This is the final of a series of three essays that Owen Lean has graciously allowed us to publish on the site. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have, please comment and tell me what you think. I would now like to formally thank Owen for allowing us to use his three essays, and hopefully we will be seeing more from him here in the future!

Hello! I have loads of money. Seriously I’m absolutely rolling in it, i have cash coming up to my eyeballs. I mean really, just the other day I dropped a 50 Euro note on the ground, I could have bent over and picked it up but i didn’t because I’M ABSOLUTLY LOADED! Yeah, that’s me, the guy who’s made of money, all self made of course, and my house is huge and I have seven cars, twenty gorgeous girlfriends and an Olympic sized swimming pool with a retractile sunroof and waterproof plasma screen at the bottom so i can watch David Blaine specials while I snorkel…

Not very convincing is it?
You see, when someone comes up to you and spends all his time trying to prove something to you, we tend to question it. In fact, the more he tries to prove it, the less we believe him. Let me give that example properly – from my limited 22 years of experience of life on this planet I’ve noticed that the people who constantly talk and boast about how much money they have are usually the people who have no money at all or are very insecure in their wealth and know full well they’re about to lose it all. The same with sex, I used to go to an all boys boarding school, where it was of course customary for the majority of the boys to boast constantly about their sexual conquests, despite the fact everyone knew these people were still sending valentines cards to their own right hand.
But those who really are wealthy? Or those rare cases who were were getting all the action these adolescent morons only dreamed of? They never talk about it, they never mention it, they just KNOW it. They know it and you can tell it about them as soon as you meet them – they don’t need to prove it because they know what they have and they know everyone else should know what they have and even if they don’t – they don’t care.
So where the bloody hell am I going with this? Allow me to elaborate with another example.
Hello. Would you like to see some magic? Here choose a card. You put it back in the deck. I shuffle them, i snap my fingers, and look it comes to the top. I put it back in the middle, snap my fingers and its back on top. Every time I do it your card comes to the top. Amazing isn’t it?

Allow me to translate this awful piece of bog-standard patter into the subtext behind it:
Hello! I can do magic! Look, I can do magic! See I can do magic! I really can do magic! Yes! Its magic! I can do magic!
Not very convincing is it?
You see, this is the impression that I get about a lot of magic, as magicians we spend almost all of our time trying to PROVE we can do magic. All of the focus of most of our tricks seem to be based around that, and there is nothing convincing about that, not only that but there is nothing even remotely INTERESTING about that either.
Now there are many different reasons we may perform magic, some of us do as part of a comedy show, and our aim is comedy – in my street show this is the case, the show is about the comedy and the magic plays a secondary role to it. Some of us do it in motivational speaking, where again the magic takes a secondary place to something else, in this case the “Look i can do magic” presentation may just work. However the reason I got into magic believe it or not, was because I wanted to do magic! And this is what I try and do when I perform magic close up. Anyone who’s seen me on the street or on the stage will know my show is mainly stand up comedy – but as the few who’ve seen my recent close up performances will know, I’m a different performer.  I’m relaxed, polite and most importantly, I DON’T DO TRICKS. I spent a long time considering this – if you really could do magic, just supposing you really could – you would not spent all your time showing off and trying to prove you could. So what would you do? For me the answer was that I would be someone who told stories, taught lessons and revealed hidden knowledge about the spectators life and the world around him and would be using magic to illustrate it.
The first routine I changed was the ambitious card that I already mentioned – now I no longer talk about the card, I tell them outright at the beginning a card is a meaningless thing, and ask them to make it meaningful by writing there name about it. The routine from then on is no longer about the card, or my ability but about them, I’m not telling them about what I’m doing or what’s happening (after all they have eyes, they can see that) and suddenly i started getting more gasps and reactions then ever before. I will post of video of this some time so you can see what I mean.
A lot of “bizzare” magic tends to lean this way I know, its an area that far too few magicians study, but again there can be a little of the “look I can do magic” flaw in bizzare magic performances. The less you state, the more you imply, and the more powerful it is. The less emphasis you put on the magic, the far more powerful it is, it should look like you are performing something only trivial, something that’s only a glimpse of ones ‘true power’ to use a very pretentious phrase – a brief glimmer, but one that is so powerful, like a gnostic only needs a brief glimpse of the divine spark within him to break free from the Demiurge’s prison, so too a spectator only needs a brief glimpse of magic to break free from the mundane reality that society confines them too.
Isn’t it strange? The way we set our sights so low? I don’t want to be just another magician I don’t want to be Dai Vernon, or Slydini or Ed Marlo. I want to be Simon Magus, Merlin, Mephistopheles and Cthulhu. I want to change the world, raise the dead to life and bring war on the Demiurge one mind at a time. Yes, its an impossible target, one I probably will never obtain, but if I aim that high and miss, what I hit, surely can’t be a bad thing? But then, that’s just the impression that I get.