Poof!
“Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
– Roald Dahl
Suggested Listening:
John Cage
“Organ²/ASLSP”
[“Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible)” is a composition for organ that Cage wrote in 1987. The score is eight pages long and includes a cryptic instruction to perform the music “as slow as possible.” Interpretations of this have been wildly varied, with renditions ranging from several minutes to many hours to days. (The version linked above is 32 minutes long.) On September 5, 2001, a performance in the medieval cathedral of Halberstadt, Germany commenced. The piece has been playing there continuously ever since and is scheduled to conclude on September 5, 2640. You can find out more about that here.]
Suggested Reading:
Roald Dahl
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
(Note that the story as it appears online is in an anthology with un-numbered pages; you’ll need to scroll until you find the title.)
Originally published on Instagram
November 8, 2022
The top image of this post is not my work. It’s a scene from the 1921 Buster Keaton film, The Playhouse.
As many of you will know, I posted a still from a different Buster Keaton film back in June. People have been asking me ever since how they can see that movie, a 1926 production called Radio Silence that co-stars Charlie Chaplin.
The answer to that question is revealed below.
*
When I was eight or nine years old, I saw a friend of my father’s perform a magic trick. It went like this: First, the friend borrowed a cigarette from my old man. After lighting up, he began to tell a story about an Indian boy who could hold hot coals in his hands without getting burned. As he told the story, the magician drew on the cigarette and blew smoke into the palm of his left hand. With his right, he massaged the smoke into the skin, explaining that this was a sacred rite that would empower him to do what the boy in his story could. When his palm was sufficiently anointed, the magician held his arms out in front of me and waved his hands back and forth in a manner that evoked birds in flight. He then made a loose fist of his left hand and dropped the cigarette, ember first, into the hollow that his fingers formed. When he held out his hand for me to take a closer look, I could see the cigarette smoldering there. Coils of smoke rose from his fingers and stung my eyes.
Transfixed, I studied his face. Not a grimace; not a wince. It was as serene as a yogi’s.
What could I (a North-American kid of Irish-Russian ancestry) have known about yogis then? Coincidentally, I happened to be reading about one named Imhrat Khan at the time.
For anyone who doesn’t know it, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a mesmerizing novella by Roald Dahl. Although it’s ostensibly for children, I’ve read it again and again over the course of my life. It’s about a man who studies the teachings of aforementioned Imhrat Khan and trains himself through yogic practice to defy the laws of nature. I’ll say no more about the plot, except to add that hot coals factor into it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m sure that my father’s magician friend knew I was reading the book and showed me his trick in order to bring some of the excitement and mystery of the story to life.
*
I must have stared at the cigarette smoking there in the magician’s hand for ten or fifteen seconds – certainly long enough for it to have badly burned him. Then he said that he could do something the boy in his story couldn’t. With that, he brought his hands together, clasping the left in the right, and asked me to blow on them after saying the words ‘hocus pocus.’ In the instant that I did so, he pulled his hands apart and opened them to reveal that the cigarette had vanished.
I was spellbound, of course. I asked to examine his hands. Not a mark. I looked on the floor. Nothing. I asked him to roll up his sleeves and turn out his pants pockets, and he casually complied.
When this failed to turn up the cigarette, I did the only thing left to do. I pleaded with him to teach me the trick.
He refused.
A few months later, when I saw him and my father again, the magician invited me to shoot some pool. After I started hounding him mid-game about the trick, he told me that if I ever beat him at eight-ball, he would teach it to me. That felt like a pretty hopeless bargain. I was too short for the table and had to stand on stacked telephone books to make my shots. I secretly hoped that he would let me win. But that didn’t happen.
We’d see each other occasionally after that, and whenever we did, we’d go to the pool hall. I got taller and could eventually play with my feet on the ground, but I always lost.
I wonder what I would’ve done if I’d had access to the internet then. Would I have researched the trick online? Probably not. I like ritual. And even then, I understood that there’s something sublime in waiting for a mystery to go from bud to bloom in its own time.
Then one day I won. I was twelve years old. After making me promise I wouldn’t start smoking (ahem), he showed me how the trick worked. The elation I’d felt as I was winning the game settled into an odd sense of grief. I was thrilled that I finally knew how to perform this amazing act — except that now, without any mystery in it, I mourned the old enchantment.
*
What does any of this have to do with Buster Keaton or Radio Silence?
Legend has it that Keaton’s famous stage name (he was born Joseph Frank Keaton) was bestowed upon him when he was a child vaudevillian by Harry Houdini himself. Even if the story is apocryphal — as some say it is — it’s poetically perfect. Keaton, if not technically a magician, was a master illusionist. On film, in an era before special effects or camera trickery were commonplace, he managed to make the unfathomable manifest. Watching him defy the laws of nature himself inspires the same kind of awe in me that the idea of someone holding a hot ember in their bare hand and then disappearing it does
I’ve read a few Keaton biographies, but none of them exactly carefully. Whenever an author has begun to explain how this or that stunt was done, I’ve skipped the passage. I just don’t want the magic to be demystified. With Keaton, as with conjuring, the suspension of disbelief puts us into the realm of the divine. Hocus pocus! Holy smokes!
*
‘Hocus pocus’ is an interesting term. It’s been associated with magic since at least the 1600s, when it was a common name for magicians and jugglers. There are many theories on its origins. One has it that the phrase is a perversion of the Latin hoc est corpus — meaning “my body” — which the Catholic Church attributes to Jesus at the Last Supper when he invites his disciples to partake of his flesh and blood in the form of consecrated bread and wine. Today, of course, ‘hocus pocus’ is both an incantation on the same order as ‘abracadabra’ and a synonym for deceit. It should come as no surprise, then, that it’s also the root of the word ‘hoax.’
*
I didn’t intend it as a hoax, but the truth is — for anyone who I unwittingly deceived — Radio Silence is a figment of my imagination. I thought it up after my image of Mona Lisa painting Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait was shadowbanned on Instagram. Why the shadowban happened, I still don’t know. It might have been because I was over-engaging with other IG users (a punishable offence, I’ve since learned); or maybe it was because the AI flagged and removed a saucy phrase of Shakespeare’s that I cited in a comment on someone’s page a few days before I posted; or perhaps it was just bad algorithmic luck. Whatever the reason, I was irritated, and Radio Silence is how I exorcized my annoyance.
I figured the fake movie review would give the joke away. I even put a few clues in there just in case. The name Alan Smithee in the byline was one of those. (I encourage anyone who’s curious to google it.) The word ‘meta’ was another. So was the whole allusion to a teenage John Cage sitting in the movie theater. In retrospect, maybe the references were too cryptic to be effective clues. Or maybe — most likely, now that I think of it — the people who were fooled by the photograph didn’t read the review at all.
In any event, the Radio Silence photograph is a collage. I’m including the constituent parts below. Reluctantly. With the caveat that if I were you, I wouldn’t look.
*
As for the trick with the cigarette: I wish I could post a video demonstrating it. Unfortunately, that’s not possible. I’m in a cabin in the woods on a remote island at the moment, and I’ve run out of smokes. I came here to escape big city distractions while I work. I’m here with no car, a 45-minute walk from the ferry terminal, and it’s sleeting outside. I’ll just have to wait out the storm.
If you’d like to see it, I’m sure there are variations of the trick on the Internet. I suppose there must also be online tutorials (whether from conjurers or killjoys) that divulge how it’s done. I’ve never looked. If you’re tempted to do so, I have a better idea. Why don’t we arrange to get together sometime? We can meet in your town, or mine — or maybe someplace in between. When we do, let’s grab a baguette and a bottle of red wine and then head to the nearest pool hall. If you beat me on the table, I’ll teach you the trick. I’m not a bad shot, but I’m not an especially good one either. If it comes to it, though, with a little sleight of hand, I’ll let you win.
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