“You know, Eugene, you can judge a magician
by how well they cover their mistakes.”
—Channing Pollock
I once read that in order for a plane to fall out of the sky, seven things have to go wrong all at once. It is exceedingly rare for that to happen, which is why the odds of a plane crashing are 0.000001%. That’s many times rarer than winning the powerball jackpot, apparently.
Maybe I should have become an airline pilot instead of a magician, then. In magic, in order for a trick to succeed and spark wonder — to take flight — seven things have to go right all at once, like actions and timing. (The magician’s oath prohibits me from naming the other five.) So the odds of failure in magic, the chances that a trick will fall flat on its face, are fairly high.
In fact, the only way to work out the kinks after countless hours of practice is to invite failure by trying out a magic trick in front of real people instead of the practice mirror all magicians have. Appropriately, we tricksters sometimes refer to this process as logging flight hours. It can be humbling, it can be embarrassing, it can be downright painful — but it is also necessary. And it can be some kind of wonderful, too: The magician learns to set ego aside and grow, gradually coming to see failure as a friend and teacher. As you reveal weak moments or discover what-could-possibly-go-wrong, you learn how to turn a mistake into a miracle. A problem into a pirouette. A tragedy — like having a spectator mistakenly shuffle face-up cards into face-down cards — into a triumph. (Magicians: See what I did there.)
Right now, many people who support democracy and fervently believe in love and compassion are feeling like we failed at something. We failed to keep a dead-inside demagogue from returning to power. We’re told we failed to read the tea leaves, to hear what is really going on in America. Liberal hubris turned into liberal tears. The indifference of the elite. In dozens of conversations since the November election, the overriding theme I have heard, other than outrage and trepidation, is a feeling of failure: How did decency lose and everything we taught our children not to be win?
So perhaps it’s time to take a page from the magician’s playbook and shift our perspective, so we can turn this so-called “failure” into something useful. And for this, I have to call on one of magic’s great teachers, Eugene Burger.
Eugene (1939-2017) was a beloved performer, author and philosopher of magic based in Chicago. He performed in bars and clubs and for corporate and private clients, and lectured extensively in the magic world. Bald and bespectacled with a flowing beard, possessing a hypnotic, deeply sonorous voice, and always dressed in black, Eugene Burger was a real-world Dumbledore. In fact, for years, he served as the dean of Jeff McBride’s Magic Mystery School for magicians in Las Vegas. MAGIC Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential Magicians of the 20th Century. I only met Eugene once, years ago, when he and Jeff offered a memorable weekend master class in Salem, Massachusetts. An absolutely mystifying performer, Eugene was universally loved by magicians, and we miss him dearly.
In the last book he released before his death,1 Teaching Magic, Eugene recounted a conversation he had had years before with Channing Pollack, a legendary stage magician who also had a career as a Hollywood actor. “You know, Eugene,” said Pollack, who was known for elegant magic and an impeccably polished stage presence, “you can judge a magician by how well they cover their mistakes.”
The thought really hit me. Channing wasn’t saying we judge magicians by their successes but by how well they cover up their failures! Among other things, this presumes we will have failures. Needless to say, this was something I had never heard from my parents when I was growing up. My parents wanted success for—and from—me. They were not interested in my mistakes. They wanted success and not failure.
But Channing was saying something that turned my parents’ approach, however well intended, on its head. He was accepting failure. His words became part of my own philosophy of teaching magic. As I tell my students: Give yourself permission to fail!
Failure is one way we can learn — and grow. Failure is not the goal but is usually part of the process of learning. It is a means to the goal. How do we learn from our failures? By accepting them, analyzing them, and asking ourselves what we can do if they ever happen again.
I know all that probably sounds like just another TED talk. Of course failure is a part of life. Of course we learn from our failures. I myself have learned far more from my failures than I ever did from any of my successes. It’s funny, too: I can’t name any of my so-called successes, but I can clearly recall my failures, such as my own contributions to the dissolution of my first marriage. What I learned from the period following my divorce some 20 years ago has made me the sparkling fellow you see before you today.
The operative word in Eugene’s reflection is acceptance. Acceptance that things won’t always go according to plan, and that assuming this makes it easier to summon the will to move on when things go awry. The pundits, who have a funny way of rushing in to predict the past, have handed down their verdict: The libs haven’t learned anything from the pounding they just got. But that’s the perspective of people who think conclusions must be produced every 24-hour news cycle. And it’s premature. We’re not done learning.
The question before us is not simply how do we move forward. The question is, how do we cover for our mistake — trusting that decency would dominate — and turn this moment in history into a magic moment? It’s very possible that our failure to preserve democracy through the vote will motivate us to save democracy through myriad other means—and discover resources we have long overlooked. Like folks on the other side of the aisle who have been going it alone. Like our international allies. Like the power of calling our legislators and those of the opposition. Like listening to each other. Like banding together not just for star-studded rallies but for marches in the freezing cold.
That’s how a magician would do it: reach into the toolbox for a move, a clever device, a psychological ploy. The key is to act like that was your plan all along. The key to overcoming the adversity we now face is to act like we wanted ugliness to peak so it could burn itself out. And that is how we can make it disappear.
Remarkably, Eugene actually co-authored two more books, with magician Lawrence Hass, Ph.D., that he insisted could be published only after his death. These books contained his most closely guarded secrets with which he made his living as a magician. Eugene Burger: From Beyond was published in 2019 and Eugene Burger: Final Secrets was published in 2021, both by Theory and Art of Magic Press.
I like it : "predict the past," "We're not done learning." The struggle continues. Thanks for the encouragement!