Introduction to Natural Magic - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 328

Martin and I stayed together very frequently. When we were approxi-
mately the age of eleven, for some reason or other we became very much
fascinated with magic. We got one of the standard little boxes which you
buy in a store, which contain all the magic tricks for kids, but when we
opened it, when we tried to do some of these tricks, we thought it absolutely
ridiculous, so stupid; everybody will find out what that is, I mean, the double
floor and all that silly stuff.
We said, this is really...,this is not the way of doing magic.
We started to develop our own illusions, and soon became more and more
deeply involved. There is a very great and internationally famous store in
Vienna, which designs, constructs and delivers great illusions for magicians
from all over the world. People of the great performance stage came to that
store, which was called the Zauberklingel, the Magic Bell. A klingel is a
bell, a German word for bell, so the magic bell. But it happened to be that
there was a Herr Klingel, a Mr. Bell, who owned the store, and who was,
when we were about eleven, probably about sixty. When we went into the
store to buy perhaps a little something here or there, of course what he did
was always first to show what the whole illusion was about. And then, if you
liked it, you could buy it.
Of course, all of these things were completely out of the world for us, we
couldn't buy them. But we came as if we would like to see this particular
piece of illusion, “Could we please see it?” So he looked at us, of course,
very condescending, and said, “Would you buy it?” We said, “Ahem, well,
we don't know, we would like to see it first.” So he showed it to us, when
he was in a good mood, otherwise he threw us out, and then we said, “Well,
ahem, we are not going to buy, thank you very much,” and left the store
very fast.
Of course, while we were watching, we were thinking, “How is it done?”
Since I am of a constructive type, and Martin is a performing type, I was
sitting down, constructing the thing—how it could work?—and Martin then
developed how to perform it. So we both co-operated in the performance
and construction of these things.
For me it was quite clear that you have to have a good mechanical and
physical mind in order to perform very great illusions. For Martin, however,
it was quite clear that the mechanics didn't do it. What he did, of course,
was the performance. So I learned from him the accent on performance,
and he learned from me the technical problems.
Now both Martin and I, when we grew up, fell in love with one particu-
lar German Romantic author. He is not too well known as an author in
the United Sates, or in the English-speaking domain, but is indirectly very
well known through the Offenbach opera Hoffmann's Tales . The German
Romantic poet E.T.A. Hoffmann was one of our very much preferred poets,
writers. There was one story which fascinated both Martin and me, that was
the story of a tomcat. And the tomcat's name was Murr, m-u-r-r. Tomcat
Murr it would be pronounced in English.