Pen-Elayne on the Web

The Magic Behind The Curtain

Something Ampersand said in his eulogy for Al Hirschfeld struck me: "Listen: the more you do an art form, the less magic it seems. My reading of comics and cartooning is nowadays much more in-depth than it was when I was a kid, but I'll never recapture the wonder again; just how completely magical the comics are, the miracle of how line on paper forms meaning. Because I can do it myself - maybe not as well as the cartoonists I admire, but I can do it - and I know how it's done. There's a technique to it. It's not magic." (He went on to say, "Well, let me tell you: Al Hirschfeld is fucking magic." but I won't keep quoting, it's worth it to just read the whole thing for yourself.)

I can't draw (yet) but I can write and have written several published comic book stories. And I watch my husband and his friends draw comics every chance I get. And I gotta tell you, folks, speaking as someone who's lucky enough to hang with the men and women behind the curtain - it's still magic. To me, all creativity and all storytelling is and always will be magic, no matter how little or how much of it I might be able to practice myself. Every day of my life I glimpse the wonder of which Ampersand speaks. I don't feel like I have to recapture anything, because it never went away.

I have to believe in the fantasy I'd indulged since childhood, that a prince from an ancient and faraway land who's meant to find me and only me would suddenly appear and turn my life around, because that's pretty much what's happened in the past half dozen years. And if I've been blessed to see that come true, who's to say all the other cool fantasies indulged by others can't be true? Maybe there really are genies and witches and other unseen little sprites dancing about the edges of our collective consciousness. I mean, who's to say? Can You Prove That It Didn't Happen?

"Faith," said Doris Walker, "is believing in things when common sense tells you not to." I'm not about to cut off the soles of my shoes, sit in a tree and learn how to play the flute, at least not just yet. But I'm not doing anyone any harm by believing that magic exists, backed by faith and my own first-hand experiences of it. Maybe I just happen to have a broader definition of "magic" than some others.