The magic of Hallowe'en

We fear uncertainty, and we kill what we're certain doesn't agree with us

Whichever way you want to look at religion, what religion ultimately boils down to is a view, an aspiration, a hope, a belief, in what the future holds: that bit of it that follows your death. That’s what it is about: in the end, at least.

Hollywood and literature, even music, have over many years given us their various takes on time travel, or their vision of the future. From science fiction to Back To The Future, The Time Machine, Space Oddity, all of us have at least a passing interest in considering what things would be like if we weren’t in the time we are in right now; if we could have just a glimpse of what the future looks like. We are crass and we are stupid. Because, as we are doing that, we are looking back at the known past, and we are rewriting it for the purposes of our present. Today, I want to talk about ambivalence, and why we like it, and why, no matter how hard we try, we cannot escape it, even in ourselves.

I once knew the future. Someone who ought to have known better but who, in that split second, saw no other path, told me what would happen in the future, and I knew in that moment that he was right. He told me that someone else whom I knew would meet with death. Within a year. That was not quite right. It was in fact two years. They were the two most worrisome years of my life. Of my life? Why of my life? After all, he didn’t say I was going to die. He said, someone else was going to die. Well, you can believe me: that’s worrisome.

There’s an old joke that Dave Allen, the Irish comedian, once told: It’s Sunday morning and God and Saint Peter are calmly looking down from Heaven, when they spot a sin being committed. On the door of a local parish church is a notice saying that the morning service is cancelled because the priest is ill. Further up the road, they spot the priest, who is not ill, but is playing golf—a sneaky little round of golf, all on his ownsome. Saint Peter turns to God and expresses his outrage: “Bejesus, is that not a sin worthy of punishment?” he rails at the Lord. The Almighty nods in gentle agreement and considers a response. At that, the priest tees off at the 3rd, swings back with his mashie niblick and whacks the ball straight down the middle of the fairway with a 400-yard drive that lands on the edge of the green, bounces three times and disappears like an ice cube in a glass of Jameson’s into the hole: plop! A hole in one. The priest’s first ever. Saint Peter turns on God with righteous indignation: “You call THAT punishment!” “Why, yes,” replies the Lord. “Who can he tell?”

That is the problem with knowing the future: who can you tell? If you tell those who would be negatively affected by the future of the fate that awaits them, their automatic assumption will be that you engineered that fate. That the only way you could have known what the future held for them was if you had arranged that future. So, knowing the future brings with it a presumption of guilt. However, even though I did, out of genuine concern, try to warn the person in question of the dangerous path he was treading, I eventually failed. He did meet with death. Because knowing the future means in no way whatsoever that you can change it. He is, so far as I know, still alive today. He didn’t die, but he did meet with death: he murdered his mother.

I have no proof. If I’d seen the act, I might now be in prison, especially if I said I knew it was going to happen. I have nothing with which I could enter a witness box and swear on a Bible is the truth as I know it. And yet, what I have just told you is the truth as I know it. If that is not ambivalence, then it’s something akin to that. You will perhaps ask yourself why this information about the future was even imparted to me, and the answer to that is simple: to save me from the same fate as the guy’s poor mother. And that, for now, is all you need to know.

The Prestige is a sinister 2006 thriller about the world of conjurors. It tells the story of two erstwhile partners who become deadly rivals in a late-Victorian setting of music halls and vaudeville, where the theatres present not music but magic. We learn, as audience, in the course of the movie (and my point is such that I must issue a “spoiler alert”) that a magic trick comprises three elements. The first is the pledge: the conjuror presents a perfectly ordinary, everyday object and asks you to consider it whilst warning you to pay extra attention. Watch carefully he admonishes you, without, nonetheless, revealing what it is that you should be watching. Next, comes the turn: what the audience watches is not what they ought to have watched, because the ordinary item they were presented with disappears. Last comes the title of the film: the prestige. The conjuror makes what disappeared come back.

At one point in the film, a young boy wails inconsolably at a trick done by one of the men: The bird in the trick is dead, he says. The magician presents the twittering bird to the boy to assure him the bird is not dead. “That’s not him,” the boy blubs, “That’s his brother.” The magician looks sheepishly at the boy’s mother and compliments her on having a smart, sharp-eyed son, before rewarding (bribing) him with a double-headed crown (five shilling coin). As it turns out, the boy has uttered the key to the whole of the rest of the film, and we’re only ten minutes in. The reason I mention this rather good movie, with excellent performances by Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine, and even David Bowie, is this: if a magician tells his audience the secret behind his trick, his trick will be worthless. It is only through secrecy that the audience is enthralled. But, if a magician tells his audience the secret behind his magic, something else happens.

Image: Christian Bale, as Alfred Borden, bribes Anthony DeMarco, as the boy who recognised the bird’s brother.

Here’s the spoiler. Jackman approaches Bowie, who plays the scientist Nikola Tesla, to build a transporter machine: an electrically powered machine that will physically transport him from one location to another in an instant. Bowie fails. No matter how much money Jackman invests into his work, Bowie is unable to build such a machine. But he does build a machine.

Bowie is turned on by the community where he lives and needs to flee. He leaves behind the machine that Jackman has paid for, for collection. It is only by coincidence that Jackman discovers what it does. Instead of transporting him, it duplicates him, and because a duplicate of him running around town would be an obvious explanation for his trick in which he disappears through a door on stage and immediately reappears through an entirely unconnected door on the other side of the stage, the new Jackman kills the old Jackman. Do you see why?

If he allows the original to live, there will come a point when it needs to be explained. He can say the clone is his brother, but then his trick’s secret is out, even if it isn’t. Because it’s the only explanation that any rational person would believe. Alternatively, he could explain it by showing people the cloning machine, which rational people with some scientific background might also understand; and then they would destroy it.

So, how do I know they would destroy the cloning machine? Well, I think they would destroy it because that is the only rational thing to do with such a machine, once its secret is out. Perhaps that is why God needs to be mysterious.

Above, I said what happens when a magician reveals the secret behind his trick: it becomes worthless. But I said something else happens when he reveals the secret behind his magic. Magic is something that people yearn to believe in. At the store where I work, we are currently selling a wide range of novelty items for Hallowe’en. Little children are being encouraged to delve into the tricks of dressing up, drinking red juice to represent blood out of ghoulish looking beakers, and to hang up glow-in-the-dark spiders’ webs, furry rats, and the whole shebang. Ironically, it is the parents who are having the bejesus scared out of them, when I tell them how much their purchases are costing. Perhaps that’s the best trick of all, and it’s all done in plain sight.

But, of course, the stories about Hallowe’en, and its partner celebration of All Saints, the next day, circulate about evil and badness and the unpredictable machinations of the malevolent dead. In that, we speak not of trickery, but of real magic. For all Hallowe’en has grown into a commercial Hallmark date in the diary, those are the bases of its beginnings: fear of the unknown. If the unknown can be explained away as a children’s party, then what is there to fear about it? But if the unknown can only be explained by magic, real magic, would you let your kids anywhere near it? Probably not: you’d want to destroy it.

It is for that reason that, besides yearning to believe in magic, we also yearn for certainty. When, at last, we believe in our magic, whether it’s Sleeping Beauty, or Harry Potter or The Wizard of Oz, we need to know that that’s that. It’s just a fairy tale, it’s simply a silly novel, it was all a dream. But, if any lingering doubt is left, then that is not that, and anything that impinges on the that that we want to be that … we direct our wrath at it. Many of the dark questions raised by fairy tales get resolved with a somewhat blanket panacea of they all lived happily ever after. When we look carefully, however, the dark questions are not answered. Fairy tales are very clever in ensuring that they do not get destroyed.

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Last week, I was thrown off a Substack. It’s owned by an Irishman who very much takes the stance that Ireland is doing great things in its support for Palestine. The reason why I subscribed to the blog was because I think its owner is right. I echo his sentiments (remember that word: echo). They are roughly these: Ireland was put upon by Britain over many centuries of cruel oppression. The English came and stole the land; they fought religious wars to impose a view of Christianity that differed from St Patrick’s, which the people resented and, as St Patrick had driven out the snakes from Ireland, the Irish resolved to drive out the English, who abused them and hungered them and left them to die, until finally, the Irish arose and achieved their liberty. If ever an underdog made good in the end, Ireland’s as good an example as any you’ll find. The oppression that Ireland encapsulates to perfection knows ambivalence, however. The whole Palestinian question knows ambivalence. And no one these days wants to hear about ambivalence in relation to any aspect of Palestine.

First, the Jewish state founded on the land of Palestine is claimed to be founded in a grant of land from God, of which the Bible is testament. That is a great ambivalence.

Second, the Jewish people, who, the Bible recounts, endured great suffering at the hands of the Romans and of Pharaoh, also suffered great oppression throughout history and, in more-recent centuries, at the hands of (eastern) European nations in a series of pogroms, the greatest of which was the Nazi Holocaust. No people in recorded history has suffered quite like the Jewish people. And yet it is the Jewish people that is executing the genocide of the Palestinians. That too is a huge ambivalence. The argument is basically that the Jews say they’ve had enough of being persecuted for their religion and want a land of their own; the Palestinians say that’s fair enough, but the Jews can’t have Palestine as the land of their own.

One of Ireland’s staunchest allies in its quest to save Palestine from the Israeli genocide is Spain. Spain is a country that has known suffering, at the hands of the Moors: it was conquered and occupied for many centuries. But, once Spain had driven the Arabs back out of its territory, it did itself set its sights on conquering other people’s territory, and there came the age of discovery, in which Spain took possession of vast tracts of Central and South America. So, the pairing of Ireland and Spain is true, but unlikely: Ireland was exclusively oppressed as a colonial territory, and never had an empire, whereas Spain, whilst having been a colony, is better known today as a colonial master. They have joined forces to plead the case for Palestine, and I admire both of them for that.

So, why was I hounded out of the Irishman’s blog? Not, I’ll emphasise, by him, but by a couple of his subscribers. I don’t know how many blogs there are on Substack, probably thousands, so the choice is wide. And, if you stumble into one that gets your back up, as I may be doing with you right now, then the temptation is sore to simply unsubscribe. However, when that blog’s members tell you to “GTFOH”—i.e. to kindly remove your personage from their presence—it is not with downcast eyes that one presses the unsubscribe button, it is with celerity. I don’t like to stick around where I’m not wanted. But why was I not wanted?

As with many of these things it boils down to a sad conclusion about our modern Internet communications: you’re either with us or agin us. The middle of the road has been erased. And, for me, the surprise comes in learning that the middle of this particular road has been erased by Irish people. The road is the road of suffering: the Irish president has given voice to Ireland’s sympathies for the Palestinians, because they share a parallel history with each other: one of imperial invasion, oppression, expropriation, exploitation, killing, hunger, military power and all the rest, and I find it interesting that these aspects that unite Palestine and Ireland also form a common thread between Spain and Israel: those two nations have also engaged in such practices, except, in their cases, they were, or are, the overlords. While it is logical, when seen from that angle, that Palestine and Ireland should be at one with each other, it is rather less logical to pair up Israel and Spain. And that is because the hegemony exerted by Spain belongs to the past, and not to the present, whereas Israel’s is in the present. So, we need to move Spain over to the Ireland/Palestine camp, because what Spain did in the 15th century has little to no bearing on what it is doing now, okay?

Now, something strange starts to happen. Israel claims that its people’s suffering in all the oppression they have undergone since the time of Moses is a sure sign of the world’s hatred of them and Israel’s current government cites that as a ground for pro-actively attacking those who bear hatred in their hearts for the Jewish race. To put in the words of one young Israeli, If someone comes to kill you, God says it’s okay to kill them first. The Irish response to that is to say, no: we must protect, not kill, the Palestinians. Ireland says that the Jews’ suffering is not an excuse for The Jews to impose suffering on others. Whilst saying that Ireland’s suffering gives it good grounds to oppose Israel: we know what it feels like, so we oppose Israel, who will not listen to reason.

However, Ireland is becoming known for precisely that phenomenon: for not listening to reason, and on a number of scores. Encouraging data centres that pollute the planet, refusing to listen to my middle of the road arguments, and one which mirrors similar manifestations elsewhere in the world, and therefore can be written off as only natural, but that at the same time is hard to reconcile with previous developments in Ireland, such as the legalisation of homosexuality and the legalisation of same-sex marriage: the oppression of immigrants. Not Irish immigrants in the U.S., but Eurasian and African immigrants in Ireland. There is a body within Irish society, of a hooligan nature, that seeks to drive from Ireland those who are not of Irish blood. All this constitutes another strange ambivalence.

The vehemence with which the simplistic arguments are propounded, that Ireland has suffered and is good, because it takes the part of those who suffer, and that Jews, who have also suffered are bad because they impose suffering on the Palestinians somehow gets lost when one points to the resistance that exists within some parts of Irish society against people who, like Palestinians, are fleeing oppression, war, hunger and the rest. I drew a conclusion that the simplistic view is a tad too simplistic, to the point where I was not tolerated. Not because of what I have done, but because of what I have said and because I stem from forebears whose government at the time did to their forebears things that they resent. That’s the time to quit.

When you try to make sense of all these ambivalences, even by identifying them, by conjuring them in your mind, by trying to perceive the trick behind them, you arrive at a strange conclusion: that the only way to proceed further is to attribute them all to magic—to something you will never understand, and, by not understanding, you will ensure your survival.

Magic comprises two simple states; states that we are comfortable with. They are now you see it and now you don’t. No one, but no one, sees the turn; and we all clap uproariously at the prestige. The prestige: when everything, despite the corpse that lies below stage, turns out all right. Everyone lives happily ever after, without knowing what is the ever after.