The Many Faces of Death
‘Lo child,
Been a while! Twitter appears to have bought and buried the utility I was using for newsletters prior to my hiatus, so we’re going to just stick with Medium/the blog for now, and beg your indulgence.
In working my way back to you, I’ve been playing with tarot cards a lot. This might seem like a swerve from Your Favorite Iconoclast, but I love tarot cards.
I love them as a heavily symbolic and surrealistic art form — they have a particular portentous whimsy to them, a sense of being so stuffed with symbolism that any meaning one might find is as much projection as divination.
dark materials
But that’s the reason I think they work, because of the way we project upon them. They’re not tellers of the future, but of the present — they are ways of opening yourself to yourself, of assuming a mindful, listening posture, curious and attentive to what’s going on inside.
We’ve been rereading Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy here at cult headquarters, and it’s hard not to observe the similarities between the mental state Lyra assumes while reading the alethiometer (which Dr. Malone compares to the mental state she experiences while consulting the I Ching) and the state I assume while reading tarot cards. It’s a listening stillness that allows thoughts in and treats them gently, lightly, so as to encompass as many seemingly disparate thoughts as possible and determine tenuous connections between them. It’s like trying to perceive a pattern in the movement of a crowd, looking at everything and nothing.
We open ourselves and listen, and what we get back is… a mess. Chaotic. So we need something to hold onto, some means by which to channel and interpret the raw passion of the subconscious. That’s what the cards are doing — they’re not telling the future, they’re a semi-random process that suggests imagery on which you may free-associate, and then you draw conclusions from that free-association. These conclusions emanate from your subconscious, but also from the generous, open curiosity with which you approached yourself.
That’s important, and it’s something I’m only vaguely starting to grasp — I’ve been looking at this stuff, basically a deeper exploration of the repeated therapy exhortation to “feel your feelings!”
This has been my go-to guide for the past couple of years, and there’s not a damn thing wrong with it. The Six Focusing Steps linked above are just a slower, more granular breakdown of the same process. It’s basically responding to, “What do you MEAN, breathe into the feelings? What do you MEAN, allow it? What is all that about, actually?”
It means that when you’re trying to ascertain what’s going on inside, the energy with which you’re looking is going to matter a lot. If you’re looking with a critical, impatient eye, if you’re looking to solve or analyze, you’re not going to perceive anything but what you were expecting. Very likely, you’ll see only part of what all’s in there, because that critical, impatient eye, the one that speaks with the voice of your worst memories, sees you as much smaller and lesser than you are. That voice — your Jerkbrain, your brainweasels, the voice of your trauma, whatever it may be for you— sees you as a helpless child, because that’s what you were when it took up residence in your head. It hasn’t paid attention to a bit of the work and growth you’ve done since. If you listen to your feelings with that ear, you’ll only get the worst of them.
feelings scatter like roaches
Focusing is intended to encourage you to listen, rather than dictate to yourself. When we go looking for our feelings, we often do it with the intention of solving the problem, or at least ferreting out its source. But our most fragile feelings, the most nascent or tentative or damaged of them, scatter like roaches when the light is turned on. They dislike scrutiny.
So don’t scrutinize. Just look. Just be there. Just look at the card, and see what’s on the card. See what it makes you think about, what it makes you feel. Where are those feelings in your body? How do they resonate with the image? What parts of it are provoking the most powerful response, and in which part of you?
This is really challenging for me, because I’m a storyteller — my instinct is to look for patterns, extract a narrative through-line, arrange things coherently for maximum payoff. I need to not do this in order to hear my own feelings, though — telling stories about them doesn’t help.
Tarot of the Day?
Today I drew three cards, and I’d like to look at them with you, if you’ll indulge me.
First card. This deck of mine is a strange one — it’s got two Major Arcanas, an extra suit of random things, and about seven different Deaths, just for starters. The Lovers isn’t a double, though — we’ve got seven shots at death, but just the one chance in the whole deck to draw love.
That’s not exactly the truth — Death in tarot doesn’t mean actual death any more than The Lovers means love, necessarily. But it does incorporate the concept. Most of the cards in this deck incorporate the concepts inherent to The Lovers. It’s a very loving deck, loving and merciless. Like this card.
When I look at it, I feel prickling warmth around my shoulders and the back of my neck. It’s a settling, sinking feeling, a cessation of strain that isn’t altogether pleasant — it’s got a ‘drowning’ feel to it, a sense that one is sinking away from light and living, into the dark. But this bifurcated state… it’s so familiar.
In some ways I always feel like that card — two faces of me, hopelessly in love, helplessly separated by a barrier neither can truly understand. I can’t love the creature in this body because I can’t get the distance — can’t stop being me long enough to see me clearly, see anything worthy of love. I feel my eyes locked on the Sleeping One below the surface, heart in my mouth, watching to see it wake — but will it? What’s the qualitative difference between sleeping and dead, here? And which is more important — to wake the Sleeper, or to know them? Am I missing the point by trying to shake alive the inchoate person inside of me, rather than simply looking to see what they’re like?
The Hawkmoth, part of this deck’s second Major Arcana. It’s a familiar moth, even for those less obsessed with moths than we are — it’s on the poster for The Silence of the Lambs, isn’t it? And it parlayed that role into a pretty solid film career, featuring on quite a few spooky thrillers and crime procedurals since.
I’m a huge Hannibal Lecter fan — you can tell, can’t you? — and yet this image doesn’t make me think of The Silence of the Lambs, in which the moth appears. It makes me think of Hannibal, the last book in that series. (The last book; do not talk to me about Hannibal Rising. Probably don’t mention it to Thomas Harris either, if you don’t want to be part of a reenactment.)
cannibalize the story
The movie of Hannibal — which is otherwise tolerable — changes the ending of the book, a decision that doomed any hope I ever had of emotionally connecting with the movies. It’s a shame Anthony Hopkins wasted a stellar performance on such mediocre films, because his work is genius — it’s the writing and directing decisions that murder and cannibalize the story.
At the end of Hannibal, the movie, Dr. Lecter escapes on a plane, having chopped off his own hand rather than hurt Clarice Starling. That’s… not how the book ends. Lecter wins, in the book. Clarice goes with him, stays with him. It ends with them in love, dancing in Buenos Aires.
It’s an appropriate ending to the story Harris was telling, an appropriate ending for the character… and it’s appropriate to this card, to the imagery of the hawkmoth also. It’s the transformation of death, the change in oneself so comprehensive that one must melt down every bit of the existing self and start over, break the chrysalis like an eggshell and be born again. It’s the acceptance of where you are, the crowning of this form as the destined form because it’s the one we have — not dictating to destiny, not struggling to wake that Sleeper, but simply observing it, taking note of its features and colors, trying to understand from what is before us what passions and pressures might have shaped the final product, rather than rejecting any prototype that doesn’t match the initial design.
It’s Goethe’s questions again, innit? We must ask what the artist intended to do, and whether it was accomplished, rather than rejecting the art because it doesn’t meet our consumer needs. We should not cry, “How disgusting, that this murderer should not see punishment for his crimes! Naughty author, you’re endorsing murder!” We should instead ask: “What does Lecter’s escape say about the world in which they live? What role does Lecter play in Clarice Starling’s life? What makes her different from Lecter’s other victims? What does that say about his other victims, and how he sees the world? What does that say about how he views Clarice? How are we asked to view Lecter’s pursuers? What might Harris be trying to say if we were to accept Lecter as the hero?”
It’s a challenging read, so I can understand why they didn’t even try selling it in the movie. Still, it infuriates me. Looking at this card, I feel pinging sounds inside me as if ball bearings were rebounding through a machine, producing marimba-like beats and bells. It’s complicated and beautiful, and beautiful because it’s complicated. I like that. So few people seem to.
The patron saint of looking inward, the High Priestess. A very traditional card with a non-traditional design. The High Priestess is about submerged knowledge, the currents of knowledge running deep underneath our conscious selves.
It’s funny how comforting I find her. She looks more matronly than anything I’ve seen with voluminous bosom and flowing locks. She gives me steady, bone-deep feelings of safety and calm. Maybe it’s a trauma thing, but I’ve always found that idea of “Death as a lover” kind of soothing. There’s this poem… hang on.
Come thou, thou last one, whom I recognize.
Unbearable pain throughout this body’s fabric
as I in my spirit burned, see, I now burn in thee.
The wood that long resisted the advancing flames
which thou kept flaring, I now am nourishing
and burn in thee.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, “Death”
Yeah, that one. I held that poem close for a lot of years, while I writhed numbly in the flames, unburning, un-nourishing, nothing to offer even the fire of my own dissolution. I lived in a thirsty place — still do. I’ve just stopped looking for water now.
What’s next?
I don’t know. I’m working on a lot of things, but I don’t know how useful any of it will be to you. I’m striving to be less useful, does that make sense? I’m striving to be, rather than become. I don’t really know how to become a being being, rather than being a becoming being. So, going forward, this newsletter may be even less goal-oriented and more navel-gazing than it was before I vanished into my own navel. That, or I’ll just send you stacks of pictures, because I’m sick of the sound of my own voice. It comes and goes. We’ll see.
