a diversion

for a number of years, i have been laying out a particular form of solitaire called "calculation," at least three or four and sometimes ten or more times a day, pretty much every day. i completely wore out one deck of cards with this game, and i am working on another.

as with any solitaire, what you are doing is sorting a randomized deck, subject to rules that limit your decisions in sorting in ways the cards can defeat. in this case the limiting card is the king.

you are building sequences in four stacks, by ones, by twos, by threes, and by fours. you are counting in mod 13, with turning points at the queen, jack, and ten. so for example, after ten the twos would be queen, ace, three, etc. and after jack the king, an end. the threes after nine would be queen, two, five, etc., and the fours after eight would be queen, three, seven, etc. each sequence ending in a king. suits are disregarded.

and over here, while you are waiting for the next card in one or another of these sequences, you are storing cards in one of only four piles, as you select. burying cards you think you can afford to bury, leaving paths to get to them when you need them.

in effect, you need to get at least one king to the bottom of one of these storage stacks, or you lose.

you put a seven and then a four onto a ten, you have an ending sequence for the threes. you are offered an ace. do you put it on the ten seven four, or just start the ones and maybe offload the four to start the fours, or do you start a new storage stack. and then you are offered a jack.

and so on, through fifty-two cards. the kings are trying to lock you into commitments you cannot sustain. you are down to the last card, and the king of clubs has caught the ten of hearts and the seven of spades. and you think, why did i tell that lie, and should i try to sustain it. or, what did she intend by saying that, and should i pretend to accept it.

or hey, something else involving something you care about and some ambiguous narrative surrounding it. you tell me.

the cards are speaking to you. listen.

and then the next hand is completely random, you get a bunch of trash and then the kings come pouring out. noise. but maybe the noise itself is a message. back off, i will come to you.

five clubs. bring it on. six spades, set it aside. five diamonds on the six. let's get serious.

nine diamonds, a root or a cover the five. take cover. two hearts, park it on the five six. ten diamonds a root. ten swords, damnit.

and the game goes downhill from there or you are somehow able to rescue it through very careful play and a couple of lucky breaks on key cards. you draw a second six early, forcing the choice on the threes, and so on, through fifty-two cards. or until it miseraby ends.

it takes seven shuffles to randomize a deck of cards, the math papers are published online. i usually do eight or nine, because it feels that way to me. and eight has significance for me from tarot. strength, or is it justice. and when justice is gone, there's always force. laurie anderson.

sometimes it is just static for even as many as two or three hands straight, but not often. more frequently than i used to, as i learn more and more nuance, i will get a beautiful game i had to fight hard, but the last card allows me to take twenty or more out of storage before hitting the last king.

you learn to minimize your commitment to any particular course, but try to leave several open. you seize some but by no means all opportunities to unload your storage. but you might leave a seven or a jack behind because you need to be able to duck an untimely two down the road.

and who was it released the last king but the ten and seven again. but which king was it, and were they the same ones, the hearts ten and the spade seven. oh, i didn't notice. the seven, yes, but i am not sure about the ten. the king was i think a heart.

and you start looking for these two cards in the next hand.

queen wands reversed

this card has turned up twice in recent days as the "shadow" to a three card spread.

the first set was three swords rx flanked by six pentacles rx and ten cups rx. sometimes when i get all cards reversed i imagine the cards are to be read by someone else, sitting across the table.

the six, earth, undermining the three, air. the ten, water, neutral.

the second set, this morning, was seven swords flanked by three swords and six cups. the three supporting the seven, the six neutral.

i accept "sorrow" as a basic meaning for three swords, which turned up in both spreads, though "melancholy" might be closer. a sort of permanent mindset. six pentacles has to do with "material success," yes, but also something about issues of equity and inequity. to have and have not. ten cups not so much "satiety" as the illusion of satiety.

the queen wands often turns up as my ex-wife, i regret to say. ten years out, i should be able to get past some of this.

but i should maybe mention that just before this reading the six of spades came up twice in my solitaire, suggesting that i might examine something from a different perspective.

and then this morning the three swords again, but here opposite six cups, nostalgia, flanking seven swords, verbal manipulation.

these latter meanings are personal to me, incidentally, and do not all that closely resemble the standard issue. crowley, mathers, et al. would call the six cups "pleasure" while acknowledging a suggestion of rotting, and they would call the seven swords "futility," arising from a lack of commitment to the effort.

pips here totaling sixteen, suggesting (16) tower, the catastrophe.

and here i will acknowledge that a large part of "what went wrong" in the marriage was my lack of commitment to the idea of material success on her terms and also the fact that i was a liar.

but there were two players.

audience

to whom am i addressing myself. who is the intended audience.

i say "the skeptic," but what exactly does this mean. obviously i cannot expect to reach the dogmatic scientific empiricist, the logical positivist, whatever they are calling themselves these days.

a skeptic, as i am using the word here, accepts that any conclusion rests on assumptions, and that any assumption must inevitably be provisional. the "academic" skeptic, in other words.

what anyone thinks she "knows" about the nature of the universe is an amalgam of mostly received ideas, ultimately limited by the range of data available through our senses. "working" knowledge, if you will. amplified by various technologies, yes, but even with these we only ever look for what we think we might expect to find. again with the pattern making.

a skeptic, then, is at least vaguely aware that existing social and cultural norms are constructs, that is, they do not exist outside people's heads. the various narratives we accept as "history" are constructs. property and money are constructs. the identification of the "self" with an individual personality is a construct.

and what the empiricists call "verifiability" is itself a construct, which assumes causality and the "forward" motion of "time."

i am not asking the skeptic to accept any of the mystical premises of qabala, numerology, astrology, whatever. i haven't, much. but i am inviting her to suspend some of the premises that have framed her experience.

allow for the possibility that other patterns might be built from the same raw, chaotic material.

seventeen and four

the other day in my morning three card reading i turned up the nine of wands, flanked on the left by (17) star reversed and on the right by (4) emperor.

and i remembered that crowley had switched the hebrew letter attributions of the star and the emperor, though not their positions in the sequence, creating what he called a "double loop" in the zodiac, corresponding with his having swapped (8) strength with (11) justice.

case and others attribute the letter heh, the definite article, to the emperor, and tsade, to seek, to the star.

the story crowley tells, referring to himself in the third person under a latin name that means "i shall endure," cf. nine of wands, is that he received instruction from "a messenger of the secret chiefs" he did not himself understand, from which he later concluded that tsade should refer instead to the emperor.

lon milo duquette gives a good description of this in his book on thoth.

for myself, i take all of these talmudic commentaries as simply providing additional perspectives on both cards. while (17) star suggests to me primarily a path of seeking through meditation and humility, and (4) emperor suggests to me the frame through which an individual views reality, each can also reflect the other.

similarly with (8) strength and (11) justice, but that is another story.

three majors

daily draw at the cafe (6) lovers rx, flanked by (7) chariot and (3) empress.

yike. seems like the deck wants me to get serious about the majors.

in a deck i might create, i would likely call the six "discernment" rather than "lovers," and use very simplified imagery to show a joining of the so-called "conscious" awareness with the "subconscious" as a path to what you may call it, transcendence, unmediated awareness, whatever.

this is straight out of paul foster case.

what i am thinking right now is simply loosely clasped hands, a "female" left hand resting in a "male" right, as though a couple were standing side by side, with maybe the "female" forearm and hand in green, to suggest (3) empress, and the "male" in yellow, to suggest (1) magician -- each of whom would also likely be renamed, but that is another story.

the background might also be vertically divided in some manner, possibly with a visual reference to the hebrew letter zain, meaning "sword," and there might be figures of some kind tattoed on the forearms to reinforce or extend the conscious/subconscious reference.

and this is as good a place as any to mention that it would be my intention to place elemental, numerological, and astrological data on the borders of each card, for the convenience of those who might want to explore those associations.

so here, on the six, would be some kind of reference to the fact that gemini, a common air sign, is "ruled" by mercury, etc.

possibly also some reference to the card's placement on the path from binah to tiphareth, i don't know. part of my purpose here is to get away from the cluttered imagery of the rider deck, but that has more to do with the angel and the trees and the flaming fruit and the serpent, etc. i do want the various attributions to be very accessible.

similarly with the seven, which i might call "vehicle" or "receptivity" rather than "chariot," possibly using the literal meaning of the hebrew letter cheth, fence, to suggest the idea of enclosure or focus. this card has to do with joining the empress with the priestess, binah to geburah.

case talks about controlling language and allowing the primal will to express itself. i do not really have clear imagery for this yet, but the fence is a beginning.  maybe the human ribcage.

and with the three, which i am thinking of calling "gaia" or "fecundity," and playing with the meaning of the hebrew letter daleth, door, by depicting a cultivated landscape contoured to resemble a female pubis. a nod to georgia o'keeffe.

but to return to the three card spread itself.

elemental attributions air flanked by water and earth, which are compatible but passive, thus exerting only a modest effect on the center. left supportive, right weakening.

i am actually thinking the spread has specifically to do with this project, and the basic message is that i do not yet sufficiently understand the relationship of the six with the three by way of the seven, and ultimately the relationship of the two with the three.

seven wands reversed

got a late start [yesterday] morning, and not exactly a quarrel with L., but a bit of contention between us, somewhat suppressed.

at the cafe laid out three cards. seven wands reversed, flanked by (14) temperance and ace wands. there is the suppressed contention, anyway.

but what about the context. temperance is fire, so the seven is emphatically supported. the ace suggesting i return my focus to the matter of "will."

i guess what i am trying to say about "will" is analogous to mindfulness or vipassana meditation. as defensiveness or anger arises, the body experiences specific physical sensations, and if you can become aware of these, and recognize their impermanence, you can learn eventually to dissolve them.

(14) tempering what, fire with water.

for example

so this morning i sat at the cafe with the morning paper and played through exactly three hands of calculation before getting out the tarot deck.

any number of times i have brought the deck and a notebook to this cafe and left them in the bag. today, a different table, facing a different direction.

an aside. one of these days i want to write a separate post entirely on the subject of "will," asking the [cartesian skeptic] to reflect for a moment on the processes that operate at or just above the autonomic level, not quite subconscious but nearly so.

breathing of course, the control of which is often used as a path to meditative states. but also the finer motor actions involved in bringing the coffee cup to your lips, sipping, swallowing, putting the cup back onto the table, picking up the cards, shuffling, dealing them out. on a gross scale, of course, these are consciously directed, but the minute details are so habitual that they have slipped below consciousness.

i am asking you to bring them forward. watch your hands as you shuffle. maybe close and open your eyes at intervals to introduce a sort of stop motion visualization to it. see it as a film in which you are the observer but not the actor. stop talking to yourself.

okay, three cards.

this morning they were the knight of swords, reversed, flanked on the left by the six of swords, also reversed, and on the right by (12) the hanged man.

air and water compatible, so the knight, albeit reversed, is well dignified. in my notebook i wrote "writer's block." the six suggesting a shift in my way of thinking about the problem. hanged man of course major, suggesting a surrender, a letting go.

and so we begin.

what is self awareness for?

homo sapiens is a pattern-making creature. it is in our genes. making patterns is what got us down out of the trees and (for better or for worse) into a position of dominance over other species. that and opposable thumbs.

but an incidental consequence of having this particular wiring in our brains is something that seems to us like self-awareness. we remember bits and pieces of the past, and we can plan some short distance into the future, and we imagine some kind of continuity between the two, a narrative that provides a sense of "meaning" or at least a story arc. always talking, talking to ourselves, talking ourselves into a "reality."

and we can almost watch ourselves thinking, though the moment of actually standing outside always eludes us. and we begin to think in terms of an individual "something" that is "behind" the noise in our heads. the ghost in the machine, the "self," the spirit. while at the same time we are at least "objectively" aware that it could simply be the play of atoms and molecules and electrical impulses.

we might, if we are alert, observe that how we ourselves experience the external world is in some ways different from, but in some ways similar to, the way others experience it -- that there are story arcs in common --, and we develop vocabularies -- analogies, metaphors, archetypes -- describing how one person or another engages with the "world." greed, lust, avarice, the hero, the trickster, the outsider, and so on.

tarot is for me an expression of one such vocabulary.

and here let me make a disclaimer or two. i have not studied the history of the cards with any seriousness. the meanings that have grown up among the cards for me originate in a very loose reading of rider-waite, but they are idiosyncratic to my own experiences with the cards, which continue to unfold, and informed by perspectives i had acquired long before i found the cards.

also, i am not a believer in any particular alternative to rationality, though i do recognize that rationality is itself a religion. in working with the cards, i have engaged in a willful suspension of disbelief, accepting the possibility that there may be "significance" not only to reversed cards, repeated numbers, "unsupported" courts, etc., but even to each dropped or "accidentally" faced card.

in the course of working through even a three- or four-card spread, let alone an entire celtic cross, you can become immersed in a very introspective frame.

start here

anyway you have to start somewhere.

i had intended to begin this project more than a year ago.  had a couple of false starts.

the original idea was to take three cards every two weeks and work through the entire seventy-eight over the course of twenty-six fortnights, roughly thirteen lunar months, not quite a solar year.  articulate my own understandings of each card, maybe do some sketches toward my own deck.  along the way creating what might amount to a "white book."

i very quickly abandoned this approach.  where i am now is to just write what comes, start in the middle, work in whatever direction unfolds.

the larger concept would be to explain my understanding of tarot in terms that would be approachable by a skeptic, in i guess the cartesian sense.  maybe moving the reader toward a more philosophical skepticism.  magical thinking may or may not follow.

so at this point i am thinking there would be a collection of somewhat unrelated essays, the introductory sections dealing with the nature of knowledge and doubt, some stuff about qabala, numerology, astrology -- descriptive, so the reader can place the cards in some context, not requiring belief, etc.  some treatment of reversals and dignities.

and then of course marching through the cards, for which i would likely use meanings derived in some fashion from mathers, crowley, waite, case, et. al.

but i am likely to generate the actual writing in some other sequence and impose organization later.

so i am opening this blog as a sort of discipline to get the project started.  commit to posting something a couple or three times a week, a few hundred words, etc.