The question is always with us: what is magic?
As someone who does magic, I don’t always know the answer to that. I can refer you to my crusty, ill-behaved progenitor Aleister Crowley, who said that magic(k) is “the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.” This is the definition I have been given most often in my study of the craft, though typically in Dion Fortune’s less pompous voice: “the art of changing consciousness at will.” I don’t know if that’s what it is. I’ve used it to improve my own luck, or draw my desires closer to me, but even those explanations are incorrect.
I use magic the way I use the flat disk in my sewing kit that contains needles. I patiently and sensitively turn the two halves against one another until the slim openings line up and I get the tool I need from inside, careful not to stab myself with it.
Magic is something I feel, and I know it when I feel it. I’m not always the one making it. And it’s not always made in the places I expect.
C.A.V.U., 2021. © James Turrell. Photo: Florian Holzherr
A week ago, my partner and I signed up for the dusk experience at the artist James Turrell’s piece titled C.A.V.U., commonly called Skyspace. This piece is one of several by Turrell currently exhibited at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA). It takes its name from an aviation phrase: Ceiling And Visibility Unlimited.
People also call it “the silo,” because that’s what it looks like. The structure is out back of the museum, a tall, round building that comes to a point at the top. The silo features an oculus that can be opened and closed via an electronic mechanism by the museum staff. It’s open during dawn and dusk for those who reserve space. People sit inside, on a rim of bench that circles the room, against an interior wall that slopes gently back so that the observers can look up.
We filed in during civil twilight, the sky a rich orange-red, with about 30 other people. Mass MoCA is the largest tourist attraction in our small Berkshires town; we didn’t know anyone else who was there. As we settled, people talked and joked. Their voices bounced off the curved stone walls and against the conical steel ceiling. Someone’s phone chirped a very loud alarm and I said with clear annoyance, “oh for gods’ sake” as they hunted to shut it off.
No guide or docent was with us. No museum guard was along to keep the peace. We were on our own.
The program had no clear beginning. There was no sound. Lights shined upward from an unseen recess between the top of the wall and the inward-sloping roof, subtly changing its colors. Starting off white, the cone bounding the sky above us became yellow and deepened gradually.
Nobody shushed the room. The lower house lights did not dim. There was no call to order. Energy simply shifted between us and within us, and the hush was total. In the absence of murmuring conversation and anxious mutterings, the sound of the crickets and frogs on the nearby Hoosic River rose to take over. The ceiling colors shifted again, and we had begun. The sky outside was still visible through the silo’s open door, turning cerulean blue as the sun sank beneath the hills. But through the oculus, the sky was jade green.
Every ritual I’ve ever attended has gone through this same shift. We’re joking and bullshitting, we’re catching up and chasing kids around the circle. Someone is busily building the altar, someone else is backseat driving, rearranging the flowers or the blades or the gods. When we link, there is no ringing of bells or intoning of a call to order. It happens because we are shifting our consciousness, that stubborn liquid stuff, into something else. With my coven, this behavior makes sense. We’ve all done ritual together before, all done magic and know one another with trust.
In this silo with these strangers, the same shift shocked me.
The ceiling went pink, and then red. The sky went purple, and then lilac. An uneven v-formation of Canada geese flew by above us, and a shock rippled through the assembly. Someone whispered “oh, it’s open!” as if they didn’t realize until that moment that what they were seeing was the same sky they’d always known. That’s part of the point of the illusion. Turrell built this structure so that the rim of the ceiling around the aperture is thin, made of sheet steel. The result is that there is no transitional plane between what’s constructed and what’s the sky, though the light display makes the onlooker doubt the reality of both.
In ritual, people spread out. They dance and settle, they find the way their body wants to move or stand still in the space based on how they feel. Inside of C.A.V.U., I watched the same thing. I saw some sit up straight, alarmed by what they were seeing. Others relaxed against the wall, dreamily looking up like kids scrying in the clouds. A small number moved to lie in the center of the floor, directly beneath the oculus.
I wonder if the floor-lying folks saw what I saw. The light show, gentle and understated as it was, created an altered state of consciousness as I watched the progress of dusk. It seemed that an enormous eye peered down at me, uncomfortably close and titanic as the optical organ of a sperm whale. The sclera was blue and the iris was green, pupilless and ever-closer. Or a massive pendulous breast dripped down toward me, sky-nipple of pink in a skin the color of a robin’s egg. Each of these changes in my vision forced me to breathe deep, to peer briefly out the door to check in with the “real” sky, to realign myself. That’s the point, I think. The artist forces a recalibration of our visual reality by fundamentally challenging perception, using something we see every day to make the mundane strange, profane, beautiful, holy.
Nobody says when a ritual ends. We have our little rhymes and salutes, our signals that the circle is open but unbroken. But we collectively, wordlessly, drop out of the link when the energy abates. So, too, did my coven of strangers come to the end of the dusk program in the Turrell silo. The lights didn’t shut off, but the color cycle calmed until the light turned white again, casting the little circle of sky in a premature inky black. No chime, no alarm, but people stirred, spoke again in hushed tones. As with ritual, I listened to people groping for words to explain what they had just experienced.
What is magic? If we change our own perception, have we done it? If we were suspended for a time between worlds, between earth and sky in a circle of our own making, was that a ritual?
My partner and I stopped on the way home, got cold drinks and tried to talk about what we had just seen.
Was that magic? The question is always with us.
A previous version of this article included an additional photograph of the interior of C.A.V.U., which has been removed by request of Mass MoCA.
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