The Magician

The Magician

The house lights flash once at two minutes to eight.
With bated breath, we all restlessly await
a dazzling exploitation of human habit:
the appearance of the wand and the rabbit.

Across strangers minds there builds a unity.
On edge of our seats we anticipate
commencing another opportunity
to witness practice and talent culminate

In exhibitions of ever unseen skills
the mechanics of which we are loathe to grasp
yet so content are we to simply fulfill
our part of the bargain: smile, applaud and laugh.

The attention of all, spellbound by one man,
a crowd who came with no desire to learn
and yet, watching him they grow to understand
that a gasp is a thing that one must earn.

To us it's so seductively confusing
as he remains, observantly amusing.
Witnessing him command the mysterious,
we realize its the jester who's the genius.

To the Artists, the Magicians and the Ice Dancers

To the Artists, the Magicians and the Ice Dancers,

You look at me, through my glasses and over my engineering degree, around my thirty-seven patents and you say things that make my soul hurt.

You say things like you should have at least forced yourself through that Calc 1 elective on your way to the fine art degree I could never achieve, or that you wish you worked at something more useful than a subjectively judged performance sport, or you belittle yourself that your entire contribution to the planet this year was twelve episodes of a goofy television show.

When I could lose days just watching you draw, marveling as you carve beauty out of nothing, pulling it from the air and out your magic fingers, when I drive four hours one way to watch you balance your bodies on a sliver of steel, crafted by deliberately accepted pain to disguise their power as grace.

You look at me and you call me a producer.

But you'd have passed Calc 1, and in a million lifetimes, I could never foreshorten the proportions of a human nose. You could hold down a nine to five before I could produce a dove, and if I spent forty five hours a week at an ice rink I could eventually master a level 4 twizzle sequence, but I could never reproduce the shared and living soul that dances between the pair of you as you skate turns and rip our collective breath away.

Maybe you're right. Maybe what science and engineering produces is more useful. But what other need is there for infrastructure, if not as a conduit for beauty? If art did not exist, what reason would there be to build a structure to house it?

You think you have no worth, because you are not a soldier, not an engineer, not a doctor.  The truth is you are the opposite of worthless.  You are the creators of everything worthwhile.  You are what the sword protects, you create what the infrastructure was built to support, what the medicine was brewed to save.  Your work is the most important of all.  It is the reason for ours.

No one needs an ice dancer to survive, but we all need things to live for.  When I was fighting cancer, I missed a lot of days of work, but not a single event in the Grand Prix of Figure Skating.

So thank you.  Thank you for the truth.  Thank you for the beauty.  Thank you for being brave enough to share your soul with us.

If Tech is the atlas that carries the world, Art provides the purpose for the effort.

Because of you, the artists, the magicians and the ice dancers, the weight is not a burden.

It is a privilege.