The Associative Memory Imp

I really like David Britland's Cyclic Aces. Easy to do, clever and fooling:

http://cardopolis.blogspot.com/2005/04/cyclic-aces-this-idea-was-first.html

Mark Elsdon recently praised the trick in one of his Hidden Gems ebooks as well.

Guy Hollingworth had this idea once of reciting a poem whilst he cut to the aces. So - if you think about it - this trick is sort of like a Universal Trick. The idea is that cutting the aces looks more impressive if you are doing something else at the same time.

I think this concept has a lot of potential. Since you can pretty much say anything you want, as you cut to the aces. So, I am just wondering what would be a good Jerx approach to this idea?

I just thought you might enjoy thinking this one over. The 'Cutting The Aces' trick - using this presentational framework - allows you to pretty much recite anything you want.—JM

Usually I’m not really into the idea of reciting anything, to be honest. It feels too performative for me.

But after thinking about this idea for a little bit, I did come up with a way to use it alongside an effect that would otherwise seem like a “show-off” type of moment.

I finally got an opening to try it last week when my friend Lena was visiting.

She saw my high school yearbook in my bookcase and that got us talking about high school and the classes we took and what we remembered. She mentioned her daughter was taking a high school class in “The History of Comic Book Art.” I was annoyed her daughter wasn’t suffering through the same boring classes I had to go through.

As we were having this discussion about classes and what we learned or failed to learn, I said, “Oh, you just reminded me of something I haven’t thought about in ages. It’s a little bizarre. Hold on. Let me see if that still works.” I looked around and grabbed a deck of cards off the end table. I shuffled a couple times and spun out a card from the middle of the deck. It was the 2 of Clubs. I shook my head and put the 2 back in the deck. I tried it again and it was another random card.

I pulled my focus back to my friend. “Uhm, so yeah. When I was in 11th grade I had to memorize a poem for English class. It’s called Invictus. Do you know it? It goes…,”Out of the night…,” uhm, “Out of the night it comes to me.” I think. I’m not sure. Anyway, I had to memorize that poem and I was spectacularly bad at it. So I spent like two weeks just drilling down on it constantly.

“Now, at the same time, I was also trying to learn this magic trick where you are able to produce the four aces from a shuffled deck of cards. It’s like a classically difficult effect that requires a ton of practice.

“And I was practicing these two things literally simultaneously. I’d sit on my bedroom floor, with the poetry book open at my side, and the deck of cards in front of me. And I’d repeat the poem as best as I could while I worked on the machinations of this trick.

“When the day came that I needed to recite it in class, I was fairly confident. But when I went in front of the class I realized I couldn’t remember the poem if I wasn’t doing the card trick. Fortunately, my teacher was cool about it and let me grab the deck I had in my backpack and do the trick while I recited the poem.

“The weirder thing is that I learned a few days later that not only could I not recite the poem unless I was doing the trick, but I also couldn’t do the trick unless I was reciting the poem. The muscle memory required for the trick and the actual memory required to recite the poem were so enmeshed in each other that I couldn’t separate them. I haven’t tried it in years, but I’m curious if it’s still the case. Here shuffle these up.”

Understand the concept? Sometimes your words and actions become so closely associated that you can’t do one without the other. If you’ve ever acted in something you’l find that you sometimes need to be up and moving around as you would in the scene in order to remember the dialogue. This just takes that idea a little bit further.

Okay, so she shuffled the deck. Unknown to her, the aces are out of the deck at this point. I palmed them back in when I got the deck back. 

The ace production I use is just a series of somewhat flashy moves I collected over time. Nothing original. I put it together years ago, when I was dumb enough to think anyone would possibly be impressed by one’s ability to produce the aces in a flashy way. 

So at this point I had the deck back into my hands and eased my way into the poem, shuffling and cutting during the stanzas.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

[I produce an Ace]

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed. 

[Second Ace produced]

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid. 

[Third Ace produced]

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
[I cut to and turn over random card. Seemingly a mistake. I turn it over and give it a little one-handed spin on my middle finger.]
I am the captain of my soul.

[I turn over the “random” card to reveal the last Ace.]

I gave my friend a look. Not a look like, “Hey, aren’t I something special?” But more of a look like, “Isn’t that strange?” 

I was very pleased by how well this went over. I used to do the ace production a lot when I was younger. As I said, it’s nothing original, just whatever moves feel right in the moment (one-handed cut where the bottom card gets dragged out by the fingers and produced, Benzais spin-out move, hot-shot cut, pop-out move, or just turning over the top card after a fancy-ish multi-packet cut), followed by the “mistake correction” ending. It’s the sort of thing that’s fun to practice and do, but any trick that is solely a “look what I can do” trick, just feels too desperate to me.

Adding the recitation to the trick should make it seem like even more of a show-off thing because now I’m doing two difficult things. But oddly, it has the reverse effect. Because the story is that I don’t have mastery of either of these things. It’s just in the circumstance that I do them together that I can do them at all. 

This is the sort of thing people can find understandable and relatable while at the same time finding it to be unreal and amazing. In all my work—and especially in the next book which is kind of devoted to this subject—that’s the sweet spot I try to shoot for.