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jpleddington Loyal user Lewisburg, PA 294 Posts |
Quote:
On Dec 18, 2016, Pop Haydn wrote: Hi Whit — Thanks for your thoughts (both present and past) about this. Thanks, too, for reading and replying. I really appreciate it. Here are few thoughts your post provoked in me. As I wrote above in my response to Bill, part of what I'm trying to do is to isolate something that I think we should call "the experience of magic," and which, I think, is what makes magic distinctive. This is the moment that I think you've so nicely characterized in your work as an experience of a kind of dilemma or cognitive bind that (when it's well constructed) resists any complete resolution. I like the comparison to the Zen koan: as long as you think that the point is "solving" it, then you're missing the point. But the parallel goes further, I think: Zen koans *are* presented as problems—or, as requiring a response—and part of the process of developing a satisfying response is the experience of its insolubility. So, too, magic. It has to kick the "rational" mind into motion only to arrest it on the horns of a dilemma. *This* moment, which I think involves a particularly intense experience of curiosity, is, I think, where we find "the experience of magic" and something akin to raw wonder. What you describe as "a fountain of inductive reasoning"—an associative chain of fantasies, inventions, hypotheses, and counterfactuals—is, as I see it, something that erupts *from* the experience of magic, and arguably it's something that all good performances should encourage. But it's also true that a performance doesn't have to be especially magical to encourage this. Maybe *any* good piece of art will do something similar. (Artworks are not, after all, meant to be "solved.") You admit that your performance of the Multiplying Bottles "fools the spectators, but only part way." In this respect, while it's a wonderful theatrical piece, it isn't your strongest piece of magic. So, you write that "it mainly delights with the cartoon like energy and zaniness," and you aptly describe it as "an affectionate burlesque of bad magic that does what all good magic should do." In sum, then, I think that understanding magic—its power and what makes it special—requires understanding *both* what's distinctive about the experience of magic *and* the kind of response that experience tends to provoke. It's in this latter domain that I think your "fountain" lies, and its here where we also discover what magic shares with other forms of art. That's my current view, at any rate (I'm happy to be convinced otherwise). Thanks again for your reply and all of your work on this. Jason
philosophy & magic
www.jasonleddington.net |
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The Magic Cafe Forum Index » » Food for thought » » NEW ARTICLE: "The Experience of Magic" in *The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism* (10 Likes) | ||||||||||
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