canvas. In one second, his life transformed.
That’s magic.
JON RAPPOPORT