The Burden of Secrets

I keep secrets so they (the audience) don't have to. I carry a burden of secrets that literally destroys my ability to see the world in a magical way....

- Derek DelGuadio, Magician

At one point in my life, I imagined wanting to become a magician.  Most young boys go through this and successfully emerge at the other end of adolescence with more realistic career goals; me, I'm still thinking some four decades later, that if I could only find enough time to practice....

Magic continues to fascinate me because of the power of its secrets.

This is more than being compelled to know how particular effects are accomplished, but why they work.  Why, for example, can Penn & Teller disclose their methods and yet continue to entertain and amaze?

Famous TV Magic pitchman Marshall Brodien would punctuate his commercials with the line "Magic is easy once you know the secret."  This was a back-handed assurance that even the least-dexterous would be able to impress with his merchandise.  What he should have added is that, in most respects, magic is stupid once you know the secret.

This is not to say that the secrets are stupid because they are not.  Often the method(s) used in a particular effect are based on quite sophisticated concepts.  Once you know the secret, magic can make you feel stupid for having been fooled by what are pretty straightforward methods.  Anyone who has ever learned the "Illusion of the Stolen Nose" or the "Mystery of the Removable Thumb" has some sense of what I mean and what Mr. DelGuadio is talking about.



Since I was not going to be a performer, I chose what I thought would be a compromise career path.  I went to work in the theatre creating illusions of time and place to help the performers tell their stories.  I was not the sorcerer, nor his apprentice, nor even the broom carrying the bucket of water; I was the guy who made the broom.

To be sure, we were not making the Statue of Liberty disappear, or anything like that, but, by the same token, it was surprising to learn what little it takes to deceive the eye so that it takes as solid something that is flimsy, or three-dimensional when it has only two.

As with magic, the early focus of this work is on technique.  What size of brush, or type of sponge, is used to create "realistic" bricks?  What is the best way to make river rocks out of joint compound?  How do you make a root beer float that won't spill during a dance routine?  Each in their own way is a kind of magic trick, a small illusion designed to transport the audience seamlessly into the world of the story.

After I left the theatre, I then spent some time working for attorneys.  As I was to find out, this was not such a radical career change as it might, at first, have appeared.  Success in this field too depends on secret knowledge and mastery of technique.  I don't want to succumb to the conventional wisdom about the legal profession, because, to that time, it was one of the best jobs I had had and it more than prepared me for my next career which was in municipal government.

Here again were the familiar components of secrets, illusion and misdirection.  And here too was a disappointing similarity to the removable thumb and stolen nose tricks.

Also common among these worlds is the concept of secrecy as power, as advantage, as leverage.  Knowing something that others do not is what makes it possible to make things possible like illusion or profit, or public policy.

As I was also to learn, secrets are never free.  There is a price to be paid in acquiring them and there is another for keeping them.  This is the side that I see far too frequently in the work I do now.

To work in mental health is to deal in secrets. 

Almost every day, people come to our offices because they have learned a secret about themselves, or a loved one and they need help figuring out what to do with their secret knowledge.  People who live with mental health conditions exist in the same world as the rest of us.  Whether they are the person who has received the diagnosis, or a family member of that person, they know precisely what society's prejudices are.  They know what you think of them and so they don't want you to know that they're sick.  They know that a diagnosis of a mental health condition is the lens through which the rest of their life will be viewed.  Their diagnosis will be the clause at the end of ever sentence, the discount for every achievement and the rationale for every setback.  "Pencils successfully sharpened by mental patient."  "Applicant with mental illness makes typos on job application."

Is it any wonder that people are reluctant to engage with treatment?  Accepting help means letting go and entrusting your secrets to others.  This can often be a challenge with low-value secrets such as a password, or a romantic crush; can you imagine the stakes where mental health is concerned?  And lingering in the background is the specter of hospitalization, involuntary confinement and forced medication.

Never mind that the standards needed for confinement and medication, not to mention the shortage of psychiatric beds, have made that an increasingly unlikely outcome, this notion is so deeply embedded in the culture that people are often surprised to learn that instead of depression leading inevitably to the straitjacket, it can be successfully treated and could be no more of an inconvenience than are seasonal allergies. 

When people disclose their mental health conditions to us, or more frequently, their personal stories that have helped to shape those conditions, they are relying upon us to keep them.  The very process of help-seeking demands that, in order to access treatment, the consumer has to surrender some, or all, of their burden of secrets.  For most, this is just as difficult as it would be for David Copperfield to disclose how he floated across the Grand Canyon, or walked through the Great Wall of China.

And disclosure is not always a guarantee of relief.  If a consumer, or prospective consumer, discloses information about their racing thoughts, or hallucinations, or plans for suicide, they reveal themselves to prejudice and bias.  Their diagnosis, or diagnoses, become part of their identities, a classification, a membership card in the Separate and No Longer Equal club.

To work in mental health is to understand that secrets are also kept because their exposure, their disclosure, would provide unwelcome advantage to another and reveal a vulnerability.  To work in mental health is to recognize that people build their sense of themselves and their place in the world on a foundation of secrets.  Disclosing these secrets is surrendering power to others.

My boss, Paddy Kutz, has been helping people who live with secrets for four decades.  People often come to her because she is a familiar face in the community and because she is not a doctor or a counselor.  When they recognize that they are up against a problem and don't know what to do, they come to our offices and go into closed-door conference with Paddy to develop a strategy of response.  Can they get the help they need without disclosing their secrets?  Can their family member be "fixed" without it having to come out that they have a "problem?"

She has had lots of these conversations with people in all walks of public and private life.  She always has the Kleenex at the ready as she patiently explains that "secrets keep us sick."  Some of her visitors remain unconvinced and leave the office with their secrets clutched ever-closer to their breast, but many, many more, leave with a brochure and some phone numbers and a strategy for moving ahead.

It is common knowledge even among those who would not be caught dead at a magic show that magicians are sworn never to reveal their secrets.  The assertion is that if the audience knows how the trick is done, their appreciation of the effect and its performer are diminished.  If the public knows what the magician knows then there is no reason to pay to see their performances.  Jobs for magicians will disappear and the art form will die.

This position insulates the role of magician as keeper of special knowledge unavailable to "civilians."  This position places an emphasis on the trick and not on the experience of magic.  With this perspective, we focus on how Copperfield might have made the Statue of Liberty disappear rather than that he did--that we could be convinced that something that monumental in scale could vanish by the wave of his hand.  This position reduces the role of the performer from that of the artist to one of mere expert technician.  This position also relieves the performer of the responsibility of innovation:  if the secrets are protected then they can be endlessly recycled.

Some years ago, there was a manufactured scandal when Fox ran a series of specials featuring the Masked Magician.  In each of these programs, the performer exposed a variety of magic tricks ranging from the close-up effects of the tabletop to mega-illusions seen only on TV.  His stated motive for "breaking the magician's code" was to promote innovation and creativity and to help move the art forward.

What's true is true.  Secrets may create the illusion of power and control, but in their hoarding comes the responsibility of protecting and defending them and this, in time, becomes its own full time job.

I became interested in magic because of the secrets--this is not surprising for someone keenly aware of how powerless they were--but four decades later I remain interested in magic because of the opportunity to tell stories and create wonder.

There is no question that secrets provide, for a time, the illusion of power, but like most things built on an illusion, there is no permanence, no security, only, as DelGuadio says, "burden."



--Graham Campbell
Associate Director

PS - I was prompted to write this because some very significant secrets were disclosed to me.  As a result, I wanted to take action, but because they were disclosed in confidence, I could do nothing that would not betray that confidence.  As a result, I was left with homilies about secrecy and an imperfect analogy to magic.  My intent in ending with Penn & Teller  was to make the point that the secrets only have the power we give to them and, in disclosure, the "magic" is not diminished.

Tool No. 9: Deal Better with Hard Times

As I write this, the airwaves are full of what seems like relentlessly bad news for the people in Japan in the wake of the combined impact of an earthquake, a tsunami and a crippled nuclear power plant.  And in Libya and Syria we are watching a handful of rebels take on deeply entrenched and deep-pocketed autocracies.  Even in the wake of an errant attack by their supposed NATO protectors, the rebels claim no animus.  Despite the loss of life of some of their number, they support NATO’s work on their behalf.

These are present examples of what is sometimes described as the capacity of the human spirit; the ability to get knocked down and then get up again.  This capacity is celebrated in song and story and film and television show.  It is a central story in the national mythology and it is also why boxing movies are almost always successful.

So, how do you develop this ability?  How can you make yourself more resilient?  How do you make sure, after having been put in life’s deep fat fryer, that it all comes back, except one table spoon?  These are the central questions in protecting your good mental health.

On the Live Your Life Well website, they suggest basic strategies for dealing with hard times:

¨      Write it out

¨      Tackle your problems

¨      Shift your thinking

¨      Get support

***

Does writing about a problem make it any easier to deal with?

I am a horrible diarist.  I keep buying different types of notebooks thinking that the right tool will inspire me to be more disciplined about capturing my impressions of the events of my life.  In reading through a lifetime’s worth of false starts, I find that I have had a particularly uninteresting time of it. When Seinfeld was on TV and everyone was marveling at a show about nothing, I remember thinking that I could keep a diary about nothing, but even I lost interest in that.

The Internet has provided a diarist something they haven’t had before and that’s an audience.  Sure, maybe your mom discovers your diary under your bed and learns the shocking secrets of being an adolescent, but a real audience of strangers was something most diarists got only when they left their notebooks on a bus and, even then, there was no feedback loop, no opportunity to learn if they, the readers, liked your stuff.  Now, depending on your tags, you have, in theory, the opportunity to reach the entire world.

Does the opportunity for feedback change the process of trying to work a problem out on paper?

I think the answer will be different for each of us.  In my own case, I think of writing for the web like writing for my teachers:  I try to be coherent, try to apply my best understanding of grammar (which is, I admit, highly fluid) and I hope only to get positive comments in response.

Clearly, journaling is a recurring element in a variety of therapeutic processes.  The mere act of committing pen to paper forces some measure of structure on to the content.  Letters, words and paragraphs follow in a linear sequence to document an idea.  And while my circumspect nature might wrestle with finding the “ideal” sequence and structure, for others—perhaps most—this is not an overriding concern.

I remember watching a documentary on Woody Allen where he described his writing process.  Like a great many writers before him, he made the point that stories are not written so much as they are rewritten.  At the time, I remember thinking that he could save himself so much work if he just thought a bit more carefully about what he was trying to say.

Since that time, I have done a lot more writing and have come to recognize the “truthiness” of what he said.  Sometimes, most times really, you have to get all of the pieces of a story out of your head in order to look at them and to figure out if they are any good.

This was a difficult and expensive realization to arrive at.  I think I’ve spent/wasted a great deal of time working out ideas before committing them to paper when I should have just started writing.  It sounds trite, but I really have only recently learned this:  ideas and, for that matter, solutions to problems never arrive fully-formed, they are more like a block of marble from which the idea must be carved. 

In trying to work out a problem, a block of an idea might drive you to your notebook or your keyboard, but it is in trying to explain it that it acquires any elegance.

The next step, the toughest step, in evaluating an idea, or any solution to a problem is to test it.

***

The second step in building resilience is by tackling your problems.

On the Live Your Life Well site, they advocate listing your problems and then identifying without judgment as many solutions as you can.  By not ruling any solution out in advance, you give yourself permission to consider every possibility.

This is particularly difficult for me as I have an active inner monologue and thoughts do not get a chance to dry before I have evaluated them and criticized myself for having had such a stupid idea in the first place.

I remember taking a design class in school and, because the teachers were so appalled at the general level of drawing talent in the class, they instituted a series of life drawing classes.  One of the exercises was what is called “gesture drawing” wherein you put pencil to paper and, while keeping your eye on the model, you try to capture their form while they are moving.

I found this very difficult to do because I wanted to keep checking my work.  I would fuss over trying to get the first line right that the exercise would be over before I had even started.

Problem solving is always easier for other people.  When dealing with personal issues, you lose the ability to see the forest and become completely absorbed by the individual trees.

My wife says I watch too much reality television.  She’s probably right.  But there is something very compelling about immersing yourself in other people’s challenges.  Whether they are making cupcakes or salvaging logs from riverbeds I find it equally engaging.  To me, problem solving is problem solving:  the process is the same, only the nouns change.

I was watching “Ax Men” recently and they featured a sequence in which one of the “aqua loggers” became so focused on recovering a sunken log that they caused their boat to sink.

It wasn’t that they did not properly evaluate the risk, or were somehow unaware that there was water pouring over their decks and into open hatches, they made the decision that the risk was offset by the potential for reward.  As it would turn out, their assessment was not accurate and the results are captured on video, but they took the risk.

Certainly they were frustrated to have lost their work boat.  As it turned out, they were close enough to shore that they were able to secure their craft and take their equipment off.  By their reactions, they seemed very equivocal, like this sort of thing happened every day.

On the same show and working the same stretch of water is another crew with a very different approach to dealing with difficult times:  they blame one another.

Theirs is a father-son operation and each believes that their work would go so much easier if the other would only shut up and listen to them.  Granted, they have not had their boat crippled by partially sinking it in water, but they have experienced just about every other possible failure situation and all of it punctuated by the Morse code like rhythm of bleeps to obscure their relentless cursing of one another.

I’m not sure they would have profited much from the journaling process, although perhaps having a camera crew following your every move serves the same purpose.

And as for problem solving, they seem ready to tackle symptoms, but cannot yet agree on what their problems might be.  For them, it would seem important to move on to the next part of the resiliency process.

***

Shift Your Thinking

I remember coming across a quote from the science fiction writer David Gerrold:  “One fact can change your whole point of view.  For instance, did you know that King Kong was a lesbian?”

If you accept his thinking, suddenly the story is transformed from a giant monster on a rampage story to a tragic story of unrequited love.  Those pilots trying to shoot Kong from the Empire State Building are transformed from heroes into villains and producer Carl Denham’s last words, “It was beauty killed the beast,” become much more resonant.

Changing your perspective can often improve your ability to respond to life’s challenges.  This is why people go on vacation.

I remember watching a program on the principles of magic and a demonstration where Lance Burton was explaining misdirection.  He demonstrated by throwing a tennis ball against a garage door and having his dog chase after it.  He would throw the ball and the dog would chase it and bring it back.

On one occasion, he mimed throwing the ball and the dog repeated his response and chased after a ball that wasn’t there.

By all appearances, the actions were identical only Burton never released the ball.  The dog had been trained to expect the ball and was therefore at a loss for what to do next.  He had every reason to expect there to be a ball and so responded as if there was one, even though he could not find it.

Not having a context for magical thinking—that we know about—the dog expected that there would be a ball and when there was none, he went to solve a problem that did not exist.  He assumed that the ball had gotten past him and not that he was being tricked.

We are just as gullible as that dog, just as easily misled by patterns and expectations.  And while we might not fall for such an obvious example, there are plenty of other examples from the world of magic where repetition is used to disguise the secret of the trick.

And what is perhaps most interesting is that our sophisticated brains will first try to explain away the effect and, when no satisfactory solution can be made to fit what we think we saw, the we are all too quick to accept that the demonstrator, the magician, has some special powers not available to the rest of us.

Nurturing the ability to break free of patterns of behavior and response is an important part of becoming more resilient.  This doesn’t mean that you have to completely blow up your life, or take up ballroom dancing.  It can be as simple as taking a different route to work or stopping at a different place for your morning coffee.

My wife’s grandmother was the very definition of resiliency.  I came away from my first meeting with her with the absolute certainty that she was someone who would only ever tell you the absolute truth, regardless of how it might make you feel.

Cancer had claimed her husband and had gone a couple or rounds with her as well.  This was never treated as anything remarkable, but in much the same way that people talk about the infamous “winter of ’78.”  She did not focus on having undergone a mastectomy, but rather on the benefit of subsequently having a convenient place to store her tissue. 

My wife tells the story of her grandmother buying a knit cap with the explanation that it would come in handy the next time she got cancer and the chemo made all of her hair fall out.

My dad, on the other hand, was not able to change his thinking.  He saw cancer as a death sentence and, when he got his diagnosis he became resigned to what he saw as the inevitable outcome.

The capacity to shift one’s thinking can be very powerful, but it is not always easy and it is not necessarily something you can do on your own.  Sometimes, you need help.

***

Get Support

When we were getting ready to move half-way across the country, my wife and I spent a lot of time cleaning our apartment so that we could get back our damage deposit.  While we were in the place, we got our first dog and, as puppies will do, he “claimed” different parts of the apartment as his own and was, for a while, almost prideful in his marking of his territory.

There was a lot of scrubbing and disinfecting and a lot of ammonia used prior to the landlord’s exit interview.

Because of scheduling, the walk-through was conducted after our departure and we subsequently learned that we would receive only a fraction of our deposit.  We were in our new place and almost a thousand miles out of town, but I was pretty steamed.  The apartment was cleaner than when we moved in and all traces of the puppy had been erased.  How dare we get anything less than a clean bill of cleaning?

A whole range of responses ran through my head up to and including small claims court.

At the time, our local radio station carried the nightly talk show of Bruce Williams.  Bruce has a tremendous radio presence, one that inspires confidence.  He talks to people who are thinking of starting a business, or who are having a property beef with their neighbors, or who are planning a cruise.  He doesn’t give advice to the love-lorn, or a forum to UFO conspiracies, he helps people navigate through life. 

One night, I heard him say that he would be staying late to answer calls off the air for broadcast at a later date.  I thought I would call and get his take on “puppy-gate.”

I dialed the number and, while on hold, fumed and fussed and generally thought of ways to justify my high dudgeon. 

And then it was my turn.

I laid out my case and, in what seemed like no time at all, it was over.  He pointed out that it would be virtually impossible for the landlord to distinguish the ammonia smell produced by our dog from the ammonia smell produced by Proctor & Gamble.  His advice to me:  let it go.

I’ve never been comfortable with that advice.  When people tell me to “get over it” my hackles go immediately to the upright and locked position.  It has always seemed to me to be dismissive of my experience.

This was the one time—and perhaps the only time—when such advice made sense to me.  I was half-way across the country with no hope of influencing my now former landlord to change her position and any action I could envision was just going to take time and money from me.  Letting go of the rope was the only sensible option.

And while it was not a response that came easily to me, a life-long grudge holder, I did.  And I really have not thought that much more about it until writing this.

***

I am not very resilient.  It would be a better finish to this piece if I were, but I’m not.  My apple cart is not so much overturned as it is relentlessly targeted by the vehicles in movie car chases.

We have all seen moments in movies when the good car chases the bad car through an urban environment with tires squealing and pedestrians jumping out of the way.  At some point, the pace of the scene slows as we watch a fruit seller, or some other street vendor, push their wares across the street and right into the path of the racing vehicles.  For variety, sometimes one of the vehicles will jump the curb and drive through a newsstand, or a parade, or some such obstacle creating massive chaos. 

I am forever cleaning up after car chases. 

But, then again, if I shift my thinking, I should take heart from the fact that I am still selling fruit, shouldn’t I?

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director

Magic Cards

There was not much on the walls, but it was an honest to goodness magic shop:  a place where hobbyists go to purchase the this and the that to make their miracles possible.

These places are getting harder and harder to find.  Used to be every town had a store where you could buy joy buzzers and fake dog poop and in the back you could find a small stretch of counter with card tricks, coin tricks and the ever-present cups and balls.  Larger towns even had whole stores just for magicians.  Not always on the beaten path, but they were listed in the Yellow Pages.

When I was a kid, my mom used to take me to Morrissey's.  It was in what looked like an apartment building, a half-flight up and a half-block away from a busy commercial street.  You could live your whole life on that block and never notice they were there.  And if you went in, it seemed like you could spend your whole life and never learn all of the secrets it held.

I am hopeless at magic, but I am a sucker for secrets.

My interest in magic began, as it did for many, with a man by the name of Marshall Brodien.  He appeared on our TV pitching something called TV Magic Cards and teased my curious self with the promise that "magic tricks are easy once you know the secret."

That was it:  I was hooked.  And like a junkie cat and his nip, I had to have them.  And for 4 decades I have been haunting shops and poking around online to find more and more secrets.

The secrets by themselves are generally disappointing.  After being roped in by the demonstrator and completely fooled like you were the least sophisticated civilian, you pay your money only to find that the magic is done with a bit of string and some wax.  These are the secrets that magicians are sworn never to reveal?  Seems like a lot smoke and mirrors.  (And wouldn't you be surprised how they use smoke and mirrors!)

And so it was that I found myself in Kamloops, in the heart of British Columbia, and inside  Cuz I'm Magic a brand new magic shop.  I was in town to visit my mom and she mentioned that the shop had just opened.  What could I do?  We had to go.

I wanted to support this new venture.  I wasn't going to be a huge customer, but I had to give him some money.  You can learn a lot about magic from books and videos and the internet, but it is only in performance that you can appreciate its real artistry.  It's when you can stand a couple of feet away from the demonstrator and have him fool you that you truly appreciate magic's power to capture and inspire.  Anyone can say Shakespeare's lines and call themselves an actor, but a magician's job is more complicated and more straightforward:  he has to convince you that something impossible has just actually happened.

My mom was great.  She played spectator while the proprietor demonstrated a couple of items and I looked around.  There was not a lot to choose from, but I did find a collection of Brodien's television tricks which included the TV Wonder Cards, the TV Mystery Cards and the TV Magic Cards.  Of course I already had these in various forms, but what made this set a must-have was the associated DVD with the original commercials.

The poor condition of the surviving video only served to enhance the value of the purchase as a time tunnel back to the very beginning of my passion for magic.  The decks will most likely never come out of their cases, but they have already served their purpose, already convinced me of the impossible by connecting me to my younger self.

Returning from the magic shop, I put my purchases down on a table that I used to know.  It came from the house I grew up in a long time ago and a long way away where it sat in a hall like it does now and where it received mail and keys and the contents of overflowing arms, much like it does now.

I had gone to Kamloops to see my mother because she will be 75 this year.  Hardly seems right.  Like the commercial for the magic cards, I think only of how she was when we all lived together so many years ago.

This was going to be the year that she and her husband celebrated their birthdays in Paris.  They both turn 75 this year and they had decided not to wait for their distractable kids and do something that they wanted to do.  Instead this was the year of the health scare, the near miss that made decisions necessary that were once so easily deferred.

Mom wanted to talk about those decisions that she had made.  She wanted to show me where things were and make certain I understood what she wanted.  I met Ed whom she has selected as her local guy, her point man to work with her kids who are scattered to three different countries.  We talked about lessons learned and not learned from affairs both ordered and disordered.

She talked about being the long distance daughter when it came to breaking up her own mother's house.  Some decisions were made deliberately and how some were made in haste and those memories are still fresh for her.

At one point, she pulled out a small creamer that came from her mother's house.  She remembered it from her childhood and it was the first thing that came to mind when she was asked to list what she might want.

I asked her about this little creamer and she said it was nothing special, it just reminded her of her childhood.  There was no family history connected with this little jug, just her personal history.  It was like her own deck of magic cards, her tunnel into the past.

These are unsettling conversations to have, illuminated as they are in the twilight between infinite and finite possibilities.  There are lots of cliches about growing older, lots of jokes, but only one truth.

I have tremendous respect for how my mom and my step-father are handling this moment in their lives.  They share many common interests and some common traits:  they're both very practical, very organized.  And it is this shared talent that is serving them best.  They are educating themselves, preparing themselves and their families and trying to make magic with the cards they have.

I used to think that, if I knew enough secrets, I could perform miracles.  As I get older, I am appreciating something I read once about magicians Penn & Teller.  They described themselves as "a couple of eccentric guys who have learned to do a few cool things."

And to that list of cool eccentrics, I would add Lois & Eric, a pair of real magicians.

Happy birthday to you both.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director