The Wishing Well

The Nine of Swords is widely considered to be one of the worst cards that can turn up in a tarot reading. It is associated with nightmares, insanity, suffering, cruelty, and suicide. A total calamity of the internal self. The card depicts the collapse of a city, the Queen of Swords in a tree, insane and howling at the moon. Is it the moon (with its inhuman face) that is causing this destruction, as it does in the Tower card? And what is that tree doing there, as the single anchor the mad Queen clings to?

The swords suit, which embodies the rational mind—the intellectual aspect of the human experience—would suggest that it is really the Queen herself behind the destruction of the world. Is the moon a sort of mirror for her? Is it some divine being influencing the Queen from some mysterious external source, within the solipsistic universe of her dream? Well, we don’t really know. The moon is a stand-in for that which human beings cannot comprehend—like our own bewilderment when we have a prescient nightmare, or a dream in which our experience is beyond our own understanding.

So what do we get when we stop raging against the tide, and accept the fact that this card signifies great trouble for us?

I was marching with Occupy Wall Street on the freezing cold morning of November 17^th, 2011. I had been running around New York City’s financial district all night, and I was tired and dizzy, and wondering if I might be thrown in jail at some point during the day. We were committed to challenging the American status quo of authority structures, the mundane lives of individuals (especially those working on Wall Street), the widespread assumption that we have to sit quietly and accept what our government does with our lives, our money, and our voices. Within that group, shouting for change, were those who hungered for the total dissolution of our political and social systems. They wanted to topple the whole world, not out of any relish for seeing the suffering and death that always accompanies such an apocalypse, but to dismantle civilization’s existing mechanisms that cause suffering and death for so many already. They were driven by the conviction that we can build something better.

Perhaps the Queen sees the beauty of the world falling down around her. Perhaps she is indulging that part of humanity that desires to lose hold of reality, that part of herself that seeks to die.

As afraid as I was the following year, when I faced the IDF in the West Bank, I couldn’t help smiling when the soldiers charged us (a little band of Palestinians and internationals, waving flags and chanting songs). I was afraid for the little boy who made a peace sign and held it in the face of one of the soldiers, while the soldier, with his riot gear and Uzi, loomed over the child, and for the other Palestinians, who would suffer far worse consequences than us for protesting. But I couldn’t help but feel glad that we were all there together, and even to feel a kind of glee when they came for us.

It’s an odd thing to admit, but I will be one of the people running around and laughing when the world explodes.

(ashes, ashes, we all fall DOWN.)

This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

Ada and the Queen of Swords

"'What on earth is an artist?' 'An underground observatory,' said Van promptly."

-Vladimir Nabakov, Ada

A long time ago, when I was an undergrad, upon swimming for the first time in a vast sea of literature of my own choosing, I was just awakening from the deep, trance-like existence you get into when you find a really, really good book and can't stop reading and re-reading it, the kind of book you wish would never end at all. At that time, my Book-to-End-All-Books was the immortal Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I had read, at that point, Ellison's book about ten times straight through, and I still don't know how many times I read that beginning and ending (it still gives me the shivers just thinking about it, Ellison's character in his illuminated cave, writing from a place outside the world, lonely but powerful, ending with his terrifying line, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?") I was winding down, in a frenzy of African American history books, jazz music, and poetry, looking desperately for another work of fiction, when a friend, from whom I was slowly and painfully learning how to be cool, told me about Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.

I read it, was impressed with the language but mildly bored and a little sickened by the story, and began casting about to read more of Nabakov's brilliant, self-conscious and bravely egotistical writing. Then I found his Ada or Ardour: A Family Chronicle, a love-story complicated by incest. The characters were spoiled, brilliant, and ridiculously self-important, even for main characters. Like Van Veen, the book's number-one narrator, I fell in love with Ada. Not that she was particularly likeable or even admirable—her brilliance never consolidated into anything more substantial than a string of sad love affairs, though she tried hard to be an actress. One might have watched with interest from afar, but I hardly think that either of them would be tolerable in real life. It is not necessary to like that which you love.

But she was so real. Her self-importance merely reflected my own, buried under yards of empathy and self-doubt. She was a tragic figure, living in a world that did not see her and could not accept what she had to give. Neither Ada, nor her brother-paramour, Van (nor, I suspect, even the great and all-seeing author himself) seemed to have any idea why this should be so, and the book's plot tossed among the flotsam of a deteriorating world, its characters saddened to find themselves lost anonymously in a landscape over which they had expected to someday rule.

Says Van (always a foil for Ada, always her more legible spokesperson, always her other self): “Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”  Ada herself dwells in that gap, belonging no place and every place, and without any metric by which to judge her shape, her size, or her place in the world.

So it is not surprising to me that when I painted my Queen of Swords, it was Ada. In tarot, queens, kings, princes, and princesses ("pages" in some decks) are sixteen distinct personalities, and may represent real people, communities, ourselves, or that "dream of ourselves" with which we do daily battle.

The Queen of Swords is at once cold and tender. She is cold because she knows herself to be the brilliant, insightful, and capable person she is, and is in so many respects immune to need and desire, because she already has everything. She is tender because she has never known an existence without her riches, and therefore has no name for the blind, yearning, half-formed girl inside of her. In many ways, her only desire is for herself. Looked at another way, her desire to share her glut of blessings with the world (a desire which has not yet taken the shape of interest in the lives of other people, only a feeling of emptiness where this interest ought to be) makes her irrepressably sad. She looks down at the world, feeling powerful and yet alone, permeated by all the knowledge and experience of the whole world and yet weak with the hunger for human experience and fellowship.

Like Nabakov's Ada, the Queen is proud but bewildered; self-worth is not confidence. She thinks well of herself and her abilities (as well as her ability to give), but she finds no one who recognizes her in the world outside. Her dream of herself does not match how others see her, and she withdraws, confused and hurt, far beneath her skin and into her internal landscape, where no one can ever find her.

This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

Synaesthesia

For my upcoming Kickstarter, I have been collaborating with several musicians. Meredith Yayanos (who completed an exciting Kickstarter of her own, "The Parlour Trick")  is one of these, which is in many ways a dream come true; she has been a small hero of mine for years now.

I don't call Mer "Small Hero" because she is short (though she is every inch as short as it becomes a tree elf beauty, dressed magnificently like a silk road-era fabric shop bazaar, to be), but because she is a hero of mine who happens to be on a human scale. Many of my other heroes, William Blake, Malcolm X, Tilda Swinton, David Lynch, Sissy Hankshaw, Alice Walker, Isabelle Eberhardt, and Sonmi-451 (from the book, not the movie), to name a new, are either fictional, dead, or so famous that I can't imagine how we would ever get to know one another. My Small Heroes are friends, or friends or friends, who make beautiful art, or change the world, and who are knowable to me.

It's a wonderful thing to have Small Heroes (not everybody does), and it's even more wonderful when we can make art together. Mer is a co-founder of the beautiful Coilhouse project, lives in New Zealand with her beautiful partner and plays exquisite music on the theremin (an extremely metaphorical instrument). She is also friends with some of the most wonderfully creative people in the world, has worked with some big-time heroes, and has performed her music on stage to breathless audiences.

When I went to the postapocalyptic wastelands of San Bernadino in 2011 to help run the interactive metal sculpture Syzygryd at Beyond Wonderland, Mer did me the favor of finding me beautiful as I was sitting in a pappazan chair on the set, gnawing my fingernails in an uproar of bashful awkwardness and slowly acquiring a sparkling patina of rain drizzle and fly ash. I showed her my tarot cards a few months later, and two years later (that is to say, last week), she sent me a piece of her music that she made just especially for me.

Mer's idea was that I'd give her a tarot reading with my own cards, and then she'd write some music about it. The reading I gave her touched on Vladimir Nabakov's odd, inspiring, real-and-unreal, lovable-and-unlovable character Ada Veen, and a few weeks later, Mer wrote some music and titled it "Radiant Void," from the passage:

"You are breaking her heart," said Ada.

“Ada girl, adored girl," cried Van, "I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.”

I have always been a synaesthetic. When I hear sounds, I have visions beginning with simple colors, which usually expand into detailed apparitions of fantastic spaces and dream-like scenes, like the one I have described below. I have listened to Mer's "Radiant Void" many times now, as I have always listened to my favorite music, reliving its vision again and again, and sometimes seeing new details I had not noticed before, until the song becomes its own little world. Now, at last (alas) for the synaesthesia part; here's what I saw when I heard her music, 28% radiance, 72% void, and 10% kind-of-maybe weeping with surprise and happiness into my keyboard:

There is a sense of vast space, derived from the sounds of an impossibly huge waterfall echoing across the black, moonless, unseen landscape of a huge canyon or 4-dimensional space-time enclosure. This dark universe (and the sense one gets is that there is nothing to see yet, that the singularity has not yet popped, not yet projected light and energy and identity into the willing nothingness), begins to tremble with a faintly cacophonous jumble of distant oceans and volcanic eruptions, thermonuclear explosions and silent supernovae and stone-metal mountains shaken out of the new earth.

The sound, of course, of the beginning of the world.

Visible things (rather than the many things one has already begun to perceive in the dark, as a sleepwalker perceives her path between the bedpost and yesterday's boots and the gaping doorframe) begin to show themselves. They are all thin, filagreed and golden (in fact, they are dragons, but we will talk more about dragons later, when we talk about the suit of Sticks in my tarot deck). In the beginning there are only the outlines of ghosts and of the reflected glints of light upon the face of the deep. But afterwards, out of the darkness, comes the dull metallic sheen of a large ship (both space-ship and sea-ship), and then, suddenly, I can see inside. I see glass-enclosed, golden-lit interiors with great views into the engulfing sea-sky, which has suddenly become alive with tiny stars and planets, which are really phosphorescent algae and the luminescent skeletons of diatoms and tiny fish, which are all upon closer examination only the tiny points of light emitted from distant galaxies. I can see further, into empty corridors covered by leaded class archways, leading into impossibly vast gardens and orchards, the fruit heavy and ripe, songbirds and insects blending their songs with the whirring internal machinations of the ship. There are signs among the trees. They are impossible to read, but I know that they are pieces of words and phrases, and I find  messages of loss and hope and generosity, tremulously hand-painted on rough wooden chunks of driftwood and sea glass and salvage.

I pass by palace-like libraries, and museums of biological specimens displayed in amber-colored glass. I pass vaults of monstrous machinery, with clicking cicadas seemingly standing guard over the slow movements of the gears and pneumatic systems, and over the tiny sun suspended in a chamber at the center, throwing off light and radiation. a descending staircase of interlocking glass surfaces leads me to the base of the ship, where there is a stone-and-glass room shaped like a boomerang. The sharp external surfaces of the stone trail their edges in a knifelike silhouette across the light of passing galaxies. Inside, the room is smooth, and black sand, running along the mortared seams of the stone and glass, shivers in regular pulses, keeping the heartbeat of the ship's mechanical systems.

At this point, as I watch the shuddering black sand, the world around me begins to shake violently, as the sounds of glass (and dragon calls, just wait) and insect hum and birdsong fall off into silence, and nothing is left but the hushing sound of the vast space-ocean of the outer darkness, while one by one the fish-stars sputter and die. In the darkness, which smells of cold stone and damp earth, in the dimming gold of the failing lights shining through dark water, is the faint outline of, for the first time, another person, dancing like a flickering shadow in the blackness. The shadow turns to face me, and where its face belongs is the thin golden crescent of a new moon or a solar eclipse, and then the world winks out like an extinguished flame.

The "Radiant Void" EP by Meredith Yayanos will be available exclusively throughmy upcoming Kickstarter campaign for the Cheimonette Tarot.

This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

The Dizziness of Freedom: Fortitude and The Devil

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss . . . Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” -Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

The Cheimonette Tarot has several unique connections between the cards, and I wanted to expand on one of them, the Fortitude (Strength) card, and The Devil, embodying opposite and contradictory concepts of freedom and captivity.

Free will is a funny concept, wherein we are told (at least, by the Judeo-Christian bible) to think of that which we take for granted as a special dispensation from god, conferred on human beings alone. Otherwise, those who believe in a deterministic universe may argue that, in the inexorable course of time, the world is constrained to have only one sequence of events, only one outcome, only one choice. Within this miasma of divine boredom (god sits on his couch, having ruined the movie for himself, watching the story play out without any hope of astonishment), free will gets lost in the shuffle, crushed under the bulk of an all-powerful fate.

In Fortitude, a blindfolded woman is frozen in the moment just before she leaps off the back of a speeding, headless, horse. Is she in danger? The scene would suggest not. Sprouting from her back are four insect wings, poised to go into action at any moment. In fact, the woman seems to be about to fly, rather than to fall. There are in fact three blindfolded characters in the Cheimonette Tarot (and none of them are the blindfolded Fool of the Rider-Waite Smith tarot deck): the Priest, the Ace of Swords, and Fortitude. Each of these cards represents a different act of courage, and the latter two symbolize a genuine leap of faith. True strength is not about confidence, but is an act of imagination. After all, the strong must accept that they are in danger. When we travel as far as the legs of human experience: wisdom, reason, and animal instinct (the headless horse), can possibly carry us, we may take an imaginative leap, and thereafter decide for ourselves the course of our lives.

If fate denies free will, this leap is nothing more than another foreordained act of human limitation, but if fate accepts free will as a cohabitant and a sister, then machinations of a deterministic universe affect our freedom not one whit. What have the affairs of the gods to do with our mortal choices? Our mortality make us artists, generating beauty, wonder, and nonsense within the monotony of omniscience.

In the Devil, we find the head of the galloping horse in Fortitude. Although Fortitude's horse, despite having no head, has a seeing eye where its head would be, the animal's mind and mouth and face are missing. In the Devil, the horse's head expresses pain and fear, seemingly unable to move its limbless body even without the superfluity of the chains, held by unwinged, birdlike creatures. There are no people in the Devil, although the angel, itself headless as it merges in terror back into itself, spreads its wings as a sign of its power to escape. The Devil horse portrays human suffering. The nameless birdthings (the identity of which is as mysterious to the author as it is to you, reader) have no expression, either of satisfaction or dismay or confusion. The expressions of their faces remain illegible. A scene to make the angels hide: the disenfranchisement of the soul from its birthright of freedom and fortitude.

Anxiety is a natural reaction to danger. The abyss, as everyone knows, can be frightening and disorienting in its hugeness. There is nothing really left to do, then, besides tie on a blindfold and jump, and fly, or else stay in your shackled little world forever.

 This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

Atlas/ Alas/ At Last

They say that to dream of the moon is a sure sign of impending good fortune, but I dreamt last night of the full moon in Beit Ummar, in the occupied territories of the West Bank, where good fortune is notoriously hard to come by. Last year at this time I was working in Israel, putting together the beginnings of a research report that would delve into the Arab and Jewish history of a beautiful small town in the northern Galilee named Safed. During the Golden Age of Qabbalah in the 16th century, this little town was the center of the world: from which vast quantities of art, music, mystical literature, and poetry poured out, and from which much modern Jewish tradition derives. As I found (but which is not widely known any longer), the Arab Sufis had a great deal of discourse with the Jewish Qabbalists at that time in Safed, and these two spiritual communities shared many techniques and ideas for religious meditation and practice. (You can read an article I wrote on that research here)

In the course of time, I traveled all over Israel, and by July I found myself in the West Bank, staying with a wonderful Palestinian family and learning about them and about the political situation in the occupied territories. I was staying in a little guest room they had, with a pretty view overlooking the few farming lands left to the community there.

I woke up in the night, just as the Muslim Call to Prayer was sending its first sonorous echoes across the landscape, sounding like a lonely love-song. Outside on the bare soil between the olive and fig trees, skinny dogs dragged their chains. One uttered a low howl, but the other kept silence, her head down, her black feet raising the dust as she slowly paced the circumference of her captivity. The full moon hung so low over the trees I felt I could touch it. The Call to Prayer seemed to be pulling it down out of the sky. I was sure that unless the Call stopped, the moon would crash into the earth, breaking open and spilling bright water into every pore of the parched soil. The Call did cease, and the night insects (as if they had quieted themselves to listen to its beauty, though they were as ignorant of Arabic as I was) resumed their clockwork sounds, ticking out the time until morning.

I did not sleep again that night; I lay and listened to the sound of the dragging chains, the heavy sounds of the thirsty dogs, the memory of the Call, the night insects, and I watched the way the moonshadows slowly dripped over the landscape, turning black and blue and then fading like a bruise to pale purple as dawn approached.

Last night I dreamed of that night last July. The dogs were black wolves, and the moon still did not break open and water the earth. I woke up as hot as I had been that night in the tremendous heat of summer in the high desert, and with the taste of fresh figs in my mouth.

Atlas was the god with the worst job (or, rather, it would be the worst job if there weren't so very many others). Atlas, while his Titan brothers were imprisoned in Tartarus, was singled out by Zeus and condemned to carry the the celestial spheres on his shoulders, in order to keep the primordial father and mother (the sky and the earth) forever apart. Atlas was a tragic giant with a monstrous burden (which could only have gathered in bulk as, over the centuries, human beings discovered just how deep the sky really went).

I love Atlas for his burden, because the world is indeed a heavy, heavy place. But I think that the god that holds up the universe isn't a strong man at all, but a baby, a madman and a madwoman, a beggar, an animal, a wandering idiot.  A Fool.

The Fool doesn't take on burdens, doesn't try to help or to fix problems or even to heal wounds. The Fool is simply the Fool, ignorant, self-centered, and unable to rise even one inch above personal survival. The Fool stands on the top of a mountain because to a Fool, every direction is down. Any little movement will decide the whole course of existence; the Fool will keep falling, and the direction of life from there on out will be initiated and perpetuated on its own, like a glacier slowly and irresistibly carving a canyon out of a high, rocky steppe.

An innocent adventurer, the Fool is built to learn rather than to help. And in this way, naturally obviating the well-intentioned trap of paternalism, does not rob others of their own powers of salvation. The Fool has nothing to give, and everything yet to understand. The two tails reveal an animal nature: a person driven by physiological needs and the animal instincts enshrined in every human being's genetic makeup. The Fool may someday reach the black sea (or perhaps it is a dark stretch of desert) beyond the mountains, but at present the Fool is frozen in infancy, neither male nor female, whose two tails recall the number zero, an empty shell, a womb, a hollow world inside which to dance out the stuff of human existence.

I went to Israel and to the territories knowing next to nothing, and without any thought of working for peace or helping an oppressed people. I felt I did not know enough to know where or how to help. I traveled and I spoke to anybody who would share their thoughts with me, which turned out to be quite a diverse lot of people; a foreigner of unstated political beliefs can be a blank slate upon which people of all faiths, political positions, and personal values will write in great profusion, if I could only keep quiet and polite, and listen. And I found I could; my curiosity was stronger than my outrage. And it turned out that being there to understand rather than to help ended up helping more than I would have imagined.

Franz Kafka knew all about fools, and he wrote a beautiful little story called "Children on a Country Road". It ends this way:

"There you'll find queer folk! Just think, they never sleep!"

"And why not?"

"Because they never get tired."

"And why not?"

"Because they're fools."

"Don't fools get tired?"

"How could fools get tired!"

 This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.