The Magician
There was a moment that is not in your memories, try as you might, where you first had a thought and that thought led through tears to the thing you wanted being yours. Your first trick and the forever most fascinating. A lifetime spent learning its intricacies. Not the tears themselves so much as the pledge and the turn and the prestige.
The Magician is a card of Will. A locus of debates as old as those around God, and one side says of course there is free will, gifted to us by the same, and the other that it is an illusion. That we are chemical reactions calculable down to the blink. But see the Magician: he is an agent without doubt, and a symbol of our first preening tears for milk and our final prayers for salvation. And he holds his wand an arrow-straight antenna to focus the lightning. The lightning not from him, of course, but channeled through his Will. What a paltry notion, that to be a conduit makes us somehow less.
---
For years, I thought I chose. Writing since I barely could—fiction always, from comic books to short stories to weird little beatnik screeds—I assumed there was some rational cogitation to it all. They call it the Age of Reason because it’s in those years you’re convinced it all makes sense even if you cannot see the pattern yet. When I had a year or two left of Engineering school—not sure I chose that either—I was kicking through rain puddles thinking how would I get to this book I wanted to write with all the studying and the work and the partying into the wee hours. A compromise came to light: I would do what I could now and not fret, and then once they handed me this diploma I would change my life such that there would be time. I would focus my efforts. I would study and I would practice and I would learn. I would transfigure myself—an alchemical process—into a writer. There was no cost-benefit analysis. There was no ROI. This was bargaining with the lightning that I would find a way to run it through to the ground.
---
In the memory below your memory is a fogged-in glade, is a hollow in the land where you hid and plotted for calories. And in that place you marveled at a stick that’d fallen onto your mat, under whose possession you’d fallen. And you held it, grunting to some other cowering member of your band. And later you wielded that stick to lever termites from their home, to crack a thin flat bone, to trench through the dirt for a precious rock.
Perhaps this was the first analogy. As good a guess as any. Your second magic trick and the whole history of your race flowing from its tip. A wand is a stick, nothing less. And it is, too, an arm, a finger, a fist. And a fire is a stomach, the sky is a father. A few grunted phonemes is a rock, a baby. A lightbulb is an idea.
---
Five or six years later, I’d written a couple stories that got me invited to one of a few Meccas for us young writers. The MFA a seeming portal to Vallhalla with which we were rewarded to live our next life if the last was executed with bravery. And there was this rendezvous point, an old house at the edge of campus where some famous writer had lived, where we sat up to three times a week to talk books and writing and in-between I read those books and I did that writing and though my bills were all barely covered I was as rich as I will ever be.
While there, I wrote a book you will never read. And I read books I’d have never read if I hadn’t gone. But the most important work, it would turn out, was not quite either of these: Down from the rendezvous point, across the creek, off the backside of a little-used park, I’d found a bamboo grove someone had planted years before. Every chance I got, I would slip off twenty paces into these strange trees until I was sure I was invisible. And there I’d sit and write in my notebook and smoke a modest smoke while I listened to Ram Dass talks on my phone.
Ram Dass talked about the curriculum. About how life is a school and so you might as well learn the lessons. And the curriculum is yours alone, as much as it might be like your brother’s or your neighbor’s. You are here, he said, to learn something that maybe only you can see and you’ll learn that thing, only, by doing what you are intended to do.
And I was looking at some sentence I’d written that I thought was good. Good enough, maybe, to be worth halting my day-job career prospects and moving cross-country and all of it. Maybe the sentence wasn’t good. It doesn’t matter. The sentence itself...I did not remember writing it and read it there like some message from a future self found in a matchbox buried among the bamboo. To me it meant that I could do this. That I was a writer as I’d promised myself I would become. That I could craft a sentence and then a paragraph and then a story that would float in the reader’s head—if even just one of them. That I could get an idea—and not just that, but a feeling and perspective—out onto paper, make a mental construct real such that it would breathe and sleep and eat like a crude little creature. And I was seeing now—exhale, look around for witnesses—that my curriculum was, in fact, to write novels. That I could craft a little radio out of coconuts to pick up the faintest of signals and turn that message into a map that might guide my shoddy raft home. Quite the magic trick.
---
A pyschotechnology is when some function of how the mind works is leveraged and amplified, perhaps carried over into another context in which it might be useful. And so, Brunelleschi forced the human eye into paintings, and the Buddha saw that attachment is the cause of suffering, and Liebniz understood that the human clamor for yes/no can be a coding system from which all others would be grown like beans.
Of late, we’ve come to understand this concept of Flow. It was right there in the first major arcanum all this time—the Magician at his electrified ease—but we needed an academic to write a book. Flow is that moment when we’re engaged, almost trance-like, in our activity—and not just any, but the ones for which we’re programmed. Or destined, take your pick. And when the Flow comes, the task unfolds without any seeming effort and time passes untracked. You can hardly make mistakes and you ride each move as much as steer them. A concentration beyond concentration, a momentary hardening of the self from the flapping and jostling thing that you are to the smallest pinpoint of attention that can bear the weight of everything that you know.
---
In a moment of darkness long years, but not many, after that bamboo grove—it had all failed, nothing I’d built had toddled further than a few steps, though I still wrote every day—I sat cross-legged and sleepless on the floor of a spare room I couldn’t pay for, half-employed and half-lonely. Feeling older than I feel even now.
And so I laid down some cards. The question: “What do You want from me?” and among that mosaic response this fiery man in his flowing robes, the table before him a scatter of mystic tools. A humble question—behind it the motivation to submit, to continue the curriculum if only I could make some sense of it. And so what’s this card mean laying there at the root of the spread—a million readings and a million meanings all shades of the same.
It said, have you not been whittling and shaping that wand these years since the rain puddle. And have you not been hardening it in the flame. And haven’t you come through all of it with at least your wits. Maybe that means something to you as well, I hope it does. And it said you don’t get to be some other person and sit in some other class no matter how much you squirm and misbehave. And it said you better strap that ouroboros about your waist and stand before your table, the tools may be meager but this is a promise that they’re enough. And it said, now grit your teeth and plant your feet, close your eyes and point to the sky. It said that the only way out of this is to bear the lightning that is meant for you.