Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Volume 19 Number 2/3 August/December 2018
(Final Issue)
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Adey, Peter. Levitation: The Science, Myth and Magic of Suspension. (London, Reaktion Books, 2017)
Reviewed by
University of KwaZulu-Natal
Like a highly skilled cartographer, producing maps of increasing detail and subtlety that open new ways of seeing the terrain, human geographer, Peter Adey, has written a sublime account of levitation.
I had the visceral sense of being escorted through a three-dimensional conceptual labyrinth of the subject; each twist and turn revealing its subject in ways never quite seen like this before, and in the end seeing aspects of my own life through the multi-focal lenses of inquiry that Adey so deftly employs.
Through Peter Adey’s unpacking of levitation through the various forms that it has taken in socio-political and cultural expressions over millennia, and teasing out wisps of meaning which, themselves, would have levitated into oblivion had it not been for, paradoxically, the grounded scholarship and the sensitive gaze of the subject that only someone soaring quite high can see. In a sense, gravity and levity, referred to throughout the book, are also tools of this writer’s craft.
I was eager to read the book primarily as a hobbyist magician and a student of the theory and practice of magic. An indelible impression was made on me at the age of seven when the South African Indian magician, Yusultini, levitated his wife on the stage of our City Hall. He was to repeat this illusion more than once on the city beaches of South Africa for the newspapers as pre-publicity for his show coming to town. This started my foray into mystery, but Adey’s gentle unveiling gives me another way of seeing Yusultini. Writing about levitation as forms of transgression – physical, political, spiritual, imaginative, etc. – Levitation allows me to see that Yusultini’s performance in East London, South Africa, with his iconic act of levitation, was in the moment both a transgression and a transcendence of an oppressive political order, while concurrently presenting the magician as an ‘ambiguous and vulnerable figure’. Yusultini had to change his racial identity in order to perform outside the former Province of Natal, home to the majority of South Africans of Indian descent, who, by law, were not allowed to settle in other South African province if they were not born there. Obviously, Yusultini could not change into either a black African or a white, so he changed into a Cape Malay (racially the closest to Indians) and settled in the Cape Province. It is conjectured that this alteration of racial classification was allowed because South African whites were taken with the apparent Eastern mystique of Yusultini’s levitation act and wanted to see it performed in their towns and cities around South Africa.
My own evidence for the above interpretation of the racial re-classification lies in the fact that the show I attended in 1963 saw the apartheid authorities permit both whites and non-whites to attend the show, provided that the race groups sat apart, with the aisle being the dividing line. Through Adey’s eyes I now see how much more spectacular Yusultini’s act of levitation was. That night he levitated all members of the audience into a brief space of relative social equality.
Levitation is an important cultural document; like its title, it rises above any specific form and its apparent meaning. The dizzying conceptual heights of the book are scaffolded by excursions not only into the more obvious sites of levitation (religion, myth and magical performance), but also into a wider array of lesser-considered human acts when it comes to this intriguing suspension: architecture, film, fine art, literature, photography, political protest, popular culture, psychology, racial subjugation, science, sport, and more.
I was also taken by Adey’s honest view of some forms of levitation; honest in that we do not sense a definite knowing about the ‘how’ of the levitations of St Teresa of Avila or others like her, where multiple witnesses could report no sign of trickery and where the levitators’ own accounts are ones of being equally perplexed by the occurrences, and some like St Teresa finding the phenomenon very bothersome. Where definite evidence exists of mechanical/physicalist methods of levitation, Adey presents these. But there is no smirk in his voice, because the book is about a deeper engagement with levitation rather than how it is specifically achieved. But it is noteworthy that Adey is honestly silent and non-speculative in instances where others would rush to unfounded conclusions in order to assert rationality and scientific control. A deep reading of the book, in fact like the very title, is a clue, in my opinion, to Adey’s unprejudiced voice.
A short review such as this one cannot cover the depth and breadth of such a book and thereby failing to convey the magnitude of its achievement. But to read it, carefully, and perhaps, more than once, is to be elevated.