FRAG/MENTS

TAROLOGICAL TOUCH

2012-05-13T14:06:00.001+02:00

For as long as I remember I’ve been interested in various forms of touching. From imaginary touching to physical touching there’s a whole range of cognitive emotions that one can draw on. Whether imagined or not, touching is a participatory rather than an individual move. When we say, ‘I’m touched,’ about something, we first get the visuals in place and then the abstractness of the situation. Touching is therefore quite magical. For instance, there is a powerful relation between asking people to imagine things and physically touching them. Touch relating to visualization is the most complicit of acts. When people allow you to touch them in that way, they strip naked for you. Yet their nakedness only serves to give way to a translucent light right into their souls. This is the part I myself find most moving. What I’m interested in is what happens when complicity breaks off, with some people taking the touch and leaving the imagination on the table, or taking the imagination and repudiating the touch.

Not long ago I sat at the Shakespeare pub in Birmingham with my sister. I was visiting the university to teach some classes in literary theory and creative writing. As for my sister, she just came along to check out the spiritual state of England. We were tired after a long day of teaching and shopping that included a spree at an esoteric place called Zen and where we bought new Tarot decks and a few interestingly shaped stones. As we sat there enjoying some pale ales and looking through our purchases, an elderly couple next to our table was looking our way quite intently. ‘Are those Tarot cards?’ the man asked, and I said ‘yes’. ‘Oh, my God,’ he said. ‘How nice, but those things mess with your head.’ ‘Why do you think so?’ I asked, and he said, ‘Oh, I just know, these cards make you think very hard. I never want to look at Tarot cards.’ Then he delivered unsolicited information, ‘But I talk to ghosts.’ ‘That sounds interesting,’ I said, ‘So, what do they tell you?’ ‘Oh, many things,’ he said. ‘About life and all. But there’s always something that I don’t understand,’ he also said. ‘We can use the cards to ask about it,’ I said, and then I made a move towards his table. The man’s wife was making space for me unconsciously. ‘Please, don’t touch me,’ he said. ‘I won’t’, I said. ‘Oh, I’m so afraid of this,’ he said, and jumped on his feet heading for the restrooms. His wife turned to me and said, ‘You can touch me.’

I did it, first with the cards. But I gave her a reading on her husband’s behalf. As he was absent from the scene for a while, I took a seat by their table and said: ‘Let’s see why your husband’ – ‘ex-husband,’ she then corrected me – talks to ghosts’. 3 cards fell on the table: Le Pendv, Jvstice, La Rove de Fortvne. [The Hanged Man, Justice, The Wheel of Fortune]

I said to her, ‘He’s chasing some truth at a standstill that he’d like to get proof of, but it hasn’t happened yet.’ Then the touch. The woman took both my hands in her hands, and said, ‘You know, this man thinks he has a twin. During the war he remembers that he was placed in a safe house with another kid, yet when he returned to his family there was only one of them left. Ever since then he’s been trying to find out whether he has a brother. He even went to Canada on a trail, but no luck.’ Then, as we saw the man returning to the table, she quickly let go of my hands and said, ‘Please don’t tell him I told you this.’ I said, ‘I won’t.’

As I had to leave myself, I parted with them, yet wondering: Does the man have a twin? Back at the hotel, I went out for dinner with a friend, and told him the story. As he is also into all kind of texts – he teaches literature and, as it turned out, he is very good with the Marseille Tarot – he almost yelled at me, ‘What do you mean you parted with them? You can’t do that to people. We need to know what happened. Does he or does he not have a twin?’ He was getting hysterical, so I said, ‘Listen, if you’re so worked up, you can cut the deck and ask the question, and we’ll see what the cards say.’ Said and done. 3 cards fell on the table: Le Pape, Lermite, Le Fov. [The Pope, The Hermite, the Fool]

Before I said anything, he got up and shouted ecstatically, ‘There’s no twin, there’s no twin. Look at those cards. He thinks there are two of them, but it’s a foolish thought. He’s alone. And look at the cat eating his balls. This man has only one testicle. Men with only one testicle are often chased by the chimera of an Other.’ Needless to say, I didn’t have to add anything. My friend then insisted that I went back to the pub, try to find the couple, and ask the wife to corroborate his thesis. I ended up suggesting that he did that, get himself a pack of cards, and start searching. We ended this scenario with my friend insisting that I take the cards with me everywhere, to work, to pubs, to conferences, to classrooms, the restrooms, but that I shouldn’t read in the streets after 6 o’clock, as that is the time when the ‘nutters’ come out.

As he forgot to include both of us in that category of nutters and Tarot enthusiasts, I still feel haunted by the economy of story telling and particularly touch. Occasionally I retell this incident to friends, and I’m continuously touched by what they have to offer. The finest tarologist, Enrique Enriquez, (to appear now also in the first feature film on Tarot, Tarology, accompanying his book Tarology), had this to say: ‘It is funny that a man would only let himself be touched by dead people. Touching is important. It is one more thing therapy took away from us (…) “Le Pendu, Justice, La Roue” = “fate judges the tRaitoR“. That man doesn’t talk to ghosts, but to his own Remorse.” Indeed. Remorse for having survived the war, who's to say? 70 years of living with an invented story is quite something. And yet, I have to say that I was a bit jealous. The old man seemed more in touch with his imagination and his ‘real ghosts’, as he insisted, than the rest of the lot at the pub, some clearly tormented existences. Had I stayed 10 more minutes, I would have touched him, in that special way that Gabriel Josipovici also talks about in his fine book Touch, the complicitous way, but then again, that may have spoiled the later magic. I took the gift that was given me at that moment, leaving myself like a ghost, and appreciating it for what it was. The man liked me and I liked him, and that was all I need to know.

Meanwhile, such encounters are proof of the kind of poetic situations that Tarot cards create. As Enrique also offered a reading of my friend’s reading of the old man’s cards, we ended up with spin-off narratives, alternating poetically between the world of logos and the world of mythos, and keeping the two in perfect balance and co-existence. Said Enrique: ‘The Father has two sons. We could also see the whole tableaux as if it where depicting your ghost-whisperer's situation: a grown up man (Lermite) remembers a past when he had a brother (Le Pape), and goes through life (Le Fol) with such memory biting him in the ass. Or we could see the tableaux as a direct instruction (to Lermite): "snap out of it! Turn around and walk away. Ignore the pain of what you think you know". To what I would suggest: “You deserve to live.” I wish all my taro logical encounters were like that one! Now, the amazing thing about such encounter is the SITUATION you created, where a series of memorable events occur around the tarot, while eliciting a poetic derailment of reality.’ Indeed again. Such situations are not only magical and astonishing, but above all, touching. They enable us to make creative leaps that expand our field of vision and our consciousness. The art of Tarot is an art of participation in what it means to be honest beyond the cultural construction of clichés.

§ Note on the deck: Jean Noblet's Tarot de Marseille, 1650. Hand-stenciled cards as reconstructed by Jean-Claude Flornoy.

§ (For more Tarot related posts, go to my Taroflexions website).

B-DAY

2012-04-20T23:52:00.000+02:00

“Words shall not be hid
nor spells buried
might shall not sink underground
though the mighty go.”

― Elias Lönnrot, The Kalevala

Hyvää syntymäpäivää rakas ystävä!

SHAREHOLDERS

2012-04-12T12:45:00.011+02:00

A house in the woods of wood, a house in the woods – I want. A house in the woods of wood, a house in the woods – it’s mine. ‘Let’s do the antler’s dance’, the magician says, and starts playing a forbidden tune. Meters and meters and meters of silk match the rising and falling tone of La Force, the magician’s violin. My hands on the wand, and the antlers aloof awaken the fox. Shapeshifting. ‘Your secret name is Alogon,’ the magician says. Ten ton alogon pragmateia. The theory of irrationals – the irrational silence, the decapitated silence. ‘Play, play, play a tune for Alogonashi Korponensis,’ I say, in this house of mine, house of shares, house of bears, house of snares. ‘(A)Log( )on to the square root of two, that’s what I say you are,’ says the king of cups, while pouring and poising the wine. The Korppoo house is our private extension of the Stainer Library in Turku, we think. Witches to the left, witches to the right, shamans to the left, shamans to the right, magic to the left, magic to the right. ‘Lo’, the below and the above say, ‘don’t forget about us.’ ‘– What are you looking for today,’ the magician wants to know. ‘I don’t know,' I say, 'but I formulated an intent. To have a book find me. So give me something on wheels’, I say, 'to give this incantation wings.' He bows and says, ‘Boethius. Present, future, past, present, future, past, present, future, past. If time was irredeemable. But I’m not sure it is. The point is that the center is the point.’ And so Boethius goes consoling us: "I know how Fortune is ever most friendly and alluring to those whom she strives to deceive, until she overwhelms them with grief beyond bearing, by deserting them when least expected. … Are you trying to stay the force of her turning wheel? Ah! dull-witted mortal, if Fortune begin to stay still, she is no longer Fortune." Hells, bells, honey smells. I ring the bell and get in. ‘Western esotericism for you today, courtesy of Donner, bonner, honor,’ the chief librarian of the occult greets me, while looking alogonashingly at me and handing me a book of a lot to go with my tarot. Book hook look took. But where is the one I intended to find me? I charge my index finger with the power of the bell hooks sent on by the magician earlier on today and go for Spellcraft. A manual of Verbal Magic. I take it to my den without opening it. This one has something coming out if it. This one is a good one. This one is a good one having something good coming out of it. This one has the Ace of Cups a-washing. Whoa! What’s this doing here? This is not a book about Tarot – not even in the slightest. And yet all the chapters begin with the Marseille, spell bidding and spell binding. Can this be magic? “Magic is a joyous exceptional experience which leads to a sense of well-being,” says Sybil Leek which makes me say: 'so mote it be, so be it, let it be, be it.' The center is the point. Expanding.

EAGLE

2012-03-21T19:02:00.002+01:00

I have dreams of Bach as an eagle playing the organ with his wings. This sight is mighty and powerful. I always did suspect that Bach was a master at shape-shifting, and I like it very much when I get this confirmed by the eagle itself as Bach. I ask the organ-playing eagle: ‘who are you?’ and the answer is: ‘I’m Bach, of course.’ I like the ‘of course’ part, as it has just that kind of magic in it that interests me. Between worlds, this vision is as real as the very cantata 27 which Bach wrote, and whose third movement is based on the verse in the book of Isaiah 40: 31: “but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” I’m thinking today of the work on my peace of mind, the work that must transcend my ambivalence. When prompted also by a line in a poem sent to me by a friend: “a superstition is a poetic license” – thanks Enrique Enriquez – I get this thought crossing my head, that the earth sings – thanks also to Annette Høst. A superstition is the sign of the shape-shifters. Bach is my spirit helper, and together with my other totems from the animal kingdom we perform magic. The kind of magic that entices us to keep doing what we’re doing and believe that we can only get better at creating magical realities. Happy birthday, Bach. Thanks for flying (with) me to the stars, to the underworld, here and in space.

POWDER

2012-02-23T17:27:00.011+01:00

I go powder skiing around Camp Tamok outside Tromsø. All is well. I fly over everything like a fool, and do a few tricks that impress my instructor, Roy. “How can you do that,” he wants to know, and I disclose that it’s my yoga education that enables me to walk well into my forties while allowing myself to do unconventional things in the snow. Finally, of course, I also learn a few tricks. In between magic I take a moment to enjoy the breaking of light through the marvelous landscape, and a quote flashes through me. I find this annoying, as I’m not here to think. But, as the case is, Jane Austen insists on interfering: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” I look at Roy, who tells me that the best about powder skiing is that you never have to explain what it does to you. “If you had to explain it, it means that people wouldn’t get it,” he goes, and I like his logic. I file Jane Austen’s remark to the back of my head – hell no, I actually banish it from my head – as it occurs to me that there’s nothing more pathetic in the world than the culture which holds such artificial universals. “Should we go again,” Roy asks, thus interrupting my reverie, and I say, “yes,” with my whole body and all the promises I made to my soul. I never did a conventional thing in my life, and I don’t see any reason why I should start now. Thank god for snow and free men who remind me of what the meaning of life is. All hail to my beloved, Norway, and everything else it has got in it.

NATURAL FORCE

2012-02-20T16:39:00.002+01:00

Walking the trails in Tromsø, I imagine the nature speaking to me: “Heed attention,” it says, and then thunders through light and snow: “I never lie to myself.” Suddenly I feel empowered. My pace picks up speed, and I fly over the ice. Whoa! My body is lean and slim and arches in the air like a well-fit tightrope across two mountaintops. The magnetism of the North Pole smuggles me over to my natural state of ashes to ashes in progress. I pulverize culture. I banish words such as ‘responsibility’ and ‘reflection.’ Tall Norwegians pass me by and find me attractive. They can sense the Snow Queen and the Ice Witch at work, making love potions. I can fuck anything here, though not all is worth the while. "I don’t lie to myself,” nature says, and I hear myself banishing all insults to where they came from. Non serviam serves me well as a spell. I wonder what else I should throw into the pot: the sound of my force clenching the fire. The truth is that I am the One.

RAW

2012-02-19T00:58:00.008+01:00

I’m riding high waves in the Arctic. In between talks on literary and cultural theory seen through tarot methodology – I am, after all, officially starting an esoteric wave at my university – I go dog-sledding, drumming with the shamans of the Bålfolket, and rescuing a few souls from the honorable state of zombiness. People ask, where the hell are you? Are we losing you to the ice – like that one hasn’t happened already. My friend, the genius mathematician, also wants to tell me: “you must come back and help me, I’m reasoning with Cantor so much these days that it frightens me.” Another one is looking for a musher-partner to go dog-sledding with in Pasvikdalen, Kirkenes, in March. “It’s just for the weekend,” she says, and I have to say yes. This one will be: each with her sleigh and pack of dogs. Yep. Here we go flying again.

I write a few words on my computer, tie a few lose ends, close projects, make new pledges – they call this work. But up here, everything I do is sanctified. I think of the Arctic as one big natural cathedral inundated in light. When the aurora borealis is here, I bow to it. When the sun rises, I bow to it. When the snow squeaks under my feet, I bow to it. When the huskies kiss me, I bow to them. When the trees whisper, I bow to them. It occurs to me that I need no yoga. All this bowing stretches my body and my alpha senses. And it goes to show, as soon as I write the alpha word, the aleph is here. The mathematician sends me word that, just in case, if I should hesitate to come back, there are all these men "aligned, singing their ode to nothingness” and yet waiting for my touch: “gødel, cantor, banach, tarski,” and “plus Bach,” he says, trumping everything. I’m beginning to feel like a dragon-lady in that silly fantasy series, The Game of Thrones, turning everything into raw essentials. It may be cold here, but the hot-blooded ones, the ones with bleeding hearts, recognize this space as the space that gives us back our redemptions. Here we love with an infinite love on the real numbers line.

HOTPLATE TAROT

2012-02-05T17:29:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I put on my astrakhan coat, strings of fresh-water pearls, Misaki pearls, opals, rune amulets from the Lofoten islands, and hamsa bracelets from Israel. I was properly armed and ready to visit the annual wellness/body and soul fair in Copenhagen hosted over the weekend. The minute I stepped inside the big forum, I could see that there’s system to the madness. The ground floor offered grounding things: crystals, stones, drums, animal skins, and incense. The first elevation and up had Tarot, witches, angels, Indian gurus, and a corner full of what others in everyday parlance would refer to as the ‘totally-beyond-redemption-speaking-with-the-dead’ type of folks. Most of the visitors walked about either in a completely catatonic state, or a state of eagerness, which often resulted in their sticking their noses into crystal balls and the like, and forgetting to pay attention to who else was walking about and who they stepped on. But then this is the place for the totally disturbed, totally narcissistic, totally righteous, and totally loving.

As I like to see totalities in action, I never want to miss a beat, so I try to attend as many encounters of this type as possible. On a more pragmatic level, I was interested in seeing what else the Danish tarot community is up to these days. I went to what was advertised as a lecture on tarot by the owners of the Danish Tarot Academy, Ulrik Golodnoff and Søren Rasmusen. As it turned out, there was no lecture, but instead an invitation to the public to just come forward with individual questions, which the two lecturers would answer by looking into the cards, in ‘stereo’ as they put it – the Waite/Smith and Crowley/Harris decks. This is not very interesting for the members of the audience who can make a distinction between place and space and various types of exhibitionism. Also as a general rule, an exhibitionist is not interested in seeing another exhibitionist, or having to listen to people asking questions as to whether the cards could say something about how and when – ‘when, I need to know NOW’ – a lost philanderer lover will return to the one and only loving bosom. While the Waite/Smith Tarot suggested: ‘forget about it, honey, your man is an immature and insincere Page of Cups in reverse’ and the Crowley/Harris suggested busted security in the 4 Wands in reverse, the two lecturers failed to deliver a synthesis or a narrative that would say something commonsensical about how the imagery of the two cards in fact supported the same message. The subject was also lamenting that she didn’t get it, insisting also that her lover promised that he would come back to her. Yes, and there are no dishonest men on the planet, but if she worked hard at it – the two lecturers said – of course the additional 5 cups can also turn into grand love, because good fortune is in sight as signaled by the Wheel of Fortune. The woman was happy with this answer.

For some reason, the Danish tarotists are particularly fond of Crowley’s Thoth Tarot. I think this has to do with the fact that they think Crowley/Harris is ‘cooler’ than the standard Waite/Smith. I am a Marseille reader myself, so I don’t belong to the club. In fact, as there aren’t any other Marseille readers in Denmark – most people find the historical decks difficult to read with, as there are no pictures on the minor Arcana cards – I can consider myself a one-woman show. For cultural reasons, however, I rather like the mainstream decks used yesterday, and I can also read with them without any qualms – I can even do the kabbalah stuff in relation to the Thoth deck, if need be. Consequently, this knowledge enables me to make a few assessments. So, on yesterday’s performance: No, no, and no, I don’t think so, OMG, that is so no, absolutely not, no way in hell, nope, and no. I had a hard time finding a ‘yes’ when, for instance, Rasmussen was telling the woman concerned with her lover that the 5 of cups in the Thoth tarot was challenging her to think of what Jesus would do if he was sitting on a hotplate. As an image in itself – Jesus with a hot ass – this works brilliantly, but if you leave things up in hot air, merely telling someone that they need to find a way of hopping between the branches of the Tree of Life, from Geburah ruled by Mars to Tiphareth ruled by the Sun, is not very helpful. Given also what we know of Jesus, who’s to say that he wouldn’t elect to burn and endure it all, carry the heavy cross, instead of taking another path? Thus, telling the woman to go soft and beautiful on the inconstant and disinterested lover is a way of betraying her trust and siding with the absent potential bastard.

At the end of the day, although I can appreciate people’s unfortunate efforts – and I still believe in the poetics of Tarot and its ability to derail our reality for the better, in spite of everything – let’s just say that while entertaining, the Danish Tarot Fair fails on the question of precision. But then, balancing Tarot’s potential for precision with its potential to leave it open and up to us is the grand art. It is for this reason that we don’t give it up, even though we may feel the urge to smash a few pedestals, go from small scale to grand scale and thus rewrite and reclaim the tarot schooling from clubs, establishments, and body and soul fairs.

ON TIME

2012-01-26T12:49:00.005+01:00

I’m anticipating with great pleasure my sabbatical this term. Although I enjoy teaching, I find it that if I have more time I can teach more systematically people other than students. Or people interested in what we call ’weird stuff’. As I like to think of myself as a reader – I read books, Tarot, pictures, children, animals, the universe, stones and water – I find that it helps people to know that there are others in the world who appreciate their time on a level that's not culturally time-bound. We all have an intuitive knowledge about the fact that time is significant, but we rarely have this knowledge consolidated – such knowledge often gets to be perceived as some cosmic gobbledygook. So, we either doubt too much, or we believe in nonsense too much. Here, what I have to offer is this: we are here to pay attention – or so the Zen Buddhists say, or so the Shamans say, or so Bach says, or so the mathematicians say, or so we all say.

To arrive at any conclusion takes time. Neither intelligence nor thought contribute to enhancing the nuance of understanding that time and space alone create. The impatient ones, the ones who even want a reward for their blunders, get a reward. We call it the world of clichés.

I’ll be globetrotting again in search of the present, away from myself, away from repeating myself to death, repeating others to death, away from the past, away from projecting fictions into the future, away from myth and symbolism. On my schedule I have new and old places to visit: London, Tromsø, Harstad, Delhi, Turku, New York, Helsinki, Olso, Copenhagen, and then back to the source, Roskilde. I will conclude a few things, but not before I get out there all the senses available to me. Get them in there as well. I’ll take the time it takes to eat and appreciate those oysters at Grand Central in New York and the roast goat in Tromsø, hear the sound of the drums pulsating at unison with ancient history in Harstad, say abracadabra with the magical Giordano Bruno in Turku, get all Aquarian with John Starr Cooke in Helsinki, greet and greet and greet the holy men in Delhi and Kurukshetra, get hit in my gut by the dust of my 1181 supernova spread all over in Oslo, step into the cathedral in Roskilde and say, I’m back, and so are my senses, or at least my sense of time.

We can’t run away from time, therefore all time is always the right time. The only thing that may be wrong in our ballooning through space is failing to make a few good distinctions. To right that wrong, it takes time. So take it. It's all you've got.

SHAPE-SHIFTER

2012-01-08T11:49:00.001+01:00

Breakfast on board the Hurtigruten ship that goes from Bergen and all the way up to Kirkenes. There are things to see on the way, adventure activities on land, kissing huskies and dog sledding, flying over the snow and communing with the spirit of Odin in the Lofoten islands. All very good. But I’m reminded of a pledge I made some 2 years ago on the same Hurtigruten, when I decided that if I should ever get rich, I would buy the entire fleet and enforce a few rules. Starting with banishing all the yakking at breakfast. I listen to people talking over their coffee, all in a very assertive way, all being very formal and reverential. All about the kids’ schools, work and health, and the occasional love grief or frustration. No one is interested in the meaning of life, or the grand nothingness. We pass it ever so gracefully, though. The white Lyngen Alps stare us in the face silently and are inviting us to imitate them. Sit in silence and wonderment. But we don’t do it, of course not, and why should we? How could we? In this civilized world, it’s crucial that we yak at breakfast in a loud voice, as we need to remind ourselves of our mighty powers which we need to exercise as soon as we get out of the house to go to work, to school, or to seduce somebody. The meaning of life is called selling. We need to sell all that we’ve got: Our looks, our brains, our bodies, our souls, our dead ancestors, and our relatives. Everything is for sale, and the ones who can do it best are the ones considered successful. They are showered with rewards in the form of prizes, which then enable the winners to sell themselves some more – now by proxy, meaning that it won’t matter any more how brainy or empty-headed you might be, or how good looking. People will buy your stuff simply because you won a prize. It’s a good life.

Lunch is coming. Free buffet. The other rule that I would enforce if I had the fleet would be the ‘no ‘free’ lunches’ rule. No more eating. Only bread and water. If you want salt on the bread, you can lean over the railing on board and let your bread be splashed with sea-water. There would be retreat rooms instead of TV rooms. No soap operas. The only drama allowed would be the drama created in these silent rooms, where people can get to do yoga, meditate in zazen, and feel the pain of disciplining the body. All for nothing. My chief of staff in charge with the well-being of the tourists onboard will have one announcement only over the speakers: ‘good morning ladies and gentlemen, today we begin the day with selling nothing.’ ‘Guten morgen, meine Damen und Herren, heute Morgen fangen wir an Nichts zu verkaufen.’ ‘God morgen, mine damer og herrer, i dag starter vi dagen med at sælge ingenting.’

Dinner time. Everyone out on the deck. The full moon creates magic, Trollfjorden is not bewitching for nothing, even though the trolls are not interested in exchange rates and more selling. Here you get the magic all for free. By the time you hit the deep arctic, the only desire you will have left would be the desire to think of yourself as one without a self. As No One. You will come home empowered. Nothing will impress you anymore. You will be able to see through a lot of shit. You will wear masks all according to context and circumstance. You will have become a shape-shifter.

BELIEVING

2012-01-03T12:22:00.002+01:00

I’m cruising through the Arctic in the North of Norway. I do a Tarot reading here, and another there. I quickly settle the score with the incredulous ones upon being presented with the question: ‘so, you’re an academic AND a fortuneteller?’ I just say ‘yes.’ But ‘yes’ is never enough. ‘Surely you don’t believe in that sort of thing,’ people go, without defining what ‘that sort of thing’ is. I always say the following to this: ‘well, obviously I don’t believe in it. What I believe in is the words of men and women walking down the aisle, swearing eternal love to each other, only to demonstrate the opposite in the end.’ As they say, 50 million people can’t be wrong. They all believe in THAT sort of thing, and so do I, so help me God.

Here’s a recent reading that addressed the above issue. As one can ask meta-questions of Tarot, we asked the following: ‘how does the belief in tarot compare to the belief in marriage?’

I pulled two sets of 3 cards for each, one for Tarot and the other one for marriage:

TAROT: As de Baston (Ace of Wands), Roy Despee (King of Swords) Le Fov (The Fool)

On what you get out of your belief in Tarot, here’s what I said:

Tarot allows you to put your will and belief forcefully to work in the service of your dissecting mind. Whatever you find sets you free. You don’t explain the Tarot, you just let it walk its talk. It will always have an answer that will tell you what you need to know. Whether you believe in the Tarot or not, the Tarot always wins.

MARRIAGE: 3 de deniers (3 coins), Valet de deniers (page of coins), 5 de coupes (5 cups)

Here, the story is this one:

Two get together to tend to a third. But they only use half of their potential. With assets buried in the ground, what you invest in returns as disappointment in love, broken engagements, loss and sorrow.

THE VERDICT: Before I said anything, the woman in front of me disclosed that she is tired of her marriage, that she is tired of who she is in it, and many more things. I myself got a lesson in the benefits of why not to do it.

So, no fortune was told on this occasion. More like misfortune, which is yet not enough reason to give up fortunetelling just because the uninitiated may have a problem with it.

Enjoy your freedoms, and the suspension of (dis)belief.

§

Note on the deck: Jean Noblet’s Tarot de Marseille, 1650, as restored by Jean-Claude Flornoy

WINTER SUN

2011-12-16T16:59:00.013+01:00

Part of my academic research is dedicated to looking at Tarot as a cultural text. What does this mean? This means that I look at how the visual language of Tarot intersects with cultural precepts about a given phenomenon, a type, an archetype, a relation (of class, gender, race, sex), reality, magic, and the physical and metaphysical world. This is already more than what most people associate with Tarot: a fortunetelling device that the gypsies, neo-pagan witches, and other such devils employ in their charlatan endeavor to cheat venerable people out of their money. To me, I don’t really see what the difference is between such tricksters and the ones working on Wall Street, but then again, such is the working of language. Some names are more respectful than others, and people are entitled to their opinion. I’m happy to report, however, that most of the serious Tarot readers wouldn’t be caught dead trying to defend the workings of Tarot, explain endlessly on what we can use it for, nor why we should upgrade the condition for its existence from crap to crown. For the interested folks, there are enough clever books out there they can consult.

TO FOLLOW OR NOT TO FOLLOW TRADITION

The thing about tarot worth knowing is that there are 2 main traditions: before occultism and after. The occult tarot was started by the French in around 1781. Some of them were into illuminism and masonism (Antoine Court de Gebelin and later Comte de Mellet) when they started claiming that there is a relation between tarot and the ancient Egyptians. This is a good story, but there isn't any real historical evidence to support it. In around 1900, and in spite of the lack of sources, The Golden Dawn order in Britain revived the research into Tarot’s links with Thoth, and particularly Aleister Crowley proved to be influential. His own Thoth Tarot, designed with Lady Frieda Harris as the illustrator, is still very popular. Edward Waite’s contribution to Tarot made an even more brilliant impact, as the deck that he designed in tandem with illustrator Pamela Colman Smith has gone on to become the most copied Tarot, and the standard Tarot now used throughout most of the Western, Anglo-American world. Many artists still use Colman Smith’s insights for the illustration of the minor Arcana cards.

The other tradition is the ‘French’ tradition based on the Visconti-Sforza pack (the first Tarot we know of from 1450) and the Tarot de Marseille pack. The Marseille cards, although originating in the north of Italy and then Paris, are a stylized derivation of the Visconti-Sforza cards. Unlike the occultists, the ones working with the historical decks – and which do not have picture representations on the minor Arcana cards but stick to the geometrical patterns – are simply not interested in finding correspondences all over the place between this and that spread position, Kabbalah, numbers, and some other complex system of symbolization. I myself work with Tarot de Marseille and the Visconti-Sforza cards. I never do ‘spreads’ – cards locked in a certain position whose meaning is assigned beforehand. I do 3 cards at the time, and no more than 9. No reversals – some prefer to shuffle the deck with reversed cards. Also, I never see the individual cards as having any inherent meaning. In conjunction, a synthetic message emerges all by itself, out of the direct, simple, and beautiful images that these cards represent. In a card-reading context for divination purposes, as people come to you with a question, my philosophy is that it should be possible to give them one straightforward answer in 10 seconds flat without losing yourself in irrelevant details and redundant information. If, however, there's another agenda, and people come to you for something else rather than an answer – to be reassured, to be comforted, to find peace, to confess – then there is the option of going the therapy way, and perhaps even conduct masterclasses in esoteric studies. Thus, depending on how you frame the question, you can follow either the 'keep it simple' types or the psychology consultant types. Both groups can work magic in terms of helping people with their issues.

TAROT AS CULTURAL TEXT

From a cultural point of view, the most fascinating thing to consider is that there is no other art form that has been reproduced to such an extent as the Tarot cards. Especially the 22 Major Arcana cards, the cards dealing with archetypal forces, have undergone fantastic transformations. No other art form can boast such a history of engaging generation after generation in rethinking ways of understanding such popular cards as the Death card, the Devil, The Emperor, the Tower, or The Lovers. It is, for instance, fascinating to see how a feminist deck puts a spin on these types, by telling the same story of an archetype as does a fantasy deck, a queer deck, a cats’ deck, or a housewives’ deck. As I have emphasized elsewhere in my reflections on Tarot, we can appreciate Tarot for its art, for its cultural significance, for its philosophy, for its secrets, for its poetry, for its psychology, for its shamanic qualities, for its prophetic powers, for its letting us know where we are in the present, for its derailing of our reality, for its presenting us with an alternative view of the choices at hand, the love that kills us, or the kindness of strangers.

Thus, in my writings on Tarot I emphasize both the divinatory aspect of the cards and modes of reading the cards that enhance our interpretative skills. While divination relies on the kind of reading that takes us beyond rationally understanding a situation, and which does not necessarily lead to action, hermeneutics, knowing what to make of 3 pictures on the table, enables us to perceive how we can ‘understand’ things with our emotional faculties. This is actually a crucial distinction, as, say, if someone understands at the cognitive level that he or she is not happy, if such understanding leads to action, the action more often than not turns out to be ‘wrong’, in the sense of its being off-beat with ‘what is really going on’. Conversely, if one ‘feels’ that one is not happy, the action following the desire to change that often leads to the right course of action. We have countless scientific reports, from neuro-psychology to its cognitive counterpart, that claim veracity for this state of affairs. Our best actions are not the ones that ‘make sense’ but the ones that ‘feel right’.

‘DISTURBING’ TAROT

As an example of what we can see in cards that cut across history, art, hermetic philosophy, and cultural text, I want to give an example of what reading with unusual decks can do for us. These decks are Elisabetta Cassari’s Solleone cards (1983), and the Swiss philosopher, Charles Frey’s Der Akron Tarot (2004) (now both out of print and difficult to find collector’s items). So, let me plunge right into it.

SOLLEONE TAROT

A woman comes to me with a question about her relationship with a man, whom she presents as being inflexible, and ‘not very quick at relating to matters of the soul,’ as she puts it. Three cards fall on the table, and I deliver the first 10-second ‘sentence.’

A powerful man (Il Re di Denari, The King of Pentacles) is intent on banishing you in the desert (L’Eremita, The Hermit) for having sacrificed his material goal for an ideal that he is clueless about (L’Apesso, The Hanged Man). The woman poses an additional question: ‘how can I go against such a man?’ And the cards answer: ‘poison the bastard with your wit.’ (Tre di Spade, 3 swords; Due di Coppe, 2 cups). In Cassari the 2 of cups has an unambiguous message: give him more poison.

What I like about Cassari’s deck is the fact that it dares to go against the tyranny of dogmatism. In her critique of the Catholic Church, she denounces the stupidity related to men formulating rigid rules and then innocently asking: Is there anything else other than the Inquisition? The innocence stops at the stake, where the powerful cardinals, moralists, and other clergy assume the role of spectators, yet passing the final Judgment: ‘burn the defying witch.’ The subtle message in Cassari’s whole deck is to pose mirror questions à la: is there anything else to do to these men than bewitch them, poison them, or stab them? If one looks at her High Priestess, one can clearly see that the woman there is leading other women into the temptation.

Seeing Tarot as a cultural text is not even a small task, nor a frivolous one. In the feminist context, or the ‘against status-quo’ context, one must honor the intercourse between women and wit, for it formulates a poetics of the visual text as it is written in the image of the iconoclast. Where more humble pursuits are concerned, such as helping people, decks such as Cassari’s leave us, the self-proclaimed diviners, with the choice of getting it out of our special drawer where we hide it just at the moment when the woman in front of you is spilling her guts over her disappointment: her man manifested again his passion for her by informing her that he will now do the dishes as he can see that she is kind of tired, thereby not only assuming that such a task ‘obviously’ belongs to her, but also that he rules not only over the favors that he graciously decides to bestow on her, but also over maintaining the house-order. I often ask these women: ‘are you happy with what this man gives you?’ They often say no, and then they point out that it is pointless to tell such men what they want as they would never get it. It’s a sad, sad situation, I always conclude, intoning to Ray Charles.

DER AKRON TAROT

This brings me to another example, this time from a reading with Der Akron Tarot.

3 cards fall on the table: Der Mond (The Moon), König der Scheiben (The King of Pentacles) and Das dunkle Kind (The Dark Child).

The same powerful man as the above Cardinal with money is depicted in Der Akron Tarot almost as a Dickensian fat frog who has had too much to drink, eat, and who is now even tired of ordering servants around to serve him. His dull mind is incapable of paying attention to the quiet, intuitive signals from the moon. One can only speculate that in this conjunction, as the moon remains a distant and incomprehensible thing, succumbing to its fascinating shadow will only bring out the inner psychopath in the king. The Dark Child is a terrible card, and one of Akron’s original contributions to Tarot, along with devising 2 cards for the Devil (in Der Akron Tarot we have a total of 80 cards, rather than the traditional 78).

Women are no better than men here. The mature Königin der Kelche (The Queen of Cups) is vain and superficial in spite of her cunning ability to function as a mirror for the soul, while the Prinzessin der Stäbe (The Princess of Wands) is daddy’s insufferable girl. Die Hohepriesterin (The High Priestess) pops out of a magic box with electrifying hair, and Die scharlachrote Anima (The Scarlet Woman), who is also something else beneath, a black goddess, is Akron’s second Devil. Der Herrscher (The Emperor) may attempt to organize and ‘educate’ these beings, but he is useless in his function. All big uniform – here comes the general – and very little brains. The cattle underneath him pull in different directions, but he is too busy with his own size to notice anything. Laugh, laugh, laugh – at him. Again, this Tarot is a wonderful work of deconstructing the grand myth behind power figures.

FEEL THE SWORD AND BE HAPPY

There are a thousand modern decks around, and most of them do not have such bleak visions of the reality of man (and you are welcome to take ‘man’ literally). Most decks are happy to follow the old suit and accept the legacy men left throughout the ages: wars, battles, possessiveness, and falseness. In these decks, kings are benevolent, even the King of Swords, cups are always about love, wands about virile and erect passion, coins about magic, and swords about intellectual acuity. The Emperor is a responsible father who makes his Empress happy, and together they manage their wonderfully functioning kids. While I try not to take any positions beyond the fact, or beyond the claim that I merely look at how language constitutes us differently, I must admit that I don’t like these decks very much. In people’s ordinary reality, Cassari’s rendition of the 10 of cups, with the woman doing the dishes, tired and consummated by child-rearing, is much closer to what they experience than the rosy, rainbowy image that we find in most of the other contemporary decks, where all people are just beautiful, happy, and unaware.

So, I must confess that I’m a purist. I read with Visconti-Sforza and Jean Noblet, my 1450 and 1650 decks which are free of imposed on symbolism, and for special occasions, I read with what others have now called ‘disturbing’ decks. But for their cultural significance I look at as many tarot decks as I can possibly get my hands on. There’s enough Tarot genius around to keep us entertained until the day we die, provided that we give it a chance, and see it for what it is: the work of people trying to understand themselves in the simplest of ways, which is the way that’s free of prejudice, free of cultural preconditioning, and free of judgmental eyes.

With the holidays around the corner, I hope you’re all lucky to get a pack of cards. Have a joyful Tarot Christmas.

(For more Tarot related posts, go to my Taroflexions website).

ZAZEN

2011-12-07T16:15:00.004+01:00

Every now and then people say things to us that make us disclose the reasons for our counter-reactions. This month I’ve been constantly reminded of the fact that although I don’t follow any religion whatsoever, I am what others call a Zen Buddhist. Given my life philosophy, I must admit that both in and out of the Zen Buddhist context, I’ve now been a Zen person for 27 years. In fact I can even remember the exact date, when, on December 7 1984 I went Zen, after having confronted a whole Sanhedrin of another religion. I made some ‘unfortunate’ statements against the venerable institution of marriage, which the patriarchs, members of the venerable council in charge with maintaining the venerable tradition, didn’t like. As patriarchs are not in the business of listening to the voice of reason, I decided that it was high time for me as well to stop reasoning and to stop explaining what is wrong with hypocrisy, cultural preconditioning, and uniforming the self according to five-year plans.

I’m happy to say that 27 years down the road, I’m still against competing in school for the highest grades at 16 – so that you can impress your teachers and make your parents proud; showing your sexual prowess at 21 – it’s all about sex anyway, as some smart folks claim; getting both the dream job and the dream man at 26; feeding the third baby at 31; getting a divorce at 36; sleeping with your boss for a promotion at 41 – or getting another man to turn you into a respectable woman, and with whom you can live in a bigger house; getting involved in the community for the sake of preserving the future for the future generation at 46; ‘finding yourself’ at 51 after some brief internal crisis – you can’t be too unhappy for too long; getting ready for the marriage of your own children at 56; swooning over the grandkids at 61; retiring at 66 – you did well, after all; going on a pilgrimage at 71 – it’s time to think about death, but not too hard, you don’t want to get too depressed; pestering your family doctor about the whole world’s personal and political ailments at 76; and ending your days with the big remote control in your hands at 81 – as you can’t understand what all this minute technology is all about.

‘Yes, yes,’ most people would say, ‘but there are nuances, it doesn’t have to be like that, we can find that every age is meaningful in itself, and there are all these stories we can invent about ourselves,’ and so on and so forth. ‘Good for you,’ I’d say, ‘and good luck with it.’ And this is the point when I’m forced to disclose that I don’t believe in meaning, and that all of the above means nothing. Time means nothing and 'personal realizations' mean even less. ‘What do you mean you don’t believe in meaning,’ people would then further insist, and you begin to see the consequences of their rationality and how it shines through, for you yourself don’t make any sense. ‘You must be depressed or something, someone must have hurt you, or done you some wrong to be so cynical,’ people would rationally conjecture. To this you would be adamant in your response: ‘No, nothing is wrong with me.’ ‘But then how can you still not believe in meaningful narratives,’ people would go rationally, for there’s a lot of logic in the logic of concrete manifestations. And yet, even though you’d insist that modes of perception are often irrational, and that this is the reason why you believe in poetry - for poets are the only ones who don’t have a problem with death and are not so goddamned self-delusional - somehow the others would still win. ‘Yes,’ they’d argue, ‘but poets are a thing of the past, and besides, who can ever understand poets? They are all mad. They have no morals, no family values, they are all dangerous, and not to mention, suicidal.’ Indeed, most rational folks have a point. So what would you then say, if you had to maintain your position, however precarious? You’d have to sound conclusive and say, ‘now listen, do you know why I don’t place my faith in language, even if language is all we’ve got? Why I don’t like to consecrate words and rituals because they don’t mean anything at all? Because I’m a Zen Buddhist, that’s why.’ ‘Ah, well, finally, why didn’t you say so,’ people would go, sighing with relief. ‘That explains everything.’

Happy holidays to you all. Everything is clear now, and it still means nothing. Take it from a Zen Roshi who has just stumbled over some more funny koans, and even funnier stories of perception. Here’s one from Josh Steiger:

The Zen Roshi and the Ice Cream

A Zen roshi and his buddy from India (who was himself, of course, a yogi) are taking a walk along the beach. In the distance, they see an island, and on that island is an ice cream stand. Now, it's a hot day, and the venerable masters agree to go to the island and cool off with a nice lime sherbet.

The yogi says, "For thirty years, I secluded myself in a monastery, high in the hills of Nepal. Every day I would walk on hot coals, hang myself from the ceiling with fish-hooks, and eat feathers. After my thirty-year seclusion was over, I had the ability to walk on water."

The roshi says, "Why the fuck would you do all that? The ferry only costs ten bucks. I could've gone to that island and back a million times on the ferry, in the time it took you to learn how to cross the water at all. You must be some kind of retard.”

And if this is not enough, take a last minute peek at the latest EyeCorner Press books. Get some for Christmas, and enjoy all the rational and venerable stories about everything between heaven and earth.

FAMILY BLING

2011-10-26T11:52:00.011+02:00

England is a good place to visit if you want to get a sense of the prevalent state of conformity in the land. As I walk the miles and miles of long paths full of ethnic shops in Birmingham, one thing is clear. ‘Family’ is big here. I have nothing against families, but seeing what sells the most makes me rather suspicious. There isn’t a single shop that, in addition to selling food, fabrics, or incense, is not also selling picture frames. Especially the golden and the silver ones are popular. The minute I enter a shop like this, the owner strikes up a conversation that is almost always identical in its exchange with what I get to hear and say in all the other places:

‘Can I interest you in a picture frame?’
'I don’t think so.’
‘Why not, don’t you have a family of your own?’
‘Sure I do.’
‘So, what’s the problem, then?’
‘There is no problem, I just don’t like to think of my family as objects in a frame.’
‘How many children do you have?’
‘I have none.’
‘I’ll pray for you.’

Obviously the implicit assumption on the owner’s part is that if I had more than one child, then there would be no way in HELL I wouldn’t want to present them nicely, as they pose happily on display for everyone else to see. So the number of children is very important. The more of them one has, the more one can fill the empty space on the dresser with their representation. Now, due to my platonic philosophical inclinations that favor being kind over being merely smart, I refrain from commenting on the fact that I find such displays disgusting. What mythologies people fead their hearts and heads with is really their problem, but I often speculate what the reaction might be, if I said that I preferred to see empty spaces on furniture and fireplaces filled with books rather than idiotic pictures that disclose the poverty of thought and emotion in the house. (Actually, I think that I said that once, and it didn’t go so well with the well-intended party).

Roaming through the art galleries in Birmingham, I notice that while people have always wanted to represent families, it was never the poor who got to do it. So I wonder what happened between 1350 and 2011. How has the transmigration of the discourse on family as dictated by the affluent groups been translated into solid ethnic British conviction of the ‘this is the way’ as dictated now by the ones who have to compensate for lack of recognition and money? (We leave the middle space populated by the snobbish bourgeois who make the norms for clichés out of this).

“It’s all about memory,” my sister tells me – as she is trying to keep me away from ending up in the hospital due to high blood pressure. “People use their family members as objects in mirrors, in order they that appear closer.” “Closer to what?” I ask, while being reminded of the attention signs written on all American cars regarding the perception in the mirror of vehicles behind you on the road. “Closer to what they imagine they have, but don’t have,” she says, “a fulfilled soul.”

As I try to understand what such a statement means, and what its implications might be for all those who declare themselves soulless on purpose, so that they can be exempted from having to engage with deconstructive commonsense, my sister turns to the wall behind her and says: “Why don’t you stop worrying about people buying crap, and take a family picture of me right here now, in this pub, featuring another family." Above her seat, Led Zeppelin is grinning from another time in a picture frame, and I can’t help thinking that Robert Plant has just made today’s showbiz headlines in Mail Online, with a remark on his joining the establishment after receiving CBE from Prince Charles. (I bet that the family picture will make it into a frame on the mantelpiece).

Some stupidities never change. I think I’m going to book myself a flight to the Arctic today. I’m getting claustrophobic here.

CALVINO'S CLAIM

2011-10-16T00:04:00.008+02:00

One of my absolute favorite writers, Italo Calvino, would have been 88 today, had he not kicked the bucket in ’85. I secretly entertain the idea that he would have lived longer had he gone Zen. The ‘don’t think’ doctrine would have saved him from the brain explosion that he suffered. Calvino thought too much. Couple that with a heightened sense of play, and you’re in trouble. For, you end up tormenting yourself about whether to think or to play. The thinker, by definition, has a hard time with play that allows for all sorts of contradictions. For the thinker, the aim is often to say something instructive and clear. The player, even when following a strategy for play, has his eyes on something else. Self-expression may be part of it, but the smart player will ditch that in favor of creating a space where other things can happen rather than merely deploying the actualization of one’s own ego in popular recognition. After all, the player, also by definition will do anything to escape becoming entombed and impotent within the very world of self-imposed constrictions. The art is, and has always been to rise above limits.

What I like about Calvino is that he was obsessed with Tarot. Especially Tarot de Marseille. In his great book, The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969), a bunch of people – wanderers – end up in a castle on a dark and stormy night. They want to have dinner together and chat like normal people, when they realize that they’ve lost their speech. The owner of the castle provides them with a deck of cards, Tarot cards, and they all start speaking in visual tongues. The stories they tell are most truthful and accurate, heartfelt and hilarious, and there’s no ambiguity about anything at all. Everybody gets the picture. Speaking the visual language thus seems to leave no room for misunderstanding. This is a very nice move. That the image can communicate its message in a more direct way than its verbal counterpart is rather liberating. One is free from having to make stupid assumptions, or having to ask all the time what the meaning of it all is. What an image invites us to consider is the possibility that we might just experience a revelation. And the beauty of a revelation is still this one: that it needs no ‘rational’ discourse to explain it. It’s magical.

Since Calvino wrote his book there seems to be consensus among the serious Tarot de Marseille readers that he raised the bar on sophisticated interpretation. What is more, this sophistication is all about keeping it simple. You have the cards in front of you. There are pictures on them. You look at them and you have two options: to go the cultural way, or the free way. Cultural preconditioning creates a preponderance for readings that rely on repeating set phrases. The gypsies and the occultists prefer this practice. The free-way types of reading prefer the space between your eyes and your nose, and the leading questions are always of observation. What is happening? And how does it make you feel? In my opinion the best Tarot de Marseille reader right now is Enrique Enriquez, who, following Calvino and other no nonsense men, argues for the efficiency of engaging the picture at the querent’s own level. According to Enriquez, the ideal situation in a one-to-one Tarot session is this one: the cards fall on the table. The reader sees them, the querent sees them, and they both know it. Words are redundant. By following the simple rules of observing what elements rhyme with one another when going from one card to the other, and by looking at the shape, color, sound, and rhythm of these elements, we should be able to remember what we already know. Enriquez has even truncated the whole reading method to the idea that:

between

“Once Upon a Time” and “Happily Ever After”

is about going

from warm to cold
from cold to warm

about contracting if you have expanded
about expanding if you are contracted

because you are a lump of clay

(and I mean it nicely).

Calvino was a poststructuralist and a postmodern man. This means that while he appreciated all the binary opposites and beautiful symmetries he was not buying any mythologies. He was no occultist, concerned with learning heavy stuff between heaven and earth by heart, and he didn’t give a damn about the symbol. Calvino was a man of letters. And he took the visual image’s own word for it. For instance, and unlike some Golden Dawn folks who decided that the now 400 years old card of the Lover in the Marseille lore is about the marriage between heaven and earth, Calvino took a good look at what the image communicates beyond the symbol and decided that not only are we dealing here with a man unable to decide between two women, but that if we also looked carefully we could see that that choice has already been made. The Lover, with his hand firmly planted onto the blonde woman’s crotch, while flirting with the smart one over his shoulder, is nothing other than a deceitful bastard merely enforcing what some other clever writers have emphasized ever so eloquently. In the words of Nabokov: men always want to fuck Eve – as she looks like their mother – while being forever fascinated with Lilith – who doesn’t give a damn about reproduction. In the face of having to choose, or pretending that we do, for whatever reason, we have Calvino’s word for it that things are really much simpler than we imagine. Thus he says in the Castle: “Every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing.”

In honor of Calvino’s birthday, I pulled 3 cards for him, wishing to see what he might communicate from beyond the grave, and what might be Calvinesque par excellence. Here’s what I got:

CINQUE DE DENIERS (FIVE OF COINS), LE FOV, CINQUE DE COUPES (FIVE OF CUPS)

Keeping with the tradition, here’s the 30-second interpretation – as it really doesn’t take any longer to figure things out:

Don’t be impressed by the exciting core of things, material or emotional, that are seemingly external to you. You are yourself this very center, forever caught in the paradox of ‘no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing.’ Squeezed between the fives, now you let go of the money – and renouncing the establishment’s cat scratching your balls – now you’re ready to get drunk, giving in to the temptation of believing that love can make you feel special. The Fool is what has always been: the truest to his unstable nature, and therefore the most stable. The one who believes nothing and assumes no responsibility for any claims, except perhaps this one: freedom doesn’t have to cost anything at all.

While writing these words, I’m thinking of yesterday’s event, when, over fancy beer at the local pub, The Bishop’s Arms in Jönköping in Sweden, I pulled these cards for myself in connection with musing over the freedom to do what Calvino did, whatever the fuck he wanted. Read more Tarot. But how? There’s no tradition for it here in Scandinavia, not any that is worth much. I got these cards:

LA PAPESSE (THE HIGH PRIESTESS), LE CHARIOR (THE CHARIOT), JVSTICE (JUSTICE)

‘Jolly good,’ I said to myself: forge ahead with the knowledge you have, and go goddamn professional.

We bow to Calvino tonight, to Enrique Enriquez, and to our partners, who, although not Marseille’ists, pay close attention.

Note on the deck: Jean Noblet’s Tarot de Marseille, 1650, as restored by Jean-Claude Flornoy.

For more Tarot related posts, go to my Tarot Reflections website.

TEMPLARS

2011-10-09T00:33:00.025+02:00

Köln. The day after. The post-conference trip ends with a tour of the Dom, the magnificent cathedral from 1242, which is a close imitation of the one in Amiens. As with cathedrals of this caliber, the legend has it that the first architect made a pact with the devil. I'm thinking of pacts, and what we use them for. If this is true indeed, then what the architect made a deal for was to encode the language of the birds into the stones.

The night before, over beers and weird light at the local pub, I read the Tarot cards for my closest friends. Frank Klaus, one of the three musketeers in the trio which includes Rainer Kaus and Cathrin Grabner, has some doubts: should he continue with the Jesuits or do philosophy instead? We use the cards to get an insight into an alternative reality. The cards fall precisely into place reflecting exactly the nature of his question. This morning, he tells me how on the way to his hotel around midnight he heard the organ very loudly playing in the church. There were no lights on, and there was no traffic around. It was all very quiet, except for the music thundering all of a sudden. “My god,” I said to him, feeling jealous: “you heard the language of the birds. How fortunate.”

While looking at the beautiful stained glass windows from the renaissance, depicting what we often find in the Tarot cards, I initiate the now reduced number of people from the conference into the legend about the nomadic cathedral, the Tarot cards. With the destruction of the Order of the Temple on the night of October 13, 1307, the masons and the architects of the sacred buildings went underground. Their teachings re-emerged, however, around 1400 in Northern Italy, and legend has it that in order to prevent the assassination of masters opposing dogmatic systems, whatever knowledge about how the sacred can be experienced literally and in a direct way, was to be encoded unto a pack of cards. As playing cards, this knowledge survived, and with it, so did the brilliance of the structure of 22 types and 56 relations.

Everyone likes this idea. So we decide to stick to churches. The three musketeers suggest that we all go and see another master, Peter W. Rech, an art therapy professor, painter, and a hardcore Lacanian. Peter lives in a church. A modern church, but a church nonetheless. At some point, when the catholic congregation went over to graze on other pastures, Peter bought the place and turned it into a gallery. He himself now lives in the bishop's rooms right across the main building. The altar is in his living room and filled with postcards of Peter's paintings with variations over Courbet's L'Origine du Monde. Peter never paints anything else. For him, that is the Real. We sit in the middle of the Real and drink a grand cru French wine, while stuffing ourselves with goat cheese and Danish cookies. Peter wants Frank to read some fragments. Very lyrical, which in German, with its amazing falling tone, acquire a certain gravitas. We all feel pulled towards the stone. Frank, the cardinal, has a very soothing voice, and we make him give us a blessing. Courbet is winking. We all know what we know.

We leave Peter's place in Rainer's vintage 1980 blue Mercedes. While cruising through the woods, Die Köningin, Cathrin, is trying to communicate to us what the plan is. This woman gets things done. But Rainer turns on the music, and says: "here's the short version of what the meaning of life is: spend your time wonderfully." Barbra Streisand gets channelled and we all marvel at her voice while she enforces Rainer's point. The song I'm a Woman in Love makes us all nod. And I'm thinking: This IS the language of the birds. Sung in Rainer's blue cathedral, and seen in Peter's Courbet cathedral.

Back home, two hand stenciled Tarot decks await me, sent from another cathedral. Roxanne Flornoy, the wife of the late master cartier Jean-Claude Flornoy sends me her warm greetings, handwritten on an additional special card: The Hanged Man. I read this as a message. The meaning of life is to let it all hang, and let whatever streams through you turn into a church bell, resounding the joy of knowing the children of Maitre Jacques.

LOGICAL

2011-09-19T02:00:00.004+02:00

Often the best commentaries to our work come from unexpected sources. They are also often delivered with humble aplomb, which is the best way of expressing genuine enthusiasm. I respond to such feedback with a bow, in gratitude for people's way of expressing also that which cannot be conjured in words. While lost in reading weird texts on the internet on 10 different websites, I get a mail of profuse thanking. Fernando Silberstein, a professor of psychology and psychoanalyst – in his spare time, a neoplatonist plus an infinite number of other things – has been reading my book, The Logician. He insists that it's fantastic, offering a string of supporting adjectives to that effect, creating correspondences to his own work, Lacan and heavy to read Renaissance Spanish scholars and Jesuits, and emphasizing the emergence of parallel dimensions of all sorts. Out of this writing that he has been reading. My writing.

I used to say that I write for myself and strangers, following a truly clever woman, Gertrude Stein, but time and time again, I feel that I need to revise that philosophy. How can we call strangers the ones who make an effort to let you understand that although their enthusiasm cannot be expressed in words, they still want to say it? They find ways to say it. They are like those fairytales cavaliers who ride to the end of the world to bring you the word. The word that is impossible to utter other than by capturing it in a wave from the ocean, or in the swishing sound of the wind as it cuts through your boots on one of the 7 mountain tops that you have crossed. As Silberstein wants me to understand that he means what he says, he sends me a link to a piece of music, Bach on crystal glasses, in reference to one of my references to such things. This makes me think that I write for special people, for the ones who I imagine have open souls, and who allow me to salute the divine in them. It makes me think that I write for the people who can see with their hearts what is essential and which remains impenetrable to the eye. I write for the people who I know can sing. I write for the people who can make us come through the gates of the fantastic, to a place where we join that fool of Don Quixote, the best logician of them all, and intone with him at unison on Bach's music, the only logical consequence of silence: to sit and stare at vibration, as it articulates eloquently what is never said:

“I came to the gate, where some dozens or so of devils were playing tennis... in their hands they held rackets of fire; but what amazed me still more was that books, apparently full of wind and rubbish, served them for tennis balls, a strange and marvellous thing.” (Cervantes)

Here is the book again, The Logician, almost one year after its publication, full of wind and rubbish, and other marvelous things.

CATHEDRALS

2011-09-15T10:34:00.012+02:00

Last night I was at my sister's playing the godmother fairy. She had called me to consult with me on a full moon problem. The night before, on the 13th, on her way to work at the hospital for the night shift, she found herself alone on the train platform. In the very bright light of the moon she noticed a figure hiding behind a light pole on the other side, waiting for the opposing train. She was singing softly some church hymns, and was wondering whether to do it louder so that the other could hear her. The opposing train approached, and then in a split second she saw what she could now identify as a man in his 30s jumping on the tracks. He laid down crossing them. His face turned towards her. With her mouth already open, the words, 'Oh God,' were uttered at the exact moment when the train made full impact. For the next longest five minutes in her life, she was kneeling – her physical power gone from her legs – looking at the remains. Scattered body parts, blood, an ear and a palm next to her, and bits of clothing still fluttering in the wind on the tracks. Her own train arrived, she stepped inside it, numb, got to work, where another man was dying – and she almost broke down. But she didn't. She called the police, reported the event, and then was told that she must have her state of shock checked at the psychiatric ward.

And this is where I came into the picture. When she called me in the morning, she wanted to ask me why the professionals insisted that she shouldn't think that it was her fault, and that there was nothing she could do to prevent the man from taking his life. 'Obviously I don't think that,' she said to me - though she did entertain the idea that if only she had sung louder, then, perhaps the man would have stopped. I said to her that the reason why the professionals insist on the guilt part is because it doesn't occur to them to say that she had to go through this because some divine power must have loved that soul enough to grant him his last moment in the vicinity of human breath, a singing breath. Insofar as all she cold say was, 'Oh, God, Oh God,' God was invoked, and it was enough for the young man to have a proper burial. I asked my sister: 'why do you think he turned towards you, while preparing to die, instead of placing himself with his face down, or facing the moon?' 'I don't know' she said, 'I've been wondering about that.' 'Stop wondering,' I said to her. 'You were chosen to perform a very special task. To allow a dying man to take your hand – however coercively and violently – and say a prayer for him – however unconsciously.' 'This is a privilege of the highest,' I then further said, 'and you be grateful that you were found worthy of it.'

My nephew intervened at this point, to remind his mother of the parents' day event at his school, the Roskilde Cathedral High School. 'You must also come' he said to me, and I blurted at him, reminding him that it was not given onto me to perform the task of mothering anyone. My sister insisted that what I was saying was complete nonsense. 'Some mothers are of the spiritual kind,' she said, and they are itinerant, and therefore the best. Outside the school, I was standing before its tower. This school used to be right next to the Roskilde Cathedral proper, but as it grew in size they had to move it. The original tower could not follow, but thanks to technology, a beam of light was installed to reflect the shape of the cathedral. How beautiful and ingenious, I thought, and then bemused that there is something special about itinerant cathedrals. After listening to the Rector instructing the young ones on refraining from drinking binges, Paul's class performed Stevie Wonder's song, 'Don't You Worry About a Thing.' I took my sister's hand, and said to her, 'you know, my dear, you're a cathedral and a tower of strength. I bow to you.' Our hands touched and the world stood still, yet resonating.

THE SECRET OF OIL

2011-08-29T21:34:00.007+02:00

I sit at my dinner table anointed. I'm having white corn on the cob and spring potatoes. This ritual involves pouring a considerable amount of Israeli oil on your plate, and sprinkling it with rock salt from the Kalahari desert. The salt is very important. You then take your precious little fingers though the mix, and with them thus baptized you grab a potato. First, you smell its peal for the divine earth in it, and then you toss it vigorously though the salty oil, before you bring it to your lips – no, no, no, not yet. You, don't bite it yet. You hold back. You allow your lips to kiss it to the point where you swear that you are one with the potato, that you come from the deepest underground in Africa, and that you are resurrected after having been crucified on Mount Scopus, Har HaTsofim, in Israel at harvest time. Bachelard, the magician, brings you back to your senses, when you begin to contemplate the whiteness of the corn. As the cob also gets enveloped in the Kalahari mine, you start speaking in tongues. Well, in Bachelard's French, to be more precise, which you, however, translate into English: “When a poet tells us of the secret of milk, he is not lying, not to himself, nor to others. On the contrary, he is finding an extraordinary totality” (On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, 8). My partner follows my fingers getting deeper and deeper into my throat, and asks me: “is that oil good?” I faint.

THE WAY OF THE SIGN

2011-08-27T20:48:00.007+02:00

NEW BOOK: In my years of teaching literary theory, it has never ceased to amaze me that students find it difficult to understand that – even though a futile act – we still have the obligation to go against myths of self-deception, false principles in the name of whose war is waged, and crass stupidity that is always murderous in its intent. I've published The Way of the Sign as a way of keeping it simple. As a way of suggesting that we must situate ourselves as far away as possible from anything that presents itself as the keeper of traditional values, or as suspicious of new developments. Traditionalists have no imagination, that's why they are called traditionalists. We must go against their idea that everything can be sold and bought; that everything is designed and packaged to cater to our basic needs for sex, security, and soul-searching. These needs do not manifest themselves as empty bubbles into which we can throw our clichés and idiotic 'concrete' solutions. Literary, visual, and cultural theories make us see what is wrong with ventriloquizing what we think others want to hear. They make us see what is wrong with speaking from a place that is devoid of inner strength and conviction.

While I haven't proposed any new idea – in this context, I find the old ones better than any – I ask simple questions. In this sense, The Way of the Sign is a book about extraction, about reducing methods of inquiry to the bare bones. It guides students through 10 schools of theory and criticism. The focus is on ‘asking’ each theory to give its best in the simplest way, by making us see what is at stake and how we might respond to it. In simple Socratic dialogue, I invent scenarios: ‘What is happening?’ Deconstruction asks. And we answer with it: ‘We are buying a mythology.’ ‘How does it make us feel?’ ‘Dumb.’ ‘What is happening?’ Marxism asks. And we answer with it: ‘The rich cheat us.’ ‘How does it make us feel?’ ‘Angry’. ‘What is happening?’ Feminism asks. And we answer with it: ‘Nobody sees us.’ ‘How does it make us feel?’ ‘Invisible.’

By posing such simple questions, I try to bring out the complexity of the ideas formulated in different approaches to texts, and the joy at discovering that some theories are mighty simple, and therefore also beautiful. The book’s aim is thus to contribute to every student’s ‘aha’ experience. Make it richer, so that they might fall in love with theory, and consider that if decisions need to be made at all – about what to think or what is best – then they should be about never ceasing to ask questions. Or consider that it is not our actions that are important, but how we receive the gift of joy. As with Mary Oliver:

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”

Enjoy!

REVIEW
“In my classroom, The Way of the Sign proved to be a potent catalyst for animated – often impassioned – discussions about personal, social and cultural forces that continuously, if often imperceptibly, impact our lives. The students really appreciated the challenge of working with a text that assumed they were intelligent from the start. One student said for the first two chapters, he didn't understand the text. But when he read about the approaches (structuralism, etc.) elsewhere and then came back to the book, it was crystal clear! So, the book raised the IQ of the class. That two-step mantra – what's happening and how do I feel about it – was useful even once we moved on to other material.” –– Glenn Wallis, Won Institute of Graduate Studies.

THE WAY OF THE SIGN: CULTURAL TEXT THEORY IN TWO STEPS

EYECORNER PRESS
ISBN: ISBN: 978-8792633101

PRESS MATERIAL

CONTENTS

Introduction | KEEPING IT SIMPLE | 9
Chapter 1 | STRUCTURALISM AND DECONSTRUCTION | 19

Chapter 2 | MARXISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS | 41

CHANGING SANCTUARY

2011-08-09T11:58:00.004+02:00

Back from Norway and feeling the same old regret for not taking the plunge and moving over there for good, my heart leaps with awe and astonishment at what awaits me. Among things piled up in my mailbox over a month, I find two books by Matthew Remski. I don't know Matthew, but for some reason he seems to know me. A card accompanies Syrinx and Systole, and yoga 2.0: shamanic echoes, which says: “To a mentor, plus inspiration from afar.” Over the years, I've grown accustomed to people seeing me as some kind of a teacher, or some kind of an “esoteric genius,” or other such things related to some form of transmission. True, I have funny interests. And yet, for my part, I'm suspicious of instructing. More often than not the act of instructing is misunderstood. And I leave teaching “positive change” to the host of self-helpers who blissfully remain ignorant of both change and positiveness. For, what form does change assume in relation to what we know, how we are, and what we are willing to acknowledge about our nature? What conditions change, and what does it mean to be positive? That you have to take it all in good stride? Like hell you do. That would require a whole lot of seeing, and seeing is not what we're doing, in spite of the visual culture we live in. Seeing requires time and the recognition of light. Ours and others'. So, what do we really see?

Cognitive psychology of the 'you can fix it' kind never invites us to see anything, only to asses the so-called situation, and then change it. So you change the situation and lose sight of yourself. Nice going. Next step: self-deception. I believe in light, and the nature of light is to enlighten. And the beauty of light is that it comes without forcing. When you see the light, you also see the balance between your intelligence and your acts of kindness. You let it all stream through you, and that is all. Of course, since this theory is so simple, there's no money in it. Hence we don't get to hear about light on TV or other channels promoting happiness. Emanating light is not about petting each other on our backs and instructing each other on how well we're doing and how fantastic we are.

Writes Matthew in the yoga book: “When you open your mouth to speak, nature throws her voice outwards, through you. The land moves your hands. The weather moves your feet. Your point of view is singular yet comprehensive, because the world itself is looking out through your eyes. When something arises to be done, there is no question about whether it should be done. How it should be done arises naturally as you begin to do it” (29). So, no forcing. If a wall is impenetrable, leave it unchallenged. It the world is dense and dull, leave it to its devise. I also read these lines from Syrinx and Systole: “Inquiry begins with the harshest consonants (ts and cts, and dental ds) but opens into a palatal ds and lingering ns: What exactly don't I understand?” There are these 3: liberty, self-sufficiency, and frankness. Anything else is nonsense. These 3 require the kind of self-knowledge that exceeds the cynic's lot. If there's a task we want to preoccupy ourselves with, then it is this one: let us read more poetry. The words of the poets carry heavy light with them, and this light beams far and bounces into our sanctuaries. Matthew Remski, thank you.

GREEN LANGUAGE

2011-07-18T20:38:00.011+02:00

I’m on top of the mountain and fly with the eagles of Norway. I look down on the green waters and see fish. Lots of fish. They say that birds are a higher form of evolution of the fish kingdom. I like fish, even though most of them have small bones. Hardly ever a strong stamina. They are good at adapting, and being malleable, and all that. But they would never understand an uncompromising bird that would insist on breaking a wing before changing its mind. Birds are air animals, and some like to shit on the heads of tall statues. In Romania, where I come from, most statues of Lenin and Stalin have a crown on top made of sharp blades. Some birds fly straight into them – they don’t get the point about the communists trying to prevent the occurrence of immoral acts, such as being free and independent.

So, while flying I get this idea, inspired also by the zoological narrative which has it that while the chimpanzee has 13 ribs and homo sapiens only 12, it goes without saying that when God decided to take a rib out of Adam to create the woman, he was thinking about her as a higher form of evolution than the other species. With Adam being demoted and all that, it also goes without saying that he was unable to see that logic, of the higher self. Consequently he argued for millennia that Eve was his inferior. Therefore she had to submit to him, and cook for him, and give him children, and all that nonsense. So I get this idea that perhaps while flying, one could speak the language of the birds, go back to more commonsensical times. Back in time, to the time before Adam screwed up logic with his complex of inferiority, the language of the birds was the only one uncontaminated by shit. It was the perfect divine language, green language, angelic or Enochian language, and magical language for communicating grand esoteric secrets. We don’t evolve for nothing.

I heard a bird today instructing me in the following initiatory idea: Thou shall move on top of a mountain in Norway. If Norway was a religion, it would be your only religion. Thou shall open The House of Spirits and Spinach. There thou shall serve the following: for breakfast, the toast called The Flying Magic Spinach Carpet; for lunch, the sandwiches called Ali Baba and the 40 Spinach Thieves; for dinner, the lentil-stew called 1001 Spinach Nights. Go to bed and have green dreams.

HOUSE

2011-07-07T15:20:00.011+02:00

Yesterday was a day of checking out houses. Going from old farm houses to the virtual types, the latter installed as part of the House exhibition, also called Living, at the museum of contemporary art, Louisiana, I came home with a sense of relief. Where I was concerned, I declared it once again to myself that I am definitely not the 'let's play house' type. The reason for this has little to do with my general aversion against all things status quo and the tyranny of possessiveness. As I entertained myself with watching people's reactions to houses, I rather got a clear idea in my head that the reason for my remaining immune towards such exclamations, oh no, or oh yes, has to do with my zen inclinations.

As the idea of 'house' is related to material gain, pride, and compensation for lack of imagination, a zen approach to dwelling finds itself at odds with this form of stability and uniformity that houses invite us to appreciate. And which we do, for the sake of convenience. There is a slight irony here, however, as zen can also seem a philosophy of stability: it insists on change as unchangeable. At the museum, enjoying the samples of wooden houses in the forests of Norway the most, I was reminded of this zen koan: “Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” I could feel surrendering to the calmness of detachment. I felt rising above the successful manipulation of feelings that the exhibition operates with. It was enough to take a quick look at most people's strong reactions to the way in which houses were depicted and represented to make me feel good about myself. As people were either repelled by some dwellings or envious of others, I was reminded of the wisdom attached to the trio of learning: understand, accept, and let go. Most people see the latter stage of renunciation as a sign of resignation, but here I would have to insist that insofar as we don't move towards living but towards dying, accumulating things in life will reach a dead end a lot faster even before the other end is experienced, which is the real tragedy. And this is the paradox: the more one lets go, the more one experiences what it means to live in the world. This is the teaching of zen.

I live in a beautiful apartment, but I think of my next move: it will not be down the road, but into the wild.

NUMEROLOGY

2011-06-13T15:18:00.006+02:00

In her works on the natural numbers, Number and Time and Psyche and Matter, Jung's assistant, Marie-Louise Von Franz recounts the story of the value of numbers for the Chinese. Even in the military, where men of logic and order rule, it looks like action and choice are under the law of qualitative numbers rather than quantitative ones. So, once upon a time there were eleven generals who had to decide whether to go to war or not. They took a vote. Three were in favor, eight against. They went to war. Now the question: what must these men have been possessed by to engage, following the minority, when the majority decided against it unambiguously? According to the Chinese tradition of assigning more symbolic value to some numbers over others, a relation of worth taking precedence over success becomes crystal clear: insofar as the number three expresses unanimity, and number eight indicates dubious attachments, it follows logically to endorse the three and discard the eight. This story makes one think of Einstein's often quoted line: “try not to be men of success but men of value,” which allows us to ditch our foolish urge to only engage with things that 'make sense.' Von Franz has also written a fascinating commentary to a medieval text attributed to Thomas Aquinas, Aurora Consurgens. In Aquinas's “Fourth Parable On the Philosophic Faith which Consisteth in the Number Three,” there is an interesting relation of sublimated value between eternity, equality, and the bond between eternity and equality. Diverting the energy associated with 'unacceptable' impulses into a socially acceptable activity has only the function of getting it wrong. While Von Franz makes the obvious remark that “the entire work of the alchemists is an endeavor to reintegrate that unsublimable residue, the sinners on earth and the fallen angels, into a whole,” (255) we are left to ponder on why we love the logic of action as dictated by symbolic choice.

AURORA RESURGENS

2011-05-20T12:07:00.005+02:00

I'm tempted to advertise for Anthony Johnson's new book, AURORA RESURGENS, with these words: when in doubt, think hermetic – and thus remain in doubt. I've done this to an extent in my introduction to this book, and yet, I came out of it with a sense that when you deal with texts that fly, the certainty principle is the last thing you want to preoccupy yourself with. You go with the light. Especially the light that enlightens in obscure ways.

Read this book, which is a wonderful collection of three sets of texts, about Enochian Angels in the legend of The Shining Ones, an opera about Giordano Bruno's The Clavis Magna – and some domestic drama in which characters say to each other things like this: “love is leaving it be” – and poems, poems, poems, formed in diamond shapes, and resounding musical notes of the highest.

Read my intro here, for a preview.

Enjoy!

EYECORNER PRESS

ISBN: 978-8792633057