There was no test, no vision quest, no institution empowered to hand out credentials. It was instead accepted that anyone willing to present himself as something as ridiculous as a magician might as well be regarded as one. Theirs, too, was a society uniquely resistant to hierarchizing. Since it has never been remotely clear what magic is - or on what terms it might even be confirmed to exist - the practice of it can only be judged in utilitarian or aesthetic terms, none of which are native to magic. One magician might be older, richer, more popular, more helpful and more pleasant than another, but no one could prove that either was better or worse at magic.
I had learned that others' interest could be held by depictions of relationships between people, events, truths, but never by descriptions of any of those. The base unit of communication is the verb and not the noun. Even the difference between two objects of one kind was not enough to anchor focus. You needed to show the effects of that difference on each, and how those diverse effects affect that difference. And so on. It is never a matter of saying that, for example, the prophet had ignored the oracle, but of putting one's ear to the world where a prophet can do such a thing, to catch the tone of its response to that ignoring.
He didn't do tricks. The trick was for you to figure out what he did do, which you'd never master because he kept on doing more of it. A performance, sure, but was it for you? And if not, if it was for him he performed, wasn't that so that he could feel it was no performance at all? Whatever made him need that would then be the player, the real puppeteer. And since, if you let yourself think about it, you'd have to admit you were part of what had driven him to this extreme - with your laughter, with your shrugs, with whatever the hell we do to people we don't do for - then maybe the only real trick was for you to figure out why you'd help push someone out of reality and into magic. Or help pull a magician's hat out of an innocent rabbit. But whoever plays people like you never lets you think things like that. Or, if ever, then probably just this once.
Sense does not quickly decay but is immediately at the mercy of our whimsical methods of storing, every one of which is eccentric, like a specific funhouse mirror or a famous painter's style. What is actually lost is dwarfed, and thoroughly distracted from, by the scale, variety, and curiously absolute confidence of our semi-voluntary acts of translation. Where something of the world is lost it is at times more effective (and often more feasible) to study our own habits of retention - almost as pronounced as a stamp, as a signature - than to reconsult the model, who, like clockwork herself, will have already spent our dollars on her favorite drugs, disfigured her face with a new tattoo, changed her name, married our enemy, died and left town. The trick to remember is to try to keep in mind both her and us, as it's so easy to get lost in how ourselves we are or how far the world has strayed from where we put it. Get the thread back into the needle's eye and you'll have usually forgotten what you were doing it for, of course. Still, someone with needle and thread will find work soon enough.
Nude at her wardrobe but innocent of me, her inspections put her through several changes in rapid succession. Each was captivating, was something new and permanent, to be destroyed but never moved. It was statues she went through, not poses. Statues of living flesh. They hardly seemed related to one another - at most she was a set of sisters. A better man would have felt guilty of infidelity by thought, but conveniently for me my loyalty seemed to be to the blurred range of people she was, while my desire, whose glove my body had become, freely and callously threw over each woman she'd been just before for the her it had just now spied. Who did some of those sisters see in you, though, you'd have asked me. But I'd have kept on and claimed wasn't that us to a T: I with both shirts to my name nailed right onto my back, she changing hers so often she hardly wore a stitch. Two ambiguous solutions to one basic ambivalence, you'd have thought. But these were sunspots. How things would unravel if things would unravel, which, yes, fine, they did, but they hadn't then. Then was her by the wardrobe and me on the bed. Then I'd reach out a hand.
It is not that a story is over when the relation it depicts becomes stabilized, but rather that the possibility that one could ever have been told requires that time exist, and time, defined precisely, is the promise that anything that can move will be moved - and that anything that that anything touches will be moved by its moving. Nothing is settled enough to be described the same way twice. States of relation are no more settled, of course, but by their exposure of the tail every object has, its unshakeable "and," and the way these can tangle, such relations meet a minimal condition of existence - connection to something else that exists - that objects, viewed alone, fail. Some argue that storymaking relations fall short of achieving existence themselves, holding that the story of the world must be all one story, including every occurrence within it, and that this story is identical with the world itself, which exists both by and as its own self-telling. But to whom could it even be told? The stories that connect an I with a you borrow their substance from the complex and complexly shifting connections between an it (perhaps a you) and another it (perchance an I), the sort of motion that, since we have our own experiential history with each of the objects interacting, we can be sure is happening, even if everything else about it proves difficult to characterize. Telling a story invites subject matter into the story of our breathing, already in progress. Verbs outline nouns, and, as these outlines web together with those conferred by other verbs, can infuse them with qualities such as color, heft, endurance. Verbs adjectivize, as nouns adverbiate. Adverbs, adjectives are shards, grindings, traces of the nouns a verb has carried, of the verbs a noun has led.
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