When I got home from the spa last night — around 10 — I brought my laptop into bed and started on a draft of this newsletter (not this draft). I wrote about the drawing of the last three cards (completed Feb. 11) and how it aligned with the end of a relationship (or the end of another phase of said relationship). I wrote:
Each of the two remaining cards made a lot of sense for me to end on, to end this perfectly weird and poignant journey through the collective unconsciousness as symbolized by the Tarot. I began with the Queen of Pentacles on Dec. 31st 2020. She looks apprehensive, guarded, a little wary on her wicker throne. She looks unformed.
Then I fell asleep. I dreamed that I was hired staff for an event (unknown) in a very large, very grand, only partially inhabited house (manor, palace).1 Food/beverage service, maybe serving soup. There was a very attractive couple, sleek and polished. I was working with someone, a vague compatriot. I was on an errand down labyrinthine hallways, following a line of burnt-orange oil (the color, not the flavor) that had dripped on the floor — on thick sheepskin, the longhaired kind. I took a wrong turn into the owner’s side of the house: a vaulted ballroom, well-appointed. A dog lay near the door, large and imposing if it weren’t asleep. I stepped around it gingerly, retracing back to my station. I noticed with dismay that the orange oil came from a bag I was carrying — I stashed it in the trash, I feared I’d be found out. There was another booth with “creole cakes:” rich buttery shortbread from the Louisiana Coast. I wanted them. I woke up before my alarm with the delicious pleasure of sensory indulgence in my mind. Something unconscious cohered and I understood the journey then, the dream of the Queen (if not my own), the framing I’d been seeking: the thread that when pulled closes the circle, brings the end to touch where it began.
As a child I read a lot, so much. My parents worked and I was often alone with my imagination. I inhabited fantastical, intimate worlds populated by a rich roster of archetypes and heroic journeys. I was drawn to magical realism and modern myths. I read far beyond my grade level, I read words I would only understand years later. As a teen I developed a hearty cannabis habit (nobody called it that, then: I smoked a lot of pot, we all did) in part because it seemed to further tighten the synaptic connections between symbol and referent, collective-unconscious and my own burgeoning understanding: a front porch semiotician, stoned and seeing threads between everything, watching it all come alive.
In other words, I have always lived within a fairy tale. But (because to say someone lives in a fairy tale is to level accusation against —) I knew since I was very young what Disney hid — that fairy tales were not, were never only singing animals and animate candlesticks (not to deny those their due). They are dark, scrappy, tragic, comic, chaotic, symbolic tales that teach humanity about itself, if we listen. To me the archetypal is a primary language, one of my first.
I have also always been in love with the tactile world, with colors and light and eyes and sensation, hands and heartbeats and fashion and fabric and, since finding my way back to it, with being a body, moving through space. I love to dance, to hike, to ride my bike, to drive fast motorcycles, to breathe hard, to feel the wind. I am enraptured by the shapes of things, perimeters where things meet and merge, and things that fit just so together. I am ecstatic in a tumble of layered patterns. Morocco gave me vibrant dreams of cascading hues, a saturation impossible to find in Portland. My fingers seek texture: I want to touch paintings2, wear furs. I think of this pleasure as Eros energy, and that I possess an erotic engagement with the living world — not sexual, per se (or not always), but Platonically so:
[Of Eros, the] main characteristic is permanent aspiration and desire. Even when it seems to give, eros continues to be a "desire to possess", but nevertheless it is different from a purely sensual love in being the love that tends towards the sublime. [wikipedia]
and. what so directly opposes the joyful embrace of Eros but Thanatos, the great dis-embodier? When Death came for the ones I loved it left me alive but disemboweled, hollowed and undone. When Kelsey died I convulsed until I cried and cried until I dried up, dry heaving. My insides liquified and I shat all night, my body revolting against the truth of it, the truth of itself. For months after I stood only on the outside edges of my feet, unable to ground.
And yet. After every loss I have gradually found my way back to being (to living, not just surviving) through a personal alchemy of body and story, Eros and Mnemosyne. Neither is enough on its own. I walk, I talk myself into a plot line, weave sense where there was none. The chemistry of exercise, the rapture of sensation. Gradually I reconnect.
I’ve told you this before, so briefly here: I started the tarot deck at the very end of the end of the very worst year because I had to, hand over hand, begin to pull myself out of the darkest mire, that formless place. I had to start drawing again because I had to live and the tarot gave me something to draw from and then it gave me something to look forward to, to live toward.
I started reading cards with the Motherpeace deck when I was about seventeen, my only deck for a long time (though I had books that familiarized me with other imagery and interpretations). Especially potent readings I would draw in my notebooks. I have made several attempts toward a deck before, always beginning with the Fool. None got further than the Hermit (Arcana #9). The proscribed march from card to card annoyed me, though subliminally. I got bored. I knew what came next.
The tarot is often spoken of as a journey, though usually as a progressive track that starts with the Fool and completes with the World, then an Ace that becomes a King, circling back to begin again. But our lives are not linear. Our growth is rhizomatic, connective, abortive. The tarot works as a divination because its symbols tap the inchoate morass of imagery and ascribed meaning that we all carry within us. What surfaces is what needs attention. It’s not magic, or we are all magic. It is both and.3
As much as I swear that the tarot is not divinatory, that its magic is of the psychoanalytic variety and not a teller of fortune or future, I have also been spooked, stricken and shocked by its veracity. There have been long times when I have not drawn cards at all, afraid they might tell what I’m not ready to hear. I have not always wanted to know what comes next. I seldom pulled any cards during my years with Ben, and never read his — there was a shadow lurking in the corners of our life that I didn’t want interrogated, a ghost of yet to come. I only sought them when we’d been fighting and I knew they’d say to stick it out— which they always did, which we also did.
A typical reading of the kind I most like to give (based on the Motherpeace cycle but transformed over time by the telephone-game of my memory) always starts with a Signifier, a card to represent the querent at the moment of their question, the journey’s launch.
So when I drew the Queen of Pentacles — that fertile lover, Earth mother, abundant of texture, familiar to pleasure, rich in land and wheat and gold — the irony wasn’t lost on me. I was, in fact, already steeped in irony, sitting on a short-term-rental bed strewn with the documenta of probate and estate while a moated land I didn’t want but had yet to let go of lay fallowed by winter and my inability to care for it the way Ben had while alive — his life’s last work and the death of him, six months to the day before. Just a few pages prior in my sketchbook, a note: The stupid rubrics of money… I log into E*Trade post-transfers and Ben’s accts now show net assets $485.06. His assets My assets. Oh Ben how much you thought about your money. How separate we kept it. Is there a tarot card for Irony? there must be? And on the next page: “Q’s to ask your potential new Financial Advisor: 1. How will you deal with the fact that I cry every time I look at my future investments?
Because I’ve always used the tarot as a tool towards understanding aspects of my life and identified with each archetype in turn, there has never really been a single card that felt most “me”, but (always quick to cast others in lifetime roles, if not myself) Ben fit certainly solidly within the inferred structure of the Pentacle King: a Capricorn, grounded and grounding, lord of his land, generous and demanding. And there I was, his widowed Queen, cutting her hand on that spinning blade of coin, side-eyed and dumbfounded.
And so, to pull the thread and close the circle for you, my patient reader, to put a bow on it: this whole time, these long three years, I have been thinking of the King of Pentacles as my dear dead husband. And along the way I have fought dragons and battled demons, consorted with Knights and raised a Page, drained cups and been very fired up about all of it. But of all those archetypes and symbol stories there was just one I most longed for — my partner, the King to my Queen — and only one I could never lose: the Ace of Swords, tattooed on the back of my neck since 2015, always invisibly pointing me forward. And these were my last two cards. And this is poetry, this is why I love the tarot, this tool for telling stories.
But — what I’ve learned, what I knew when I began to draw the King of Pentacles after a day of writing about Eros, sex and embodied vs chaotic energy (a newsletter I sent to draft as it got later and I realized I had to get to drawing if I was to finish the deck by Monday, my final intended deadline), and what I felt again throughout my body when I awoke this morning: the end game is integration, not return. Embodiment, not reanimation. If I had drawn it earlier in the process —or even in the day — King P may have looked like Ben, but instead — brain heady with Erotics after my writing day, & a walk not taken, a missed connection — I pulled a book from my shelf: MALE NUDES and there, Herb Ritts’s clay-caked queen, my animus: regal, proud and gloriously solid, glamorously gendered and bent. The King is I. Thus:
This is the story of becoming my own partner, of learning to husband myself. It’s a story of a kingdom lost and found — of inheritance, worldly treasure and re-homing oneself in one’s only true castle, the body that holds, the earth we are held to, for this time (for every story is also a story of time). It’s about finding one’s way back from the bottom of the cliff not (just) through spiritual gratitude but the lived experience of being a body immersed in its senses and declaring ownership of what it feels. & as for that sword, the final card, that vorpal blade —
Every card in the tarot contains within it multitudinous meanings, ends and beginnings. Some lean more obviously one way or the other and several, like the World or the Wheel of Fortune, hold visible the full circle, the start and the finish seen simultaneously. The Aces tend to shout about marking new ventures and fresh starts, but amongst the four suits it’s the sword that most owns its double edge: it promises clarity and focused vision, but only through sacrifice and painful discernment. It is, after all, a weapon. A breakthrough implies something was broken, it is in cutting back that we clear a path ahead.
Factually and mythologically speaking the sword is a threshold object, a tool that extends our will into action. To forge a sword requires an alchemy of the elements: earth, fire, water, air and right timing. Once made it enacts transformation, the decisive blade. In its most literal task it slices life from death, being from unbeing. Ceremonially, its touch marks the moment one takes on a new title or another name. A Knight is anointed, a quest set in motion, a change is underway. Storied swords choose their bearer: When Arthur drew Excalibur he became king. To be King is to master one’s will, to hold sovereignty, to act with authority in one’s own domain: to bear responsibility with grace, judicious in one’s decisions.
In “Zen and Japanese Culture” Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki writes that the sword symbolizes the sharpening of the “psychic power of seeing in order to act immediately in accordance with what it sees.” It is an object that, once drawn, stands no deliberation: it is execution itself, the delineator. Its honed edge draws a line between what was and what is and in doing so creates a new world. If aces hold endings the hope of the sword is death without delay: no flood, no conflagration, no slow decay. But steel yourself and heed what’s been cut, for even clean wounds bleed. Be surgical with your intent. Rebirth will follow, the hard path will clear. Then set course for true north, find your horizon and stay! on! point!
Thanks for following along during the last 9 months of this. I’m now working on my book proposal, printing card drafts and trying to figure out how to get them into the world in different ways and stages. I think it’s likely I will soon be adding a subscription plan to this newsletter, one that is somehow tied to the deck. A lot of what I’ve been writing I end up cutting and saving to the developing book draft. I’m reprioritizing, something that’s never been easy for me. I’m practicing using the sword, though it feels like a hack job right now. I should probably go for a walk. I wish it were spring already.
LOVE YOU ♥️ z
When I was an art student in London I worked for an event staffing agency that would hire out its mostly foreign/student staff to various productions around the city, mostly trade shows or holiday parties but occasionally of a much higher profile. I ferried models between floors inside a glass elevator at the Versace store, I served canapés to Manalo Blahnik at Buckingham Palace, I blended smoothies for office workers from inside a giant strawberry costume. There was a masonic dinner in a crypt, there were many after hours behind scenes at old museums. This was the vibe of the dream.
At 12 and in Amsterdam I surreptitiously stroked a Van Gogh 🤫
“This is the story of becoming my own partner “…. I literally heard an orchestra sweep across a wide expanding landscape that opened before me reading those words. I guess I mean to say I literally felt that happen because honestly I’m looking at my phone and listening to my refrigerator rumble and Yelling Man carry on in the background but, I read it again and the sight and sound feeling happened again. These freakin words of yours are transformative for really reals.
I love you too!