The Magical

Is magic real?  Being defined as the supernatural, it clearly is not natural, and so no, it is not real.  But with contradictions present in so many very real distinctions in our lives, we might expect the magical to be present in a very real sense.  Reading here before this exposition is complete, we might expect several outcomes.  In one outcome we find below a claim to real magic—yes, a person can predict the future, move an object by force of will, make things disappear with just a thought.  In another outcome we find below a claim that the beauty of a sunset is magic enough.  In the former, new opportunities are open to us because what was previously impossible now comes under consideration as possible.  In the latter the familiar objects of our lives are recast in a light that qualifies them as magic.  The former is exciting until the lack of impossibility of our new powers deflates their excitement back to the ordinary.  The latter is disappointingly already ordinary until in the course of our lives we experience a sublime moment in which a very real and possible thing strikes us as undeniably magical.  In fact we will assert both and look for proportion in the ordinary and sublime.

Correspondence will provide us our answers.  As we've observed in Virtuosity, we can gain virtuosity, effect in our world, by recognizing the implication that opposites are in direct and predictable correspondence to each other.  Distinction being the recognition of where one thing is not another, we can take all implication and consequence to be exactly the prediction correspondence enables.  Here we will explore the implications of our conception of the possible.  When we ask what are the implications of an ordinary or magical act and find that they coincide we may see where the magic is real.

Witnessing this is the easiest of them all, because we all do it all the time.  If we couldn't predict the future we could hardly expect to walk for lack of knowledge as to where the ground will be when our foot falls next.  The examples are endless and increasing in impressiveness: predicting the trajectory of a ball with basic physics, predicting the arrival of a train with a schedule, predicting the actions of a familiar person, predicting our own course in life.  As to the fantastic kinds of prediction—predicting the time of our greatest crisis so that we may avoid it—are they real?  Well, who's to say they aren't?  Or rather, is it really relevant?  In the short term, simply looking both ways as we cross the street can be seen to save our lives on a regular basis.  In the long term circling in of tragedy, if one did predict as a child something precarious in his or her future, certainly that foreknowledge would have changed that person's behavior turning a grave prediction in to something that ultimately turned out to be just plain wrong.  How often do we have concern about future events that never come to pass?  They may just as well have been true predictions that we made the most of.

The same sort of reasoning applies to other forms of the magical.  If I concentrate hard enough can I move the sugar jar in front of me?  Funnily enough, modern physics actually allows for the possibility of just about anything.  There's  a non-zero probability of even the wildest of events.  Therefore there is a non-zero probability that every time the sugar levitates it is immediately following my concentration on doing exactly that.  But that's really not what we're talking about here.  What we're saying is certain everyday powers, available to us all to create with high probability, correspond to the magical.  Do we expect that these powers be unexplained?  No, if we could really levitate on demand we'd recognize a new real force and define it as exactly that which results from our concentration on levitation.  Further, if we had control over the motion of an object with mere thought wouldn't we simply classify that as muscular impulse—that the object we move is an extension of ourselves?  Coincidentally, we do have the power of will over matter.  We move our bodies at will, lifting our arms to take the sugar.  We exercise our vocal cords at will and ask our table guests to pass the sugar.  Our understanding and manipulation of our environment is that force.

Of course we can make some things disappear.  We can make our chosen distinctions disappear.  Can we make something more substantive disappear?  In Conflict we implied that the park is really only a distinct physical thing exactly because we distinguish specific function in it as opposed to other places in our lives.  Can we make the park disappear?  Aside from the possibility we've left open in all our discussions that we don't have final say over all the distinctions in our lives, and therefore possibly not over the park, a more compelling reason for our not commonly being able to make the park disappear is that it functions for a lot more than strolling and relaxing.  If the park really did become completely irrelevant, one certainly might question whether it exists at all.  But other of our distinctions ensure its relevance, for example through its function for people directly or indirectly in our lives and therefore for us.  And along the lines of reasoning we applied on prediction, who's to say the changes in our physical lives aren't in fact application of our prestidigitatorial skill?  When I move my arm, am I making it disappear from one spot and making it reappear in another?  In fact, if the world is that which I am not, when I simply move from one room to another, which party changed, the room or me?

Perhaps this example lacks the truly exciting sense of magic.  When I move my arm or the entire Earth below my feet they don't reappear in completely unrelated places.  Can we say though that the fact that they only move in such predictable ways is exactly what characterizes them as physical things?  The supposedly non-physical things such as ownership or destination certainly change in the apparently unconnected ways that the location of a rabbit does in a magician's act.  When people transfer ownership on the condition of the roll of a pair of dice, that recognizable thing, ownership, does change hands in an essentially unpredictable way.  Does choice of destination, whether a favorite place for recreation or immediate stop for supplies, qualify as a thing that I can move to disparate places?  If a physical thing such as mass is recognized by the force it exerts, when I change my choices thereby changing where my strength lies, does the disparate object of the force of my strength indicate a disparate change in a physical thing?

We can hardly expect to identify in words what it is to be beautiful or sublime, but when it feels magical some part of it is putting us face to face with impossibility.  When we see come into existence as if from nowhere something that has great meaning to us it shouldn't come as a surprise that we experience at least a bit of shock if not an actual moment of sublimity.  When what was once an ordinary collection of clouds, sun and horizon becomes something new, a sunset containing within it its own patterns and interrelations, we see the appearance of something that wasn't there, yet was all along.  It was there in its parts but became recognizable as beautiful in some paradoxical moment.

Maybe all beauty is magical.  When a person says something beautiful, are they simply making possible for you something that was not possible before, showing you a distinction you didn't realize you were capable of drawing?  If you weren't capable before its communication to you, perhaps you are now a new person, for the same person to have and not have a capability is a contradiction.  This still doesn't remove the aspect of contradiction since seeing ourselves anew has the magic of impossibility all over it.  How can we be anything other than what we are, yet there we are, a new person.


It may as well be that magic is real as so much of our lives carries exactly the essence of magic.  Being defined as the impossible, it surely isn't real, but being in evidence before us, we may be forced simply to recognize in which context the magical is impossible and in which it becomes the real.  Recognizing magic as ordinary and at the same time actually present has freeing benefits of both dethroning the impossible and elevating our own capability.  So, though the question of whether we can become magicians for real may be obscured by the many contexts from which we must look at the question, just by recognizing the miracles we perform and participate in everyday we can make greater effect of the strength we already possess.

tags: science  correspondence  distinction  contradiction  magic  philosophy  choice  beauty