TERRY'S RANT ABOUT MAGIC

Steven Kayser wrote me about magic this week, and so I went and dug up Terry's old rant:

Terry used to laugh at the New-Age. All those witches and vegetarians, PC solstice lovers looking for the singular power of magic to fill up their lives.

"They know there's magic out there, they feel it," he said. "They just don't know where to look."

Patting the white plastic case of the burping Mr. Coffee, he smiled mischievously at the big joke, "Or, maybe, afraid to look in the right places; more like they'd be OH SO offended if they actually knew where the magic went."

" 'S in the machines, kiddo," he whispered, grabbing a mug from the rack. "The big boys, the robber barons, all them industrial multinational czars, that's whose got the magic. Those poor second-generation hippies would weep if they figured it out.
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"Think about it," he said, pouring sloppily. "These proto-humans, waking up to the world a hundred, hundred and fifty thousand years ago, the magic was all around 'em, they could feel it, too. They were more in touch with it from the gitgo. It was just a question of finding out how it went together, what the rules are. They knew they had something, just had to work with it.

"They had the time, too." he called over his shoulder, knowing I'd follow him back to the cubbyhole faculty office he's conned out of some department head. "You think they just sat around those caves, painting walls and hunting and gathering? Hell no! Experiment with the magic. Every dig I've ever been on has some place in it, a proving ground, testing area, see how the magic works. You think they poured all that hard-earned knowledge into mumbo jumbo chants, god worship? Hell no! That came later, when they needed control of the feeble-minded masses (the same folks these new age types are descended from, no doubt.) The real magic went just where you and I would put it, too. In every day stuff, the tools and artifacts of life that insure survival."

"Surely, that's just discovering the laws of physics, chemistry, stuff like that," I suggested, sipping the nasty coffee.

"Nah, that's a chicken-egg thing, that viewpoint." he said, expecting me to follow the logic. Terry pointed up at the heavy wood and glass shadow box hanging on the wall. There was a series of flint points lined up on the foam rubber under the glass. A series, I knew, depicting the development of those weapons, from the earliest known arrow heads down to the last beautiful, artistic late-Neolithic points. Terry had dug up every one.

"Y' want proof? Do a wind tunnel test on the arrow-dynamics of those suckers.

"No, " he said, waving me into a corrupt naugahyde chair by the desk. "DON'T. I already have, 'n they come up unstable as hell. But they'll still kill a goddamn rhinoceros deader'n hell! The shape has to do with the magic, not the goddamn in-flight characteristics. Trust me.

"Bows, spears, knives, all the basic technology of your basic cave man, filled with magic. Oh yeah, the drums, rattles, all that shaman stuff, it's in there too. But don't miss the point, bubba, the witch doctor ain't hustling up some spell to throw on some lizard, or driving away some evil spirit with mandrake root. He's putting the magic into an atlatl so that he knows when he's got it exactly this long," he said, holding his hands a little more than two feet apart. "he knows the sonofabitch will work."

"You do leverage tests or some kind of calculus on those too?" I teased.

Terry just smiled and tossed a monograph toward me from the pile resting on the floor below the bookcase behind him. "In there somewhere..."

"OK, OK, but..."

"No buts! Today, ask any engineer, he'll tell you a dozen things in his field that work and he doesn't know why. Say, sequences of assembly that must be done one way only or the machine won't run.

"Proof? What are the mathematical probabilities of all the systems and subsystems on a Cadillac Coupe deVille taking you a hundred thousand miles, ...no ....TEN thousand miles?"

"Entropy, engineering ..."

"Bullshit! It's magic! Most everybody has a goddamn NAME for their car! Why? Just so when you pat ol' Bessie on the dashboard, and say ;'c'mon' baby', nine times out of eleven she'll start, just one more time. 'N' Ever notice how a car runs better after you wash it?"

"So what?"

" 'S where the magic went, my man, exactly where it went. Your hoogy moogy friends'll never find it out there at Stonehenge, waiting for the goddam sun to pop up."

I tired of it about then and we sat sipping coffee and staring out of the narrow steel and glass window, looking across the campus.

"How is Anne, anyway?" he said after awhile. I remember that.


Terry's rant is from Blue Corvette Betrayal