Prudence in Hell 014
How Do I Love Thee, Part II: The Cards
It isn’t easy to write about cards; they are too charged with bias. People who are not involved with them assume they know things about cardsharks —whether its poker, tarot or canasta— and grant little to the founding graces of the papercut bloodsport: mystery and self-mastery.
Cardwork also attracts pareidoiliacs; it relieves compulsive counters from their mania to keep tabs and tallies. It is therapeutic for neurotics, and so it attracts them in droves.
The accomplished cardplayer is at once extraordinarily unsuperstitious and —what is sometimes more or less the same— extremely prone to rite and repetition. Cards, too, are a musical instrument, or at the very least present a musical incentive. My parents, for example, were consummate bridge-players, which is the tango of cardsharps.
I didn’t think of myself as a card person until I discovered that I had an aptitude for it by accident. A dinner party, an intact tarot deck –sent to the hostess by a ‘proper witch, from Switzerland’– enough drink to lower inhibitions to the point of locking horns if one so willed it and a storyteller, who had never read cards –but who’d read “everything else”–at the table? Why not.
The one thing I won’t read is instructions, so I simply started stringing out a conversation with the hostess by pulling cards, aiding myself with the booklet; adding my own interpretive spice, as some of the imagery and its implications is so archetypally anchored. In brief, I improvised: I got a feel for the deck –one based on animals, if I recall correctly– a feel for my reading partner, and we jammed about her life for about two hours, successfully calling attention to what we were doing by committing to it fully. Gather round and listen. It need not have made any more sense to outsiders than a séance, but a séance will command an audience, too; a skeptic one. More importantly, however, a tarot reading such as ours had nothing to demonstrate. It was sheer, unadulterated groove.
Over the years, I have come to like to read as conversation, which means each fork and character and change in arc comes with a corresponding change in card, that can lead to all kinds of unexpected detours, recaps, revelations. Done in small groups of friends –two or three, maybe with some intoxicants– it can become a real, transformative psychodrama.
On that first night, my hostess and I did not run through the whole deck, but the conversation produced its own sort of ectoplasm: I was essentially allowed to step into her inner sanctum –into places in her she did not step into– and to express her self through me. The result was a beautiful, low-lit, wine-fuelled one-way channeling that ended with her so delighted by the insight wrought she gave me her deck in repayment. I accepted it as a loan to practice with her daily, and I did so for several months until we moved to the States.
Though I have some knowledge of cold reading, that was definitely not the spirit of that first time, and it has almost no bearing on how I read -cards, or anything– at all. I am a warm reader, which is among the reasons I can do so well long-distance. I pick up other cues. I listen to things others may not listen to. If I were a musician I would probably be one of the Cage-y kind: indulging in long, environmentally punctuated silences; keeping score of noise as signal; connecting things that maybe weren’t meant to be connected and yet. The tarotist’s success is in-attention. The reader, like the shaman, must be conducting the reading, while reading the room. They must be inside and out at the same time.
There are many ways to go about this. Conventionally, for example, the three card draw represents Past, Present and Future but, as a psychohistorian, I have a slightly different take on time. I like to start in medias res, to situate my subject at the centre of their epic. I like to cultivate enduring and endearing reading relationships where certain cards have a special import or recurrence to certain people (as indeed they do). I myself have special, private relationships with certain cards. I have friends for whom I do deep annual readings once a year, on their birthdays, and then we can revise their trajectory over time: what repeats —sometimes exactly— what has changed, and how. The ars is in selecting what connections resonate (which, as I’ll restate, means listening). A reading is a co-authored, epic poetic creative relationship.
This is why belief is inessential to tarot. (Conviction is a different matter.) Tarot is not a form of divination, it is –like jazz– a type of wayfinding.
Wyndham Lewis. La Suerte. 1938. Oil paint on canvas. 61 cm × 45.5 cm. Tate Museum, London.