So I’m going to be a little self indulgent this week. I want to talk about one of my favorite foods in the world: Salmorejo. Most of you have probably not heard of it. A delicacy in southern Spain, it is the most simple of concoctions. The ingredients are basic: take the ripest of tomatoes and bread. Olive oil, garlic, salt. The simplest of recipes, and no, this is not morphing into a food blog.
Salmorejo is so many things to me. It is a connection to a place I love–Spain. And Sevilla in particular. It is made of one of my most favorite things in the world–tomatoes. And it is delicious. Summer in a bowl. The combination of those simple ingredients is magical. Alchemical. Gestalt at it’s best. The sum being so, so much more than it’s parts. To me, when I make this dish (every week through tomato season), I am connected to generations before me who made this dish. I am connected to the memory of summers bursting with a bounty of fresh produce. Of countless tomatoes I tended with love and attention, like James Dean in East of Eden, nursing his bean crops. I’ve nurtured many a tomato into this world. But what it really got me thinking about, as I contemplated making my last batch of the season, is magic.
Often I listen to the NPR radio program and podcast, This American Life. On a few occasions, they have talked about magic. Not tomatoes, but prestidigitation. In the episode “The Magic Show,” they explore the art of the illusionist. I started to think about what exactly magic is.
It is about your eyes seeing something that feels counter to anything that could reasonably be expected to occur in the physical world. In the old days it may have meant sawing a woman in half, or pulling a bunny out of a hat. Magic at its core is the impossible becoming possible before your very eyes.
But magic is something else, too. It’s about a feeling you get when something really special happens. And it isn’t always an illusion. Sometimes it is completely and unbelievably real.
So I realized that magic means different things. There are different types. One is the kind that feels literally impossible, but is an illusion. David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty DISAPPEAR. What? Yes. It happened.
Another kind of magic is when we know it is an illusion, but we go along with it anyway. We appreciate it for how entertaining and even beautiful it can be. We see the mechanisms and the way it happened and it astounds us all the same. In the episode I listened to, a trick by Teller (of Penn and Teller) is described. It is based on the work of a 19th century magician, wherein a ball floats magically, and even when the audience can see (or strongly suspect) the cables or the underlying mechanisms to the trick, it feels special and beautiful and mesmerizing. Like magic.
But what about magic on a less grand scale? What about magic that isn’t an action or event pretending to be something else? What about tomatoes and bread becoming the most delicious of dishes? What about finding meaning and beauty in difficulty and challenge?
Which brings me to the type of magic that interests me the most. That is the type that, in this world of cynicism and doubt, actually is not magic at all. It is real.
To me, this is where magic gets really interesting. Because it isn’t at all about deception or what a magician is keeping from us, but rather this type of magician is interested in exploring the magic of reality. David Blaine has an act where he takes a wine glass and takes a bite of it, and it audibly crunches. It breaks and dissolves into smaller and smaller bits. He chews and chews and finally swallows this bit of glass with the assistance of a bit of water. And we all have to wonder–what’s the trick? But guess what? There isn’t one. He actually bites down on a wine glass and chews it until he can swallow it. It is consistent with his other grand scale illusions–being buried alive or encrypted in ice. He actually does these things. The magic is in his ability to push and explore the parameters of reality.
At this point you have to be wondering what the heck I am getting at. And here’s the thing: life and illness, and salmorejo and David Blaine all hang out together. They are things that are real AND magical. They are bigger and more impactful than any fabrication. They make us scratch our heads and wonder how it can be possible, and I am here to tell you that it is. Real and magical. All at the same time.
In my work, I meet with people who are having a hard time. They have many reasons for this–an illness like cancer can shake someone to their very core. And when they share their stories with me, I am sometimes presented with laundry-lists of impossibility. After laying it all out, all the details of their story, given to me like the most tangled ball of yarn and silky-fine filament, they look up at me and say, “…I’m not sure what to do about any of it, so what are you going to do to make it better?” And I can’t help but tell them the truth:
I have no idea.
But here is what I actually do know: I know that wanting things to feel differently is the first step to making them different. I know that sharing our fears and challenges somehow can make them feel more organized, manageable, and lighter. Less threatening. I know that this life holds meaning and beauty and wonder in equal, if not greater proportion to the fear and pain and difficulty, if we are willing and able to accept the complexity of it. I know that every single person I meet has everything to live for. And I am not going to let cancer hi-jack the life that they have, whether that be one year or twenty, and no one really knows, do they?
I know that I have seen, with my very eyes, the power of love and kindness and connection. I know that if we trust this world, it rises to meet us.
I know that bread and ripe, gorgeous tomatoes and olive oil and garlic make the most delectable sensation of “Summer in a bowl”, and that David Blaine straight up eats glass.
And I know that magic, in whatever way we can experience it, actually exists. Not just on a stage with red velvet curtains, but in this life, every single day. We just have to be willing to look.