I once witnessed a show put on by the famous King of Spoons, Uri Geller. I am sworn by the Magicians’ Guild not to reveal what I saw, but I have been permitted to tell you what follows.
I have a few psychic powers of my own. I predict that one day you will find yourself, through no fault of your own, sitting in a tiny 400-seat theatre in Brecon waiting for Geller to begin his magic show. You will look around and be gratified to see that only a dozen or so people have turned up, and that three of those are children. The theatre, tiny though it is, is bare. On the stage a screen will be showing the beginning of a TV documentary about Geller, the part where they lay out the World According to Uri as a preliminary to knocking it flat. The technician will leave the tape running just a little too long and you will hear things that are not complimentary to your host. Geller will make a hurried appearance on stage and give the technician a look that says, “if only I didn’t need to preserve my psychic powers, you’d be a fly lunching on a dung heap.” The technician will be unmoved and un-transformed.
Geller will be dressed in jeans and a tee shirt. He will claim that his only stage costume is at the cleaners. You will suspect that he just couldn’t be bothered to get changed. He will quip that, when Les Dennis was faced with such a small audience, he bought everyone pizza. Geller will not be so generous. He will ask if anybody has read about his recent acquisition of a house or boat or car on eBay. A female member of the audience will pipe up, her voice aching with adoration. She worships the One True Geller and all His works. She knows of His shopping, for did He not outbid the false purchasers? And was He not patient and forgiving when the vendor declined to accept payment in spoons?
There will follow an impromptu trivia quiz in which the audience, all but you, will be keen to display their knowledge of all things Geller. Your reluctance to participate will not go unremarked, the audience is too sparse for it to be missed. Geller will glance nervously at you from time to time, calculating the odds. Your cards are marked, your rabbit shaved, your spoons tarnished. Are you an emissary for James Randi, debunker of psychics? An unsympathetic journalist perhaps? Do you have a concealed camera? A concealed weapon even? He only feels comfortable among Believers, but if he calls security and has you thrown out, will you go to the press? Can you afford to sue? It’s a tricky one and his psychic powers are not helping. For the moment he will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Bored with the trivia quiz, Geller will turn to the important event of the evening: the car boot sale. “Who will give me a hundred pounds for this spoon?” he will ask. The audience will be slow to respond. They are not quick thinkers and don’t realise that Geller has moved on. They are not sure of the right answer. Could it be David Frost? “You can sell it for twice as much on eBay!” Geller will assure them. He will proceed to sell the believers all manner of Geller kitsch, adjusting the outcome of each sale to suit himself. Someone buys a day with Geller at Uri’s home. Somebody else buys an autographed book, but Geller will give him the torture day instead because “he bid more.” Nobody will know quite what they’ve bought but they are content, for has not Geller prophesied that they will make their money back manyfold on eBay? Their prosperity is written in the spoons.
By this time you will be convinced that you have been sitting in the theatre for two thousand four hundred and eighty-six years, but Geller has miraculously slowed time and it’s only three-quarters of an hour. And not a single trick yet. But he’s about to do one. To the right of the stage is a blackboard. Geller will ask for a volunteer to write the name of a colour on the board. “Just an ordinary colour,” he will instruct them, “like red or blue or green.” All of a sudden you picture the show where he learned that this instruction was necessary. Somebody once wrote, perhaps, ‘beige’ on the board and Geller, with his child’s vocabulary, didn’t recognise the word. “Beg?” he would have ventured. “Is it big? Is it beggy?” You will begin to laugh, and once you’ve started you won’t be able to stop. The audience, such as it is, will glare at you, your laughter is as welcome as an outbreak of Tourette’s at a christening. But Geller is looking at you in abject terror. “Is this where Uri meets Uzi?” he is thinking. You can picture his interior monologue. “It’s their fault, not mine. I just give them what they want. If not for these dummies I’d be stacking shelves in Asda. Shoot the audience, not me. Do it to them, not me!”
Once you have regained your composure, the show will continue. The audience, unaware of Geller’s Winston moment, will settle back to bask in the radiated psychic glow. Geller will correctly divine the colour written on the board, demonstrating that he has a reading age of at least five. There’s a video camera on a tripod on stage. It’s pointing at the blackboard. Could the monitor screen on the camera have assisted him in any way? The believers don’t care. If he’d turned and read the colour directly from the board, they’d have been convinced they had witnessed true magic.
Geller will do the spoon trick of course, offering to sell the remnants to anyone with any money left, and he will do his other signature trick, the watches. This is how it will go. Among the props on stage is an open-topped cardboard box. He will show the contents to the audience. Look, just ordinary watches. No tricks here. The box, Geller will claim, contains broken watches given to him by members of the audience before the show. You will think this odd since you were not invited to contribute a watch, and there appear to be more watches than audience members. Geller will prod around in the box, select a watch, and – praise be! – it is working. He has a box containing watches from Geller-knows-where, and one of them works! No, two of them work! How could such a thing be? Scientists are baffled. Believers are thrilled.
Now the children will have their turn. They have been promised that if they sit quietly through the show, a wizard will bend their spoons. They have been waiting patiently for the wizard to appear. No sign of him yet. The children will be invited to come on stage. They approach, bearing their gifts like three wise men in a low budget nativity play where the tallest boy in class is playing Mary, Joseph and all the shepherds combined. But the wizard has no intention of bending their spoons. Possibly, you will think, he is afraid they will sell them on eBay – eBay figures prominently in Geller’s life – and deny him his rightful share of the proceeds. Possibly he prefers to work with prepared spoons. Possibly he’s just bored and wants to go home. Whatever the reason, instead of keeping his promises, Geller will line them up and give them a lecture of such adorable cuteness that you will want to throw up. In his broken English he will tell them to be kind to babies and kittens, pick lots and lots of pretty flowers, feed their bunnies, and always do what mummy says. It will be evident that he has never met a child before, isn’t at all sure what they are, and doesn’t much like what he sees. Their parents notice nothing and beam proudly.
The two little girls, six and seven perhaps, are used to grown-ups. You get prodded and poked, you have to recite stuff – monday, chewsday, weddingsday - or sing a song. You have to say bless to babies because that’s manners, but you can’t say knickers to anybody because that’s language. Sometimes you get talked at, just like now - you just wait for the noise to stop and ask for an ice cream. Mummy tells them at home that a psychic, a kind of Harry Potter, will bend their spoons. They don’t know what a sidekick is and prefer their spoons straight – surely the food will fall off otherwise? – but try to show the proper enthusiasm. They haven’t met Daniel Radcliffe and, knowing grown-ups, they hadn’t really expected to. Now they wait patiently for their parents to rescue them and prod them back to their seats ready for their next performance.
The boy, on the other hand, is nine or ten, and he is angry. He’s been forced to sit through this … this church, this maths lesson, this visit to loony-nan, and now he’s being lectured by a … a teacher who talks like his baby sister. His parents have lied to him yet again. He isn’t going to meet the wizard and it has all been for nothing. He is wondering whether Geller counts as a proper grown-up, and what the repercussions will be if he spoons him in the groin and makes a run for it.
At last their ordeal is over and the children return to their seats. Now he will make the grown-ups stop smoking. The Geller method, in case you’re trying to give up yourself, is to say, “I will stop smoking,” and then stop smoking. It really is that easy. The words have extra power when spoken in the presence of a wizard, of course, but the basic principles can be applied at home. Many say the words but don’t stop smoking. This is wrong. For the method to work properly you must do both.
But what am I doing? I’ve left you stranded in the future in a magic show that has, in subjective time, lasted long enough for a whole new race of dinosaurs to evolve, and for a cataclysmic event to wipe them all out again. When you emerge from the theatre you won’t recognise a thing. God will have corrected his mistakes and made a world simple enough for hairdressers and solicitors to understand. The prettier a thing is, the more healing powers it will have. Medicine will be learned from coffee-table books with many pictures and few words. Stars won’t be nasty science-things any more, they will be lights in the sky that send messages from the pixies to tell you of your personal marriage prospects, and how you can achieve your dream of being famous on the telly. Everyone will be granted one psychic gift and one only. Yours will be the power to lengthen the spouts of teapots. You will make a living by demonstrating your one trick again and again and again and again and again….
I’m so sorry to have got you into this. This world is not for you. Leave now, before it’s too late!
Comments
mykle | August 6, 2008 - 20:45
Took me a while to digest FTSE, and in the meantime I found this...
Jools Holland and Joan Armourplating eh? http://www.breconjazz.co.uk/
Didn’t know that Geller could play the spoons but I’ll bet he’s more entertaining playing them than bending them.
In the end I figured that you were saying that there is magic all around if we bother to get our head out of a book and look.
That going to tea parties and discussing great literature can’t compare with a walk through the countryside in the sunshine or shoes off along the wet sands beside the sea.
That children see a lot more clearly than we do because we see what we want to see.
That we live on an awesomely beautiful planet but we only see it through our TV’s.
That’s progress folks!
FTSE100 | August 6, 2008 - 21:09
Hi mykle. Yes, the Brecon Jazz Festival is deservedly famous and they always have lots of cherries in the lineup. The theatre, on the other hand, books a bizarre collection of acts. They've got Jim Davidson coming up in November - I wonder how many will turn up to that? Lots of tickets left if you're desperate to see him - followed by Rob Bryden a week later - sold out, as you might imagine. I don't know who's on the week after - Pinky and Perky probably.
Thanks for reading my effort. It wasn't intended to be at all obscure. I think you might be reading too much into it. I'll look at it again, although it will probably look the same as last time...
mykle | August 6, 2008 - 22:51
I didn't laugh at this FTSE and I wondered why.
I decided that, like a lot of my stuff, it was somehow too serious and not relaxed enough.
That it was trying too hard to convince... and consequently the humour was spread too thin.
Might be just me though...
I'm a bit tired tonight and my modem makes at least fifty attempts before it finally posts.
mykle | August 6, 2008 - 23:05
I know what it is...
Your stuff usually 'feels' sunny but this one is somehow, like todays weather, a bit dull and overcast :O)
That's putting it a bit strongly, FTSE, but I'm just trying to draw the analogy.
Only seven smileys left :O(
FTSE100 | August 7, 2008 - 08:57
Thank you mykle. Your comments are more useful than I can say. As you might guess I really did see Geller perform and his show was as I described it. Worse, in fact. I did burst out laughing in the middle of it, I couldn't help myself, the whole thing was so absurd. Maybe it would have been funnier just to let Uri perform on ABCtales.
The kids were pretty pissed off that he didn't bend their spoons, and Geller really did subject them to the horror I described. In short, Geller is entirely to blame. Shoot him, not me!
It's not that he's a fraud - of course he is, but that's no news to anybody. The thing I can't forgive is that he's such a dull, lazy, incompetent and boring fraud. He hasn't had to learn a single new trick in thirty years, nor has he even bothered to become proficient at the ones he knows. Why should he? To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, why should he give them bread when all they want is stones?
This piece was excised from something else I was writing about Geller, cut out because it didn't suit the tone of the rest of the piece. I added the first couple of lines and the last paragraph to prop it up and pushed it onto the ABC stage to see if it had legs of its own.
My theory, after reading your comments, is that you have to be sure what you want a piece to do. Whether, in the words of Arlo Guthrie, you wanna end wars 'n' stuff, or whether you want to entertain. If you're not certain, it probably won't do either.
So thanks again for your comments. I'm now having doubts about the original Geller piece, but I'll finish it anyway and see how it goes. After that, the forecast is for brighter and sunnier pieces for ever and ever!
mykle | August 7, 2008 - 10:09
I love this modem (NOT).
mykle | August 7, 2008 - 10:13
Good morning, FTSE!
I'm a bit off colour still so pardon this post if it sounds like a rant...
I don't know much about Geller - other than he seemed to promise a demonstrable power which was beyond the ken of pyhsics.
At the time people were looking for new realities, acid was dissolving the blinkers of the 60's society
and revealing that the dogma of both Christianity and Newtonian physics left a lot to be desired.
Somehow by opposing we merely strengthened the grip of those who manufactured the blinkers and they simply altered the design to cast doubt on God altogether and transfer any hope of magic to some, new, mysterious religion called "Quantum Mechanics."
Einstein had convinced us that Newton's mysterious force at a distance "gravity" was really due to "nothing" being curved and called this "nothing" space/time. Those of us who knew that there must be an ether and THAT could appear curved were over-whelmed by the power of E=MC squared - (which seemed to me to be a consequence of the Lorenz Fitzgerald transformations needed to explain the lack of an ether and so not really originated by Einstein at all).
Anyway, I digress. Geller was a hope. A pointer to something that might bring a little magic, a little light, back into lives which were starting to be darkened by cold, Godless, theories which supported an essentially materialistic model.
Geller and his ilk were looked for chinks in the soul-less, vision of a Universe created by accident when a mystrerious 'nothing' exploded and eventually, by pure chance, resulted in us.
It's possible that people like Geller had something but lost it as they lost faith in themselves.
I just feel sorry for the man who sounds like he's selling his life, spoon by spoon, on ebay!
FTSE100 | August 7, 2008 - 12:06
It's interesting you should take that point of view, mykle. If I had to grind up my own view of life and put it in a pill, it would come out something like this.
There's magic everywhere you look in the world. Not Potter magic, but magic all the same. The trouble is, you need an education and a functional brain to appreciate it. In the words of the art world, it isn't accessible.
The problem with psychics, new-age hippies and their ilk is that they want everything to be simple. God, or Mr. Bigley Bang, didn't make the world simple. It wouldn't work if it were simple, nor would it be very interesting. It would just be some sort of Lego set, and for me Lego has no magic whatsoever.
Terry Pratchett, as you know, has invented a world that runs on Potter magic. The striking thing about his books is how little difference it makes. His stories would, for the most part, work just as well if they were set in any old town anywhere. They'd need a little editing to replace trolls with circus strongmen or whatever, but they'd still work just as well. Broomsticks may be magic, but for my money a car, or a microlight aircraft if you must, is the way to go. Magic doesn't necessarily mean good!
In a world that really did run on magic, who's to say that magic would be any less complicated, any easier to learn, or any more interesting to a certain kind or person, than physics? "Oh, I can't understand magic. I hate stinky magic lessons. All those runes and stuff, what kind of nurd is into that? They'll never get a girlfriend that way. I'm giving it up next year."
I don't think any advance in physics can push out God. Who Banged the Big One, eh? Just answer me that! If big bangs happen of their own accord, what's to stop a new one kicking off inside our universe? It would be a little inconvenient, to say the least.
As for Newton, if only he'd been familiar with magnets, physics might have developed very differently. Instead of saying he couldn't see how gravity could act at a distance, he'd have said, "it's a bit like a magnet, really," and everyone would have been content. Then who knows where we'd be today.
Dan Ryder | August 7, 2008 - 12:14
i really like this, it reminds me of being a kid at butlin's, the tackiest place and surely the breeding ground of all kitsch and novel crap, it gave me a good laugh mate
FTSE100 | August 7, 2008 - 12:30
Thanks Dan. I liked your piece too, but I've already said so. When do we get some more? I can't wait!
mykle | August 7, 2008 - 14:05
The magic I meant is everyday magic, FTSE.
The magic of a sunset, the awe of the Grand Canyon, the miracle of life.
These things ARE accessible and we have simply learned to ignore them.
While technology dazzles us all with its laser lights I marvel at the sun and the magic of its beams.
The sort of magic you mean is fairly simple you just need to find an appropriate spell and keep repeating it with minor modifications until it works.
The kind of magic I mean fills people's hearts with joy and gives them a reason to continue.
In the end I suppose we more or less agree but are looking at the same thing from opposing ends hence the different view points :O)
tcook | August 7, 2008 - 17:37
It made me laugh like a drain.
FTSE100 | August 7, 2008 - 19:18
Thanks Tony, thanks Margot. I'm glad I managed to please somebody!
mykle | August 7, 2008 - 20:21
I’ve decided to stop commenting, FTSE... It seems I don’t know what I’m talking about anyway.
Here are some final thoughts to chew on...
Gravity isn’t like a magnet though is it?
Leaving aside the fact that magnets have poles I’m quite convinced that if you tried to set up a scale model of a planetary system using a big magnet for a sun and suitable metal balls for planets that the planets would always simply crash into the model’s sun. I admit I could be wrong but i doubt it.
Gravitational theory has problems and you just need to look at an Einsteinian explanation of tides to see that it certain does not simplify the problem.
Surely, a planet like Saturn would have rings that clumped together and the expansion of the Universe would be slowing down not speeding up.
Also, though spells like the ‘polymer’ spell have been fantastically useful the side-effects were never considered and plastic is littering the oceans and killing a lot of the sea creatures or making them sick. So, yes, the magic of science has its benefits but it also has its drawbacks. Science pretends to be objective and based on observation but because scientists are men it is riddled with opinion and obeys Hegel’s law that the Status Quo remains despite huge (evidential) opposition until finally a new synthesis is forced. In other words we’ve never got it right before so why do we believe we have it right this time?
Once Adam ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil he started judging things and from judgement comes adjustment and from that comes consequences.
All too often we see the benefits of change but do not give sufficient consideration to the drawbacks. Alright the new, super, duper, collider probably will not explode, but what if it does.
Build the bloody thing on the moon and go and play there and then if it does explode we will quickly learn a lot more about gravity! What? Couldn’t generate enough power on the moon – we’ll then wait until you have fusion generators and stop adding to the Global Warming problem you’re supposed to be fixing!
Even though the word seems on the edge of cataclysmic change scientists still comfort themselves with the belief that they will find a solution. So really we have just swapped a belief in God to a belief in the cleverness of men...
As the dinosaurs said when it started to get a bit nippy “We rule the world we will survive.”
Take care and keep smiling :O)
FTSE100 | August 7, 2008 - 22:49
Magnetism is, these days, a familiar form of action at a distance, that was my only point. If magnets had been commonplace in Newton's day and nobody had questioned how they acted at a distance, there would have been no reason to question that aspect of gravity either.
As for people being able to forsee all the consequences of what they do, which of us could claim to have that gift? I know my life would have been very different if I had it. But I don't conclude that I should never have been put in the position to make the choices in the first place, that I should have been denied the knowledge, that somebody should have protected me. I did my best. Mankind does its best. Life (so far) continues, both for me and for mankind. And on the whole it gets better.
FTSE100 | August 7, 2008 - 23:18
By the way, mykle, please don't stop commenting. I said your comments were useful and I meant it.
sunshine | August 9, 2008 - 16:24
Made me laugh too - not like a drain (what does that sound like?) - but I did laugh. Margot
mykle | August 10, 2008 - 15:19
And there you weren't; gone!
I was just going to add that I'd forgotten I had split my discs into two so I had 4 drives - hence they were about twice the size I quoted (I'd forgotten and just quoted the size of drive C).
Belle Green | September 14, 2009 - 03:21
This made me laugh!
Denzella | June 9, 2012 - 21:10
Blimey, Newton and Einstein,
I was just gonna say what a good read but I think I had better change that to this was an excellent example of physics couched in literary terms in order that ignorant plebs like me could make sense of a subject that usually only assiduous polyglots understood as they being more erudite could avail themselves of the scientific aspects of this superb piece of writing. Written, I might add as a piece to entertain.
Thank you...now I'm going for a lie down
Moya