August 21, 2008
THE MAGICIAN
| CAT RAMBO |
|
|
The card is blank—white as chalk or snow or limestone plucked from the cliff’s heart. Angle it this way and that to catch impossible bas-relief details and it remains obdurate and meaningless. At first.
Slow—fish fin flicker, overlapping gauze scarves—colors swim onto the card’s face, waver like heat mirages. A hand, outstretched, a flaming goblet held between thumb and forefinger; an eponymous face, eyebrows like soaring wings, a little cruel, a little haughty; a shoulder where a bird perches, its wings like oily sighs. A background of tapestries, peacock feathers, angels’ bare feet, kaleidoscopic embryos.
If you look away, the card changes. If you look away, life changes. If you change, you may not know yourself when you look back.
The Magician is control. You are never the Magician. You are never in control. The best you can do is know how the tricks are done and, admittedly, sometimes that is enough. The Magician is not-control. You are sometimes the Magician, but you are still never in control. It always helps to know the tricks, it always helps to have a pair of loaded dice, a talking pig on a golden leash, pockets full of distracting marvels and clockwork wonders. It always helps to be able to burnish yourself to shiny, to reflect the Universe, moving inexorable as the exhalations of mountains, watching you watching it watching you.
Cat Rambo lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. A product of Notre Dame, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and the relentless pursuit of popular culture, she writes stories that wander freely in the adjoining pastures of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, and occasionally jumps the fence to eat the cabbages of Literature. She is the co-editor of Fantasy Magazine.