PW met with David Blaine in an unused Random House office in midtown Manhattan. The magician, who's smaller than he looks on TV and speaks with a New York drawl, engaged us in a generous, far-ranging interview capped by his performing three tricks, one with a wristwatch and two with cards, that left us speechless with wonder.
PW: Why did you write Mysterious Stranger?
David Blaine: I thought it would be a good way for people to get interested in magic, like the kids who come up to me from all over the place. This is the kind of book they can read. It was almost impossible for me to do a book. My heroes are Herman Hesse, Dostoyevski, Kafka, Victor Frankl, Primo Levi [Blaine has Levi's concentration camp ID numbers tattooed on his arm], and I was thinking, "Man, I have no right to write a book." But I don't look at this as a book. It's a journey into magic.
PW: Yet writing and words are important to you.
DB: I keep writing two words every day on my arm or on my pants, and those two words are "resistance" and "humility." I think other words that are important are "courage," "humanity," "love," "God," "spirituality." I was always amazed that Christ bore his own cross. He didn't complain about it. He said, "thank you" to God for allowing him to suffer.
PW: Did you think of Christ's suffering when you were standing on the pillar above Bryant Park for 36 hours?
DB: Yeah, and more than that. It was a highly spiritual experience because, in the city, with the constant rushing around, I got to stand in one place with nothing but where I was, and to accept it. For the first time in my life I got to watch the sun go all the way up, and all the way down, and then I got to watch the moon go all the way around. The sky was black, there's people yelling crazy things, and then I got to watch the sun come up. It was freezing, the coldest night ever on May 21, but I knew that the sun was coming, and I got to watch it come all the way up again. It was the most amazing thing I've seen in my life.
It's so easy to not live in the moment. I'm the kind of guy, if I'm with my girlfriend, I need to speak to my best friend on the phone because I can't be where I am. And that's what drives us away from life. That's not true as a kid, but as we grow up, someone says, "you smile funny" or "you walk funny," so you learn how to walk differently, and you are no longer you.
PW: What part can magic play in dealing with that?
DB: Magic is exactly that kid. It strips open everything. With magic, you're stripping away all the bullshit that people formulate. They're seeing something they don't understand, and they understand that they don't understand it. When an unexpected card comes out of the deck, it blows their mind. In that moment they're open. They're not thinking about money problems, bills, who's this, who's mad. You make people wonder. I know when I do a card trick and I have mixed races, colors, creeds, all different people watching it, they're all reacting and talking together. And the same thing happens with the stunts.
I was at a magic convention that all the great magicians fly in for, in Portugal. This Spanish magician asks us to pull bills from our pocket. He folds up my dollar without looking at it, into an origami sailboat, and he throws it on the floor. And another guy takes a franc or a lira, he folds it into a canoe, then throws it on the floor. He does maybe five of our bills. We notice that they're all moving on the floor. Like they're in the ocean. Now, it can't be strings, because you can't control that many. It can't be wind, because they're all going in different directions. Me and my friend look at each other and we each want to say but don't, "Is it insects?" And we're like, "Nah. That's crazy." The guy shows me how he does it. He carries beetles with him, in his pockets. He sticks them in the bottom of the bill as he folds it and the beetles go running. There are guys like this all over the place in magic.
