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The
TRICK
BRAIN
CHAPTER TWO
Set forth as a prosaic list of nineteen magical achievements, this make-believe world we call magic undoubtedly loses much of the mystery and glamour we like to feel surrounds it.
In itself, this list supplies sufficient material, alone, to cause endless arguments and discussions wherever two or more articulate magicians may be found together with nothing more important to occupy their time. But, as will be discovered eventually in this work, I am confident, whether or not the list meets with unanimous acceptance, it will serve a very definite purpose in the ultimate objective in this book.
Really, it matters little as to what the scientifically correct list may be I am not omniscient, even though occasionally my tone may sound as if I think I am. And this tone is not intentional, please believe me.
In the maze of ponderings and considerations to follow, there will be plenty to occupy our minds without quibbling as to the word to use or the classification to include or the niceties of a general definition. My own hope is that magicians will accept the important feature of this work, the attempt to accomplish this book's purpose, as far outweighing the results achieved.
Trust me for a while. I think I know where we are going. So if you will let me lead-really, I am certain no harm shall befall you-we may reach our destination just a bit more clearly and perhaps even a bit more definitely than we would if we should pull and haul at each other, or stop for petty bickering.
It is important to realize, I think, that practically any of the foregoing effects may be done with objects, persons or livestock. This is particularly true of the effects that have to do with physical accomplishments.
You may cause a steel rod to penetrate a glass plate. Or a steel saw may penetrate through the body of a living woman. As tricks, both of the happenings listed seem different because of the objects associated together in the accomplishment of the result. Yet as far as the effect goes, you have achieved the identical thing in both cases. You have caused solid matter to penetrate other solid matter, apparently without harming either.
The time element enters into these effects. Any effect may be accomplished instantaneously. Or gradually. The ultimate result is unchanged in its fundamental regardless of the period of time involved in the operation. So in all cases this final classification has excluded the element of time.
Localized conditions do not alter the effect fundamentally either. The operation may be performed out in the open or under cover. It does not matter whether the trick is done uncovered, or within or beneath something. A production is accomplished whether the per-former reaches beneath a handkerchief to cause a cigarette to appear or he just plucks it from the thin air, out in the open.
Let me repeat again: Because an effect may be a repetition of the same effect I have not chosen to give it a new classification. In my opinion, just because the same effect is repeated, a new classification cannot be valid in any attempt to catalogue basic happenings.
It would be no more valid to give such a trick a new classification than it would be to create an additional division for a trick which might, in the course of its presentation, include vanishes, transformations, penetrations or other combinations.
Tricks that include multiple effects are simply combinations of the several general basic effects. In this work they are so considered. As an example: The Passe Passe Bottles Trick is a compound transposition. It includes movement of both a glass and a bottle, each trading places, from one place to another. Here, There and Where, a combination transposition manufactured by Thayer's, is a complex transposition. An orange, a bottle and a quantity of rice change places.
Method of causing a deception has been the principal stress in much of the literature of magic for many decades. This is probably due to the emphasis upon concealing the secret of operation. Even today, to a great many magicians the most important consideration is concealing this so-termed secret. So it is not unreasonable to assume that the importance given to method has caused the propagation of many new methods, or secrets.
Whether this secret is the important factor in magic, or whether magicians have allowed mystery as to method to lead them far from the fields they should inhabit is a matter which was discussed at some length in the first book of this series, SHOWMANSHIP FOR MAGICIANS. My convictions have been expressed. There is no need to reiterate them here.
But perhaps an indirect argument in favor of abandonment of mechanical conceptions as the chief factors in magic may be found in this work when the various inventions are revealed to depend upon a paltry nineteen general effects. These in turn are accomplished through the use and re-use of but a few methods, ingeniously disguised sometimes, it is true.
Of course, it is difficult to convert as untamed a thing as magic to an academic set of basic components, and at the same time maintain an interest for the average type of person interested in magic. While it is being done, I apologize. Yet I have the excuse that the objective towards which we are headed necessitates, even demands that it be done.
I know that no one knows exactly what an effect is, with any degree of certainty. And the same may be said of a trick. So at the beginning let's just agree that the general definitions I have given these terms are adequate for purposes of what is to follow here.
In magical parlance, an effect is a general result that seems to happen, through apparently supernatural means. But while it is happening, the spectator is perfectly aware that nothing of the supernatural is associated with the agency of accomplishment. Indeed. magicians, if they are strictly ethical, are morally under obligation to insist that their methods are purely natural.
And a trick, of course, is an effect performed with specific things or people.
So please hang onto your hats.
We are about to embark upon a whirl, the like of which I doubt if any of you have experienced before.
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