Tricks, Love, and Magicks

To be able to perform magic trickery very well, you have to master the force, misdirection, cunning wordcraftery, and sleights. It is in these four essential principles that magic is most diametrically opposite to love, if we understand and reduce love to terms of the question, reassurance, honesty, and transparency - for, as one definition goes, magic is the art of deception, implying a cleaving from the other; and love is the closest we get to being one with an other.

First binary: Force and question

The force in magic is already a predetermined "choice" the magician presents, along with others, to his audience. Without going into mentalism and the magician's choice, the force is the principle of rigged order in what appears to be chaotically random concatenations of things or options. It is in this forced/rigged action of the magician forcing your hand, unbeknownst to to you, that the trick comes to fruition.

When asking a question of a lover, you do not ask merely to hear what you desire to hear; you ask when you do not know. Love does not force a hand this way: you do not question to test. To do so would be like to play a malicious god, ready to dole punishment once your lover does not satisfactorily (read: in agreement to you) answer your question. Thus, do not ask questions such as "Do you love me?" if you are not prepared for, or at least cognizant of, the possibility of a "Not anymore." Questions, therefore, are in essence a radical openness to the othering of the other, no matter how painful that othering would be.

Second binary: Misdirection and reassurance 

Misdirection, when trying to do something and wishing the other pay attention to something else entirely. Distraction, ulterior motivations. For the trick to work, it is thus a trick of attention-leading: Pay attention to this, while I do something else. Bread-crumbing just enough for interest, but not committing enough and asking enough attention for it to be a thing.

Love, on the other hand, does not - indeed, cannot (following these four items in love's binary) treat attention this way. Love reassures the other that it is itself, and is present, and fully so. It assures by its fruition and reassures by its full attention, always already given. For that is the very defintion of commitment, is it not?

Third binary: Cunning wordcraftery and honesty

Being word-clever is a rare gift: it allows you to be a slam poet, a novelist the caliber of a Pratchett, or the greatest casanova of all time. In all these, you wield words like weapons, even if you do so smoothly that it resembles a butter knife more than a sword. A double-talking magician would do well to add to his performative arsenal a way to fool though verbs, not merely through fingers.

Honesty is in some ways opposite to the Dutch ˈklev - the root for both "clever" and "cleave." An honest sentence cannot but be a simple, unbroken statement, without play (no matter how innocent) or complication, straightforward in intention, and direct in (or has no, even) implication. Word artists are everything but honest: intricacy in wording allows for the richness of literature. That is why something both honest and clever necessarily comes out tautologous: A rose is a rose is a rose. It is what it is.

Fourth binary: Sleights and transparency

See the third one, and translate all meanings referring to words into actions.

From all these observations it can be shown that magic tricks and love are in principle opposites; though love is our truest form of magick (which is anything but stage magic) itself. Love is, at bottom, inexplicably moving. Gendered, it makes us reach the highest heavens and/or rooted to the earth. The most commonly-held of its principles can explain what love does: the law of similarity.

When you have found love, you have found, for lack of a better word and borrowing a saint's - one with whom cognitio per connaturalitatem happens. This similarity in interest, in wavelength, in what have you, is what is present in like creates like, although in this case it is not a case of creating as much as emerging as properties of the relation itself. To this connaturality we give the name fate, or destiny. To the absence of this we give the name loneliness - having no one to share our nature with.

Magic trickery, save for actual infidelity, is one of the most efficient ways to stay separate from an other, and to maintain this distance. Love, when done properly, eradicates this distance and proves that there is no need for it, no space, actually, for it. Magic tricks lets us experience magicks in a separate fashion from ourselves; love is the feeling of magick translated into two worlds uniting.