hell is empty and all the devils are here
your bibliomancy forecast for the week of april 28th
the five of cups, and an excerpt from Lars Gustafssons’ Stories of Happy People
The speech of the Prisoner was very great, very strange, and quite incomprehensible. And she pondered it all in her heart. Sometimes it was about a time older than creation, older than the Milky Way and the rotating galaxies. It was about imprisoned and betrayed creation, captured behind the terrible walls of the material world. It was about the desires of the flesh, about the dark slope of passion which prevents people from reaching the glittering water surface above, the knowledge of a freedom that once existed.
She wanted to know his name, but this wish was not granted.
the aleatory
In the canonical image of the five of cups, a person in a black cape stands before three spilled cups, his posture dejected. Behind him are two more cups which still sit upright—invisible, because his back is turned.
In the Lars Gustafsson story “The Bird in the Breast,” something like the devil appears to Fredrika many times in her life—first as a viper, then as a man at her sister’s Pentecostal church with eyes like an aurochs. (Whether she sees a man with these eyes or an actual extinct bull is not entirely clear, and maybe doesn’t matter, either.) She calls him the Prisoner. No matter the shape he takes, she knows him by his eyes, which gaze with the darkness of the space between stars. He tells her a great deal about everything—but not his name.
Does the Prisoner omit his name because he is, in fact, the devil? Or does he refuse to answer because he is unnamed spacious darkness, and naming him is the same as capturing him?
The conventional wisdom with the five of cups is fairly anodyne: Don’t miss your blessings by looking too long at your losses. But in order to interpret it that way, you have to determine that an empty cup is worse than a full one. You have to decide that the Prisoner is the devil, and all his words are lies.
But what if every word is a prison?
the forecast
When you are given the mystery, don’t ask for its name.
writing prompt
Look around the room where you are and find the emptiest thing. Sit in front of it until it begins speaking.
a chune
“Self-Portrait in Three Colors” by Charlie Mingus
Soon, we’ll be living in an apartment, the first time J or I have shared walls with anyone since … idk, for me 2013 but probably longer for him. So I’ve been trying to play trombone as often as possible before the move is complete, because I’m not about to set all the neighbor dogs howling by playing “Cariñito.” There is a prolonged sense of mourning from the fire because I keep remembering new things that are gone, like all of my sheet music and scores. But the amazing thing about this day and age is that you can look up a bass clef Real Book on archive.org instantly. You don’t have to send off a money order to a shady post office box in Golden, Colo. and wait six weeks for the photocopied phonebook-sized slab of hand-transcribed chunes to arrive. And so within five minuts of searching, I had found this Mingus head again—one of my absolute favorite things to play. It is situated in that perfect midtempo I happen to love, the one that sounds like a square of sunlight sliding down a wall (see also: Wayne Shorter’s “Virgo”). I don’t know what I’m going to do once we move. I forget how much I love to play for months and sometimes years at a time, and then when I pick the trombone up again, it’s all still there. J is suggesting that maybe I should go to a nearby park and play there. The throught of it scares me in that way where you know you have to do it.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
Stories of Happy People by Lars Gustafsson
Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus
dear diary, I bought a beautiful bolo tie yesterday. (Operation Is She In ZZ Top?! continues.) This one is made of resin, with gold flakes trapped in it, and a miniature pick, shovel, and gold pan. When I took it out of the drawstring bag they wrapped it in, the cats came to stare at it as if it was an enchanted object which was singing to them. I have no idea about the source of its power. I will report back when I know more, but for now it is being stored on a high-up shelf, because I don’t know what they’d do. XS