“We cannot emphasize too strongly that knowing the secret of the trick is not the same as knowing how to perform that trick.” -Jean Hugard & Frederick Braué, The Royal Road to Card Magic

                It’s a long way, maybe, from this book on learning card magic to the workshop my partner and I joined last Sunday. And in another way they’re close. In their joyfulness. Their serious playfulness. Their habit of being lost (and found) in the movement itself, and not the knowledge of it.
                Last Sunday’s workshop built on body mapping. We lay on the floor and traced one another’s shapes onto two large pieces of paper. Then we drew around and with our shapes: our hands, our legs, the messy cloud of our hair. We started by tracing with black markers. As soon as I got up I reached for colors. Purples. Pinks. Golds. Next to me my partner started growing roots, up from beneath her feet and into her legs. Watching her roots became drawing my roots. Drawing our roots became twining these roots together, weaving them, our papers and our hands and our colors playing together. At the end of the workshop we were invited to share about what we’d drawn, and I realized I didn’t want to say anything. It’s not that I hadn’t liked the workshop: I’d love it. But I’d felt something and learned something in the drawing, the time together, the crawling on the floor to find my colors, and I didn’t (not then, at least; not yet) want to put any of it in words.
                I know the secret for a few card tricks. At one point I knew how to perform two—how to push a card through the table, maybe, which was always a delight to share on a bored afternoon when we’d forgotten why talking had once felt exciting. Beyond the tricks (or through them?) there’s this playful wonder. This magic. The what? The how? Too often, in thinking, I can mistake the secret of the trick for the practice of its performance, but it’s in the performance that I’m always falling in love.