APPENDIX C
JANE AND ROB MEET A SKEPTICAL PSYCHOLOGIST AND HIS MAGIC. JANE’S POEM: “MAGIC IS PUBLIC AS THE AIR …”

Gramacy was a psychologist and a magician, and he came to our house because he was a scientist looking for some real magic. He was a compact, dark-skinned and dark-haired person with soft brown large eyes that were kept half closed when he was being a psychologist, and turned larger, commanding and yet inviting when he was being a magician. Both his eyes and his hands were really too expressive for a scientist’s, and he tried to be a scientist even when he was being a magician — perhaps then most of all.

He turned on a small recorder; classical music with a tinny quality swirled through the room. He bowed his dark head for just a moment then lifted it, those soft eyes now … softer and harder at the same time; his hands moved in rhythm with the music; his whole body was a marvel of motion; shoulders, head, arms, chest — his whole trunk, responding to the music. Then at his command, four silver dollars disappeared through the tabletop and he caught them underneath in the palm of his hands. Playing cards appeared and disappeared. He was in a trance of his own; so were Rob and I, watching. And in the back of his mind was the improbable hope that one day, somehow, the coins would really go through the tabletop. …

It’s really unfortunate and quite unusual that we didn’t record the session. Seth came through before I thought to remind Gramacy that he could record Seth, if Seth came through. But somehow in my mind at least, not recording that session added to it’s magical quality … the spontaneous psychological or psychic transformation came and went … We were sitting at the living-room table with the lamplight clear on my face; Gramacy could follow Seth’s psychological passage; see my features change, taking on ever so subtly those other contours. And Seth’s voice was jovial, booming, you didn’t have to strain to hear those words. There was no prepared message either. We hadn’t known that Gramacy was a scientist until he told us that night, and it was as a magician rather than as a scientist that Seth addressed him, telling him to trust his dramatic and imaginative flair.