Magic

A story by Rev. Ken Reeves
August 5, 2001

Once upon a time, there once was a magician whose tricks amazed even himself. As he performed in clubs around the United States, people would ask him, "How did you do that?"

"I don't know," he had to say.

He would privately admit, "Something in my tricks mystifies even me. In front of an audience, letting my fingers run routines with some coins, I'd see everyone's eyes widen, and I'd be astonished too. Something would happen, what, I would not know."

When he wasn't performing, this magician taught anthropology in Chicago, and he received a fellowship to travel to Asia to research the relationship between magic and medicine. He thought he'd use his tricks to gain access to native practitioners. He also wanted to explore the secrets of his own magic in cultures where magic was a serious art used for healing and transformation.

I began in Sri Lanka, he reported later, performing on streets that smelled of incense and of fine dust lifted centuries ago. Less than a week after first making coins disappear "the young magician from the west" was known throughout the island. Crowds followed me everywhere. The diseased, the blind and crippled asked me to cure them with my powers. When I tried to show them my tricks were out of my control, they thought I was hiding my real powers and felt insulted. I fled Sri Lanka in a crisis of conscience.

I decided to begin fresh in Indonesia. I spent a month observing the culture, keeping my magic up my sleeve, waiting until I could anticipate its effects. Then I began walking by rice paddies, plucking handkerchiefs from the air.

Sorcerers contacted me, through children or friends, inviting me into their homes. I lived with a healer in Java. I traded magic with a spirit medium in Bali. They thought my presence in their houses enhanced their own access to the gods and accentuated their powers. I felt a little fraudulent, but told myself I was researching and learning.

I would often ask them, how? "How did that ritual heal that peasant farmer?"

I would get shrugs, wistful gazes into the distance, sympathetic smiles. One said, "I don't do anything. The healing comes through me."

"But what do you do so that the healing comes through you?"

Shrug, gaze into the distance, sympathetic smile.

Then one day I sat in a rice stall in a fishing village on the coast of Bali. Two old women cooked the rice and served. Groups of fishermen ate and conversed. One fisherman sat alone.

Standing to pay, I held out the coins for one of the women. My fingers opened; the coins were gone. The woman and I looked at each other, astonished. I turned my empty hands over several times, looked on the dirt floor behind me, then looked under my rice bowl, and there they were. I reached to give them to the bewildered woman, opened my hand, and the coins were missing again. The men watched silent. One suggested I look under my bowl again. Not there. I stared around. One of the men backed into the street. I shrugged my shoulders at the women. I looked at the man who was eating alone and motioned for him to lift his bowl. He looked at the others, then raised its edge, and there were the coins. The fishermen shouted at each other, incredulous. The women doubled over with laughter.

The man who had uncovered the coins stared at me long and hard. As the others drifted into the street still shouting, he leaned over and asked if I would be so kind as to accompany him.

He introduced himself as Gede and led me toward the beach. We entered a house, and the man draped a blanket over the doorway. We sat cross-legged facing each other. Gede gripped my ankle and began to talk.

He told me he was a poor fisherman blessed with a loving wife and many children, but despite his steady and enthusiastic propitiation of the local gods and ancestors, for the past six months, he had been unable to catch a single fish. Everyone agreed that a demon had taken up residence in his boat and was frightening away all the fish. Furthermore, another fisherman, who had been given a magic shell by a priest, now fills his boat every time it goes out.

So perhaps I, who had obvious powers, would be willing to work some magic on his boat so he could once again catch enough fish to feed his family.

Gede peered at me, gripping my ankle tight as he spoke. Not wanting to repeat the embarrassment of Sri Lanka. I explained that I had no control of my magic, such as in the rice stall. Furthermore, my magic was only good for making coins vanish or fruit appear, I said, grabbing a banana from the air, but useless for practical matters. Besides, I told Gede, I had never worked with fish. I was sure that since they could breathe underwater, their powers were more potent than mine. So any demon scaring them away would surpass my meager influence.

Gede nodded, released my ankle, and changed the subject. A few minutes later he showed me to the door and thanked me for coming.

I walked away hoping I had convinced Gede with my excuses. But I wondered if I had taken into account the Balinese practice of self-effacement. Any Balinese healer, when told he or she is skillful, will reply, "I am stupid." Had I now just done the same?

That night I lay in bed listening as crickets and frogs chirped and croaked in unison and then stopped all at once leaving only the lapping of waves. This happened a dozen times. Startled by each eerie pause I couldn't sleep. I thought the waves themselves might cease.

Finally I dozed and dreamed I was performing hypnotic magic for sea monsters. He heard one monster applauding and applauding. The clapping in the dream became a tapping at my window. I looked out to see Gede's wide smile. He whispered that we must do the magic now while others were asleep and the moon high in the sky. I realized Gede had seen my modest refusal as an acceptance. I found myself saying, "OK, OK."

I looked around for something to use, an empty Coke bottle, some flashpaper brought from the States. I shoved the paper in my pocket, gripped the bottle and ran out.

We stopped in front of a small boat with bamboo outriggers and slid it into the water. I scooped some sand into the bottle, waded out and joined Gede. He unrolled a small sail and raised it. The breeze sprang up, and the boat glided into the blackness. Gede sailed fidgeting and grinning. The moon slid behind a cloud.

After some time, I moved to the bow and slipped a piece of flash paper into the bottle. Seeing the beach, a line of white in the distance, I said we were out far enough, and Gede agreed. As he took down the sail, I wedged another piece of flash paper into a split in the mast. Gede heaved the anchor over the side and settled in the stern to watch.

Now how to improvise an exorcism? I stood leaning against the mast feeling the rock and sway of the boat. I tried to clear my mind of thoughts, just feeling the boat rock, sensing a rhythm. Phosphorescent algae in the water glimmered like stars. The boat became a world in itself, its mast the axis, its roots in the ocean.

I began to move around the boat in rhythm with the waves. I reached Gede and took a cigarette from his hand, puffed on it deeply then touched the lit end to the top of the bottle. The flash paper exploded with white light and a Whoosh, like a wild spirit lunging into the night.

Gede sat at attention quivering and clutching the tiller. I motioned for him to cup his hands. As he did I poured some of the sand from the bottle. Then moving around the boat I poured little cones of sand in its gunwales, one for each point of the compass: north, north-east, east, south-east, south, etcetera, the cardinal points of this world.

Then I sat the bottom of the hull and planted my hands against the wood, waiting to contact whatever malevolent spirits lurked there. I felt the need for a chant to keep up the rhythm. An old camp song sprang to mind and I sat repeating it: "Zoom, gali gali gali, zoom, gali gali." The planet rocked and swayed.

Something happened. The moon rolled from behind the clouds and bathed the boat in light. I felt queasy. I stood and swept the mounds of sand into the water. When I came to Gede I reached into the sky and pulled another cigarette, already lit, from the air. I felt feverish. I held the cigarette to Gede's mouth; he puffed. Then I took a drag, held my breath and blew a line of smoke from the bottom of the mast to the top. Feeling sick and logy, I touched the cigarette to the flash paper at the masthead. A rush of flame shot into the sky. Then I felt lifted and relieved. I took a breath, turned to Gede, and nodded. A wide grin broke across his face. He tossed the sand over his head into the water. We drew anchor and sailed in, Gede at the rudder singing.

The next day I had to leave the coast to work with a healer in the interior. As promised I returned in a few weeks, full of trepidation. I found Gede who embraced me, introduced me to his family, presented gifts, and stuffed me with food. The magic had worked. His fishing was thriving. I felt elated and strange.

Eventually my fellowship ran its course, and I returned to the states having committed to teaching a course on Asian magic and healing. But I felt in turmoil. Sure, I had helped Gede. I had met and learned from magicians in Indonesia. But still I had no control over my art. I wanted control. I wanted it to be mine. I wanted to know how I had helped Gede and to be able to repeat that magic at will. Having no control of it, I decided to reject my magic and not practice any more.

Plus back in Chicago, I felt no magic. In Bali, coins disappearing belonged in their mysterious cosmology. In Chicago, it was just a trick. I knew it was not just a trick, but I did not know what it was, and felt cynical and discouraged in this practical American city.

To top it off my car would not start, so I had to take the bus to school. I boarded feeling particularly alienated from the other passengers and grumpy. Other times I might have pulled an apple from the air and eaten it, but today I wanted to have nothing to do with this magic-less city on this muggy summer day. I sat in my seat letting other passengers stand, dreading my class, and wishing I could make myself disappear.

Across from me a woman, reading the Chicago Tribune, began to laugh. She pointed the article to a woman next to her and began to read: "At the Brookfield Zoo yesterday afternoon visitors, crowded around the popular Western Lowland Gorilla exhibit, watched in horror as an unattended, three-year-old child climbed over a protective barrier and tumbled 20 feet to the bottom of the gorillas' exhibit. Seeing the toddler at the mercy of the gorillas, the crowd began calling for help. Lying unconscious, the child was picked up by a female gorilla, named Binti Jua, who was also cradling her own infant, Koola. Videotapes and photographs capturing the incident show Binti Jua shielding the boy from other curious and potentially dangerous gorillas in the enclosure. Then she gently carried him some forty feet to the exhibit doorway, where she waited with him until a rescue crew arrived."

The women beamed at each other. A man opened his paper and began reading aloud the same story. Strangers on the bus turned to each other and began discussing this event. "I saw it on the news last night." "Unbelievable." "How could a gorilla know?" "It makes you wonder."

Amid this community of amiable strangers, I felt moved to offer my seat to an elderly gentleman. As he thanked me and began to rest his legs, he said, "I hear about this gorilla and feel like I do when I look at the stars, like sensing something infinite out there."

I agreed with him and remembered the night in the boat with Gede, so similar to this morning on the bus with everyone talking and laughing. Magic was here, even in Chicago, but still not mine to control.

I wanted control, to have a technique that exorcizes fishing boats, to wave my hand and transform a bunch of edgy strangers into a community. I wanted to have whatever it was that called a gorilla to protect a toddler. But this magic in Bali, and on this bus and in the gorilla enclosure, was bigger than me. If I could control it, that would make it small -- just sleight of hand - a trick, and not suggestive of the infinite.

I thought of continuing to reject the magic, like a suitor rejecting his coy mistress, but I noticed the elderly gentleman look at me, shrug, gaze wistfully into the distance, then back at me with a sympathetic smile. The bus still buzzed with talk of the gorilla, and I realized, I need this magic. Even if I can't control it as I wish, I need it. I need whatever it is that, in its own time, brings fish to a boat, rescues toddlers, and bonds strangers with each other. And maybe I can even receive enough grace from magic as to witness these miracles, even have the magic flow through me.