The other day I was trying to focus on Marion Zurbach’s excellent Les Héritiers-x (“The Inheritors-x”) and one of the many of the thoughts bedeviling me was that in a reality where everything is supposed to be a story or a part of a story, small plot twists take on an outsize role in determining what this or that lived narrative “is really about”.
There’s of course the American Ur-scold-proverb, “The Kingdom was lost for want of a nail”, designed, efficiently, to both scare light-heartedness out of and promote obsessive compulsion in boys and girls. And though experience has taught adults that “history”, and kingdoms, too, come down to clashes of competing turpitudes and cupidities, there has now got to be a zillion quintillion competing “turning points”, such stuff as key assassinations or decisive battles or crucial votes in Congress or, for God’s sake, some random line in the “Bible”. And all that.
Truth of experience, though, remains truth of experience. Small things don’t determine big things. Mostly, just the opposite. Big things like quantum entanglement, culture, or the aggregate of personal learnings, determine the small things, like turpitudes, cupidities, kingdoms, nails, assassinations, battles and votes in Congress. Then, one AMAZING story or another is shaped out of one or more of these small things. The big things are ignored.
Mark my words, our civilization is now firmly set to croak on click-bait.
With an hour’s worth of amusing patter and theatrical variations on the ordinary disappearing coin trick, Zen magician Tom Cassani managed to pass this clear insight into the iterations (and reiterations) of the small in a big, big world and also keep me delighted and hanging on the edge of my chair, too. Cassani has something of Mephistopheles under his 1984-style black overalls, something of a true Magus. So I guess that’s why. I’ll certainly be on the lookout for his next show if not for the insight, then for the entertainment.
Tom Cassani’s shtick is this:
From what one might suppose to be a grimoire, he feigns following instructions for one or another way of presenting the old disappearing coin trick. The sleight of hand stays quite unrevealed, however. Instead, his idea is to focus spectator attention on the disappearance, finding ways to get spectators nearer and nearer to its locale. He even sets up a big video screen so we can all better scrutinize the disappearance and ignore the sleight of hand behind it. Interestingly, Cassani has only one other trick in this shtick: he “enlarges” the coin once, but only enough so that everybody sees that he can do another trick, I expect.
As the show goes along, I realize that the trick works every blessed time not because Cassani is such a clever fellow, but because, like every last person in the room, I am fixated on the disappearance because I’m telling myself that some little thing, a twitching finger, a hitch, a switch will reveal how the trick works. But it won’t. There isn’t really any trick in it at all: my perception doesn’t allow me to see it. All the magician has to do is keep the coin out of sight, as a body does with a treat for a dog and a very common political maneuver.
So Karine and I walked back to the trolley stop for the long ride home. I held that my conclusion is that magic is a science, an excursion to the odorless, tasteless, touchless, soundless and sightless holes that are half of the woof and weave of what biological seeing affords and largely ignored when examining our grasp on the world. Those stories we tell ourselves, I told her, are more like the flashes of silver we might see as a salmon labors upstream than a silvery salmon laboring upstream. Karine, who tends toward the Bishop Berkeley in things, could, nevertheless, find no real stones to kick so I won’t burden the reader.
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I saw “Iterations”, written and performed by writer, performer and magician Tom Cassani, at Théâtre Silvia Monfort as part of the 23d Biennale de danse du Val-de-Marne (2025) dance performance program on 21 March 2023. “Iterations” was developed from Cassani’s ‘Expanded Magic’ research project with support from Forecast, Skills e.V. and Florentina Holzinger and in collaboration with Karen Christopher, CJ Mitchell, BOLD!, Augusto Corrieri, Tim Bromage, Hester Stephan Chillingworth and Nik Taylor
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