Magic is a vital magical energy that exudes through the pores of the skin … so concentrated that E = mc² seems to be a black alchemical formula opposed to M = al² …
Magic = abracadabra times life squared.
— Juan Tamariz
I love magic. I have loved magic pretty much my entire life, certainly since I was 3 or 4 years old. I was at a wedding, and a man came up to me — I still do not know for sure who he was — and he wordlessly showed me a penny. He then put the penny inside a handkerchief, and he waved his hand over it, said some magic word (probably “abracadabra”), and handed it to me as a gift.
When I unwrapped the handkerchief, the penny was gone.
Inside, I found a tiny toy skull.
My brain exploded. I was never quite the same after that.
Every fan of magic has a story like that. For me, that first magical moment sent me searching for more magic in the universe. I have never really longed to perform other than doing a few poorly executed card tricks for my wife and daughters (or, occasionally, to promote a baseball book — this was SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO!):
Instead, I wanted to learn about magic, chase after that feeling, find out about the people who have dedicated their lives to exploding minds. When I wrote THE LIFE AND AFTERLIFE OF HARRY HOUDINI, I wasn’t writing only about Houdini himself. I was writing about that feeling. Houdini’s entire life was about exploding minds. He did it with inescapable handcuffs, locked boxes, and water torture chambers. Others did it by pulling a seemingly infinite number of coins out of the air, or catching bullets in their teeth, or making spongeballs appear and disappear and multiply, or, simply, by flying.
When I asked David Copperfield what still gives him a thrill after performing magic for a half-century, he said it’s something in the eyes of his audience.
I tell you all of this because the world is a little bit less magical today. Juan Tamariz is gone.
“(Magic) brings us headfirst into mystery … It imitates not the human being, as does theater, not the interior rhythm as does music, not the trill of birds as does singing, not nature (landscapes, people, sensations) as do painting and sculpture, not dreams as do movies.
“Instead, it imitates the power of the gods.”
— Juan Tamariz
Juan Tamariz fell in love with magic the same way I did, the same way countless people have. He saw a magic game (he always called tricks “games”) when he was 4 years old, and it exploded his mind, and he decided right then to dedicate his life to exploding the minds of others. His dynamite was a deck of cards.
There have been so many great card magicians over the last century — Dai Vernon, Johann Hofzinser, Ricky Jay, Joshua Jay, Lennart Green, Richard Turner, Derek Delgaudio, Dani DaOrtiz, on and on and on — but Tamariz was different. He was different in obvious ways. He wore a purple top hat and a black vest with a rose pinned on it, and he played an invisible violin and sang “ya, da da, da da,” when the card appeared or the deck changed colors. He was a performer, a delight, a constant presence on television in Spain. There he was, as the New York Times wrote, “an icon, less like David Blaine or David Copperfield and more like Kermit the Frog.”
But he was different in less obvious ways too. Magic is a stealth world, where magicians guard their secrets the way Fort Knox guards 4,500 metric tons of gold. But Tamariz shared. I don’t mean to say he shared his methods, though he certainly did that with countless other magicians who would travel to Madrid to learn from him. I mean, he shared much more important things — he shared his heart, he shared his love, he shared his philosophy of magic.
He shared his dream.
“What do we do as artists?” he asked. “We take a dream, our dream, yes, and we put it into other people. We show them what is in our dream. At the same time, we make them say, ‘No! This is impossible! Cannot be done! Perhaps I am dreaming now.’”
There are many Juan Tamariz magic videos on YouTube. They are all wonderful.
But I’ve always had a special love for this one — where Tamariz performs a “simple” trick for two illusionists who came to visit him. I love it because it seems so simple, and yet you know that it takes a lifetime to make anything, particularly magic, look that simple.
“The veils that cover magical mysteries are seven.”
— Juan Tamariz
While I don’t perform magic — at least not for anyone else to see — I do think about magic each and every day. I think about magic when I write. I think about magic when I read. I think about magic when I hear a song that grabs my soul, or take in a painting that takes my breath away, or see an athlete do something that blows my mind, or watch a movie or television show that, in some small way, changes how I see the world.
I guess I believe that all of it is a sort of magic.
Juan Tamariz wrote the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read about magic or art — he called it the seven magic veils. The idea, briefly, is that there are seven mysteries that are at the heart of what makes magic, you know, magic. I go back and read the seven veils of mystery every so often to remind myself of what it is that we’re trying to do — whether we’re magicians, storytellers, philosophers, artists, dancers, doctors, comedians, activists, friends, singers, or anyone else trying to connect with the world.
First veil: The mystery of love for what you do.
“The love of magic,” Tamariz writes, “it’s useless if it’s not passionate.” That’s obvious enough. But the mystery revolves around this: The audience recognizes that love. They FEEL it.
How?
They just feel it.
We know this in baseball. We can tell whether a baseball player truly loves the game or is just talented at playing it. When I was a kid, I just knew that Duane Kuiper loved playing ball. How did I know? How do you know if you are watching a magician who truly loves the craft vs. an even more skilled magician who does not?
“It’s a mystery,” Tamariz wrote.
Second veil: The mystery of effort.
Tamariz wrote that some magical games he performed required little or no effort. Perhaps it relied on something mechanical. Perhaps it was so ingenious that it was almost self-working.
And he found that throughout this life, these games were not as beloved as others that required intense energy, concentration, time, and practice. He readily admitted that the effortless tricks often had an even more wonderful payoff than the ones that took a lifetime of dedication. But people did not love them as much.
It’s like they could sense all of the joyful work he put into the harder tricks.
How did they sense it? “It’s a mystery,” Tamariz wrote.
Third veil: The mystery of knowledge and wisdom.
Tamariz, like many dedicated magicians, like many dedicated artists, wanted to know every single thing about a trick he performed. He wanted to know who authored it, when, and how. He wanted to know what tricks inspired it. He wanted to know every step of the history of the trick, how it was performed in different times, how it is performed in different places around the world.
He wanted to know so much more than he would ever perform.
This reminds me of how Bob Costas went into every broadcast with a thousand more stories and anecdotes and statistics and insights than he could ever use.
He believes, as Tamariz believed, that knowing would bring depth to the work … and that the people watching will feel that depth.
“How do the spectators know that I know?” Tamariz wrote.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “It’s a mystery.”
Fourth veil: The mystery of energy.
“I am not referring to the rhythm or the speed or overacting or screams or false attitudes, postures and exaggerated actions,” Tamariz wrote of the performer’s energy. “I am referring to when there is an inner energy that comes from and is transmitted through the solar plexus to spectators and it hits them and embraces them and moves them and makes them vibrate.”
How does a magician — or any of us — transmit that energy?
“It’s a mystery,” Tamariz wrote.
Fifth veil: The mystery of truth.
I so love this Tamariz line: “The most essential thing in the art of deception is truth.”
What did he mean by that? He meant that behind the trick, there has to be truth. That’s at the heart of art. What is it that Ernest Hemingway wrote about how to get started writing: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
But how does the audience know it’s true?
We just do.
“It’s a mystery, isn’t it,” Tamariz wrote.
Sixth veil: The mystery of a rich inner world.
This one might be my favorite — Tamariz believed, and I believe, that behind the magic, behind the words, behind the art, behind the performance, behind the story, there is the life of the storyteller. How could an audience member possibly know of Tamariz’s life? He was a magician in a purple hat.
And yet, they did know, they somehow understood that he “is grounded and feels nature, that he has developed an inner spirituality, that he has delved into other allied arts, and that in spite of it all, he is not free of contradictions, he still has doubts and hesitations and therefore deeply human and a worthy member of mankind.”
How could they possibly know any of that because he made their card show up?
“It’s a deep mystery,” Tamariz wrote.
Seventh veil: The mystery of love.
The final mystery is the simplest: The audience can tell if the magician loves them. “I’m not talking about love in uppercase, literary or grand,” Tamariz wrote. “I’m referring to affection.”
How can they tell?
“The mystery of love and magic,” Tamariz wrote.
Juan Tamariz died last week in Madrid. He was 83. I met him once while working on HOUDINI, and I watched him perform a few card tricks, and I listened as he talked about what magic meant to him.
And listening to him talk exploded my mind again.
“For me, you must use magic to express love, to express passion, to express your feelings about life,” he said. “If you do not express your interior world, if your interior world is not rich and interesting, you can still be a great showman. You can be a great communicator. You can be a great performer.”
“But,” he added, “for me, you cannot be a great artist.”
One never knows what 'magic' will show up in a JoeBlogs column. Thanks so much for opening up the world of Juan Tamariz, whom I had not heard of before, to me. I love The Seven Veils and will be thinking of them in my life and art, moving forward. Dan
I don't know if this is a compliment or not, but to me, some of JoeP's best writing is in his obituaries. He consistently finds a way to capture something - ahem - magical and yet humanizing about his subjects be they sporting figures or not.