What the Hell was I Going to Talk About?
Stop. That's what I need to remember. They have to remember something and I have to remember something. My something is stop. Remember that. I can remember that.
It's a surreal sort of experience--it's about synthesizing a sort of ephemeral impression of something not quite concrete. That's how I would choose to summarize the feeling of Hofzinser's card effects. They are indeed a sort of poetry--in the Ezra Pound imagist kind of way. That's how it feels to watch them.
When they're done right, anyway. Everybody seems to have a version of the Hofzinser Four Ace problem, but I really feel like most versions are just missing the point. They try to tackle a solution and they manage to leave behind the essence of what the trick is. It's a very pure effect, unencumbered--again harkening back to my little (ha!) discussion about lightness.
Now, I've personally never seen Hofzinser perform (my DeLorean is currently at the shop), but there is a certain visual style that I can assume about how his effects might have been performed. We're talking about a magician in 19th century Austria. This is not a Coney Island busker, not a 70's magic club gigolo, not a DSLR youtube magician. In examining the modus operandi, one can infer a refined and slow style of performance.
Modern methods don't capture that. I'm not saying it's the best way to perform every trick, but I believe that it requires a modicum of focus. I think these sorts of card effects beg to exist in an atmosphere in which they can be performed for their own sake. These are mysterious things.
Recently (very recently, in fact) I performed what I consider to be the best version of Remember and Forget. That is, a version in which everything is focused and straightforward. They select two cards, remember both, I lose the cards into the deck and ask them to remember one. They do and I cut to the one they remembered, without asking them which it was beforehand. And then the card they remembered changes into the card they forgot.
I use very little patter, only speaking when providing instructional information. The reason is because I think that this effect contains implicit meaning and there is no need to contextualize it outside of the abstract procedure. It's visual poetry--you show them pictures and they respond.
The thing I realized that I need to work on is that I need to allow the effect to breathe more. After cutting to the card that they remembered, which is in itself a very stunning effect because it traipses into the mental realm of something that transcends the physical, I move right into changing the card into the one they remembered.
Obviously this has to happen sooner or later, but my fear now is that by revealing the second "forgotten" selection, it may hint at the method that the two cards were under my control the entire time. Instead, I need to delay this moment, to separate it as an effect. The impression that I'm attempting to create for my participant is that by bringing something into their mind, it causes it to become a reality. I need to do this without ever explicitly stating it as so.
One Idea that has occurred to me is to, once the card is switched, palm off the card I've shown as being their remembered card and hand them the deck and ask them to look through to find the card they forgot. In my mind, I'm somehow relating this to searching for something that they know exists but can't quite place. When they can't find it because either they actually forgot the card or because it's not in there, I feel that naturally by bringing the thought alone into their mind, the forgotten card now must be the one lying on the table.
This feels really out there, searching for something that may end up just being a quick trick. Maybe so, but I think that really there shouldn't be such a thing as a throwaway effect, that somehow beneath all the layers there is always something that's going to be nagging at you, trying to make its voice heard.
But whatever helps me sleep at night, right?