Life Lessons, Italo Calvino, and The Roman Shuffle
So I was sitting across from SR. It was approaching midnight. The Applebees waitresses were wiping down tables, sitting at the bar having after-work drinks. SR and I will sometimes stay until one--the manager doesn't mind.
SR's been through all the evolutionary phases of card guy--from card punk who thinks he's inventing new revolutionary concepts, to move monkey, to forward-thinking student, to contemplative seeker of the Real Work. That's how I see it anyway. But he's read just about everything on the subject of cards published before 1997. That is to say, that while most of his professional material involves using strong subtlety over involved sleight of hand, he know all the moves. I think I've dug up something pretty fucking obscure and he'll look at me and give me a list of three other people who independently published it ten years before the reference I'm thinking of. And not only that, but he can do all the obscure moves.
"So I've been reading Marlo's Riffle Shuffle Systems," I say. He looks up from his shuffling and nods. "That's some good stuff in there--a lot of groundwork." I nod. I started reading "Systems" to get info about cull shuffling--for me, it was a purely technical endeavor.
"You looked over the Roman Shuffle," he asks. I had. It's a cool way of doing a strip out from an in-the-hands riffle shuffle. I didn't think too much of it at the time--you need a table to do the cut at the end and I had learned the regular strip out anyway, so it didn't seem like something that really needed my attention all that much. "Yeah, I said," and proceeded to do the shuffle with what I thought was a pretty good technique. "No," he said, "not like that."
I didn't really get it--I had executed the shuffle exactly like it was described, covering where I needed to, getting a really fine brief. I thought it looked good. "It's not that kind of false shuffle," SR told me. He picked up his cards and did it. I watched closely--he did it nearly the same as I had, but there was something about it--I just figured it was the fact that SR has a much more natural touch when it comes to cards than I do.
"Do it again," he said. I did. "No, stop, right there. You need to actually try to shuffle them." I looked down. "You're doing a false shuffle. You need to do a real shuffle."
Let's back up for a moment. Hopefully someone out there other than me has heard of a guy named Italo Calvino. Easily one of my favorite writers of all time. His prose style is the kind where you read it and while the words he uses don't seem particularly significant, nor his sentence structure anything out of the ordinary, you can tell that this is a kind of writing unlike any other. It has this feeling to it, the way it flows into your brain. If you haven't, go out and get a book called Invisible Cities. It is my favorite novel of all time (And Lolita, too. And some other books that are also my favorites).
Calvino also wrote, just before he died several essays entitled "Six Memos for the Next Millennium." The first one is entitled "Lightness." So just what the fuck is Lightness? Quite simply, it is the removal of weight from things. Here is a short excerpt:
My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language...
I tried to identify myself with the ruthless energies propelling the events of our century, both collective and individual. I tried to find some harmony between the adventurous, picaresque inner rhythm that prompted me to write and the frantic spectacle of the world, sometimes dramatic and sometimes grotesque. Soon I became aware that between the facts of life that should have been my raw materials and the quick light touch I wanted for my writing, there was a gulf that cost me increasing effort to cross. Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world–qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them...
At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no aspect of life. It was as if no one could escape the inexorable stare of Medusa.
(and no, I don't actually believe than anyone will read this)
And now to the nature of "The Roman Shuffle." I won't obviously describe the technical details of the move--it's not my fucking job--however, I can provide a general outline of what it is, at its core. The shuffle's intended objective is to closely resemble the casual riffle shuffle used by the amateur lay person--one who does not know how to bridge the cards--it's a riffle and coalescence of the packets. This is followed up by a cut. It is a strip out shuffle, but the mechanics to get into it are different.
So what I showed to SR was the shuffle as according to the dictation of the mechanics, but I failed to do it as described. This is not a burn-the-hands shuffle. That's not to say that it couldn't be burned--it can, but that's not the purpose. It's supposed to be disarming--the Magician is shuffling the cards like everyone else--it's fast, direct, not at all flourishy--entirely utilitarian.
The shuffle is a "Light" shuffle. Marlo removed the weight from it. Many tabled riffle shuffles are, as Calvino writes, "a slow petrification." They have weight. For lightness to exist, so too must weight exist. We as cardicians learn and practice things that do carry weight with them. Lightness is a vector--it is mobility, it is unencumbered.
When I did the shuffle for SR, I did it as a demonstration of a shuffle. This is what technique becomes most of the time when it is performed--that is, the effect is not performed, but the technique. The effect may carry weight, or it may be light, but the technique, I believe, must be light. The Roman Shuffle embodies this lightness. I finally understood what SR meant when he told me I was doing it wrong--the way the shuffle is actually designed is so that the cards must be shuffled--actually shuffled; the construction itself creates the false elements. The shuffle that I do must be a true shuffle and I must trust the technique to be light without actually making it so.
I'm am quickly realizing that this will make no sense whatsoever to someone who doesn't know the Roman Shuffle. I'm okay with that. Read Calvino, study Marlo. When you've done that, you can tell me how much I'm wasting my life (it's a lot).