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. When it happened, it made no one laugh. My father was trying to raise pigs to supplement his income just as he tried other things, other country things, or city jobs (like commercial sign painting, for which he had a good deal more aptitude), he tried what he could because we were poor~ not desperately poor but, yes, poor~ for only a man beset by money worries tries such things, a fact one must gloss over in the Grahams' living room in Birmingham, Michigan, on this perfect summer day. It was not an experience intended to be recounted as an anecdote, raising the pigs/chasing the pigs/slaughtering the pigs/discovering one day that their meat had rotted, it was a kind of domestic tragedy~ a profound humiliation for Frederic Oates must have known himself, for all his farmer's ineptitude, superior to such endeavors. But now the domestic tragedy is long since dissolved, just as the old farmhouse and the old barns are gone~ the humiliation is forgotten as if it had never been~ my father tells this story as effectively as anyone might have told it, and we are all laughing, and we are all sympathetic, and I sat there for some minutes struck to silence, seeing how, for us, for the Oates family, yes but for all of us, what is Past is retrieved only by way of language selected for a specific purpose~ the Past is in fact the consequence of a sequence of Presents palimpsestically overlaid upon it~ and that by degrees erased, abandoned, as reality yields gratefully to myth, as serrated edges are blurred to smoothness, raw experience to family legend. And now that my parents' lives and mine have so changed, have been so transformed as if by magic, perhaps we are ready to surrender the past to anecdote, past griefs to present laughter, I sat thinking these things, disturbed, yet not seriously, for in such affable gregarious social situations one can't be seriously disturbed by much, and it was impressed upon me how, if you survive, everything in time becomes a narrative, an artful structure of words, words that do your bidding, a way of proclaiming not This happened to me but, in triumph, I did this. If you survive.Page 175The Magic ShowTim O'BrienAs a kid, through grade school and into high school, my hobby was magic. I enjoyed the power~ I liked making miracles happen. In the basement, where I practiced in front of a standup mirror, I caused my mother's silk scarves to change color. I used a scissors to cut my father's best tie in half, displaying the pieces, and then restored it whole. I placed a penny in the palm of my hand, made my hand into a fist, made the penny into a white mouse. This was not true magic. It was trickery. But I sometimes pretended otherwise, because I was a kid then, and because pretending was the thrill of magic, and because for a time what seemed to happen became a happening in itself. I was a dreamer. I liked watching my hands in the mirror, imagining how someday I might perform much grander magic, tigers becoming giraffes, beautiful girls levitating like angels in the high yellow spotlights, naked maybe, no wires or strings, just floating.It was illusion, of course the creation of a new and improved reality. What I enjoyed about this peculiar hobby, at least in part, was the craft of it: learning the techniques of magic and then practicing those techniques, alone in the basement, for many hours and days. That was another thing about magic. I liked the aloneness, as God and other miracle makers must also like it not lonely, just alone. I liked shaping the universe around me. I liked the power. I liked the tension and suspense when, for example, the magician displays a guillotine to the audience, demonstrating its cutting power by slicing a carrot in half~ the edgy delight when a member of the audience is asked to place his hand in the guillotine hole~ the hollow silence when, very slowly, the magician raises up the blade. Believe me, there is drama. And when the bladePage 176slams down, if it's your hand in the hole, you have no choice but to believe in miracles.When practiced well, however, magic goes beyond a mere sequence of illusions. It becomes art. In the art of magic, as opposed to just doing tricks, there is a sense of theater and drama and continuity and beauty and wholeness. Take an example. Someone in the audience randomly selects a card from a shuffled deck the Ace of Diamonds. The card is made to vanish, then a rabbit is pulled out of a hat, and the hat collapses into a fan, and the magician uses the fan to fan the rabbit, and the rabbit is transformed into a white dove, and the dove flies into the spotlights and returns a moment later with a playing card in its beak the Ace of Diamonds. With such unity and flow, with each element contributing as both cause and effect, individual tricks are blended into something whole and unified, something indivisible, which is in the nature of true art.Beyond anything, though, what appealed to me about this hobby was the abiding mystery at its heart. Mystery everywhere permeating mystery even in the most ordinary objects of the world: a penny becomes a white mouse. The universe seemed both infinite and inexplicable. Anything was possible. The old rules were no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. If my father's tie could be restored whole, why not someday use my wand to wake up the dead?It's pretty clear, I suppose, where all this is headed. I stopped doing magic at least of that sort. I took up a new hobby, writing stories. But without straining too much, I can suggest that the fundamentals seemed very much the same. Writing fiction is a solitary endeavor. You shape your own universe. You practice all the time, then practice some more. You pay attention to craft. You aim for tension and suspense, a sense of drama, displaying in concrete terms the actions and reactions of human beings contesting problems of the heart. You try to make art. You strive for wholeness, seeking continuity and flow, each element performing both as cause and effect, always hoping to create, or to recreate, the great illusions of life.Above all, writing fiction involves a desire to enter the mystery of things: that human craving to know what cannot be known. In the ordinary world, for instance, we have no direct access to the thoughts of other human beings we cannot hear those thoughts yet even in the most "realistic" piece of fiction we listen as if through a stethoscope to the innermost musings of Anna Karenina and Lord Jim and Huck Finn. We know, in these stories, what cannot be known. It's a trick, of course. (And the tricks in these stories have been elevated into art.) In the orPage 177dinary sense, there is no Huck Finn, and yet in the extraordinary sense, which is the sense of magic, there most certainly is a Huck Finn and always will be. When writing or reading a work of fiction, we are seeking access to a kind of enigmatic "otherness" other people and places, other worlds, other sciences, other souls. We give ourselves over to what is by nature mysterious, imagining the unknowable, and then miraculously knowing by virtue of what is imagined. There are new standards of knowing, new standards of reality. (Is Huck Finn real? No, we would say, by ordinary standards. Yes, by extraordinary standards
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