chop it up, baby
by "it" I mean the small town where they just don't understand
LIFE RX 25 NOV 24
the ten of swords, and a paragraph from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying:
“Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again.”
the aleatory
There are many cards in the tarot deck that prompt someone to ask, is that good? The woman blindfolded holding two swords in her crossed arms, is that good? The floating goblets full of colorful demons and dream cakes, is that good?
Well, nobody asks that about this card.
In the canonical Rider-Waite-Smith deck, it depicts a figure laying dead on a shoreline, under a pitch-black sky, pinned to the ground by ten swords thrust through his body. When you turn this card in a reading, it usually gets nervous laughter. (Being pinned to the earth under a darkling sky by one, two, or three swords would be enough for anyone, right? Isn’t ten a bit much?)
Actually, I think that laughter is the perfect response to this card. Because, yes, ten swords in the back is too much. And, in a strange way, there’s some relief to that. Knowing, as we do, that there are no elevens of anything in the tarot deck, this is as bad as it gets, as dark as it gets, and here it has already happened.
Think for a moment about one of your worst fears: Is there any way that it’s already happening right now? The answer to that is usually yes, in my experience. Fearing something is a way to push it off into the future when it’s already here. Which, yes, I realize that sounds like a massive downer, but there is also freedom in it.
Instead of “what if,” it’s “what now?”
I always thought it was kind of funny in AA that people named the dangerous state leading to relapse “the fuck-its,” because isn’t “fuck it” a form of surrender? Or am I supposed to believe that it’s only surrender when it turns someone into a pious and pliant doer of good deeds?
the assignment
Ask yourself what wonderful thing you could do now, which you’ve been putting off in favor of dreading your various already-happening fears.
writing prompt
Be a teenage girl in a hopelessly small town where nobody understands you. I.e., lie facedown on the ground with ten swords in your back.
a chune
File under: reasons you might Google “what is thrush?” when you’re an American teenager; CD box sets; songs that changed something about your mind instantly when you heard them the first time; C#m chord; what if life could feel like a film.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Lazy Line Painter Jane box set by Belle & Sebastian
dear diary, I’m keeping this one short because I’m under the weather and I don’t have the energy to constellate some oblique channel between meanings, or even to tell a story. I typically resist writing about the straightforward interpretations of tarot cards in this newsletter, I guess because I think everybody knows tarot cards? Even as I say this, I realize it doesn’t make much sense. Maybe this will prove to be a nice change. In any case … something? XS