Clarke's Third Law

It’s odd. We’re running a Magic exhibition this holiday season, and I don’t feel the old excitement that I used to.

It's not the exhibits at fault. They're actually pretty good, if a little skimpy - I guess they must have paid the professional stage magicians a humongous fee to put their names on various tricks and record a quick video of themselves. From a design standpoint, I like how they set up the illusion in front, and then asked people to go 'backstage' behind the exhibit to figure out how it was done.

No, it’s not a bored@job thing either, it’s something a little more deep-seated than that.

See, I recall that when I was young, I used to be THRILLED by David Copperfield and his shenanigans and the weird science guy in a labcoat with three legs and what not. I mean, obviously I knew it was a trick, somehow, and part of the fun was trying to figure out how they did it, while another part willingly suspended disbelief and bought into it.

Oddly enough, in this no-longer demon haunted world, adulthood has brought such a hefty dose of skepticism that I find it very hard to believe in anything anymore.

I’m no longer willing to put aside that cynical look on my face that says, yeah, yeah, I know you’re just an ordinary human like me – it’s either sleight of hand or a just a property of science or a lot of practice and hard work, which I do respect, but hey, it’s all just illusion in the end.

I’ve stopped being impressed or startled or amazed at the unexpected. I know it’s just a clever use of patter and body language to distract people’s attention (and people are really good at focusing on one thing and missing everything else, cue the gorilla in the middle of the TV screen). Sometimes it’s just patterns, math and properties of numbers, used in a clever fashion. Hooray? Is this meant to impress me?

Bit depressing, really.

Then there was this one trick taught by a ‘professional’ Singaporean magician who had come over to teach us in a workshop. Okay, granted that all these tricks had to be simple ones that even ignorant non-performing souls could manage, this trick completely failed to stun me, while captivating practically everyone else – which of course, made me boggle and sigh at how deviant I am from everyone else.

Imagine three dice. Stacked on top of each other. The magician says he’s going to tell you the total of the hidden faces of the dice.

OOOOH! He has X-ray vision!

(Not.)

So maybe I am the only geeky one to know the properties of dice. That opposite faces always add up to seven. For six-siders anyhow.

This, to me, is not a magic trick. Come on, there is a Zahada riddle that makes you do this. This is just trivia knowledge. :P

Yet there are these people ooh-ing and aah-ing and going yay, I can go back and impress my kid that I am a magician.

...

Okaaay.

Maybe Clarke was right. Magic, technology, sufficiently advanced, indistinguishable and all that.

It does make me a little sad. These days, my reading and genre tastes veer toward grim gritty science-fiction and post-apocalyptic superheroism. Seems to be all the ‘magic’ I can stand. Fantasy? Ever since Harry Potter and World of Warcraft mainstreaming, it’s hard to take it seriously anymore. Lord of the Rings? Progressed through the ages into the classic text category already. Along with Beowulf and what not.

I mean, I don’t mind a good magic stage performance. Watching it as performance art,
that is. It’s the blend of the music and the dance and the lighting and the sex or the comic humor, plus a couple of illusions, that make it worth watching. I’d be happy to sit and watch really professional magicians like Penn and Teller, or David Copperfield, or you know, people with stage presence. But not because of the trick. Rather, it’s because of the way they provide the wrapping and narrative and story for it.

But sometimes, I wonder where the wonder has gone.