FAMILY BLING

England is a good place to visit if you want to get a sense of the prevalent state of conformity in the land. As I walk the miles and miles of long paths full of ethnic shops in Birmingham, one thing is clear. ‘Family’ is big here. I have nothing against families, but seeing what sells the most makes me rather suspicious. There isn’t a single shop that, in addition to selling food, fabrics, or incense, is not also selling picture frames. Especially the golden and the silver ones are popular. The minute I enter a shop like this, the owner strikes up a conversation that is almost always identical in its exchange with what I get to hear and say in all the other places:

‘Can I interest you in a picture frame?’
'I don’t think so.’
‘Why not, don’t you have a family of your own?’
‘Sure I do.’
‘So, what’s the problem, then?’
‘There is no problem, I just don’t like to think of my family as objects in a frame.’
‘How many children do you have?’
‘I have none.’
‘I’ll pray for you.’

Obviously the implicit assumption on the owner’s part is that if I had more than one child, then there would be no way in HELL I wouldn’t want to present them nicely, as they pose happily on display for everyone else to see. So the number of children is very important. The more of them one has, the more one can fill the empty space on the dresser with their representation. Now, due to my platonic philosophical inclinations that favor being kind over being merely smart, I refrain from commenting on the fact that I find such displays disgusting. What mythologies people fead their hearts and heads with is really their problem, but I often speculate what the reaction might be, if I said that I preferred to see empty spaces on furniture and fireplaces filled with books rather than idiotic pictures that disclose the poverty of thought and emotion in the house. (Actually, I think that I said that once, and it didn’t go so well with the well-intended party).

Roaming through the art galleries in Birmingham, I notice that while people have always wanted to represent families, it was never the poor who got to do it. So I wonder what happened between 1350 and 2011. How has the transmigration of the discourse on family as dictated by the affluent groups been translated into solid ethnic British conviction of the ‘this is the way’ as dictated now by the ones who have to compensate for lack of recognition and money? (We leave the middle space populated by the snobbish bourgeois who make the norms for clichés out of this).

“It’s all about memory,” my sister tells me – as she is trying to keep me away from ending up in the hospital due to high blood pressure. “People use their family members as objects in mirrors, in order they that appear closer.” “Closer to what?” I ask, while being reminded of the attention signs written on all American cars regarding the perception in the mirror of vehicles behind you on the road. “Closer to what they imagine they have, but don’t have,” she says, “a fulfilled soul.”

As I try to understand what such a statement means, and what its implications might be for all those who declare themselves soulless on purpose, so that they can be exempted from having to engage with deconstructive commonsense, my sister turns to the wall behind her and says: “Why don’t you stop worrying about people buying crap, and take a family picture of me right here now, in this pub, featuring another family." Above her seat, Led Zeppelin is grinning from another time in a picture frame, and I can’t help thinking that Robert Plant has just made today’s showbiz headlines in Mail Online, with a remark on his joining the establishment after receiving CBE from Prince Charles. (I bet that the family picture will make it into a frame on the mantelpiece).

Some stupidities never change. I think I’m going to book myself a flight to the Arctic today. I’m getting claustrophobic here.

CALVINO'S CLAIM

One of my absolute favorite writers, Italo Calvino, would have been 88 today, had he not kicked the bucket in ’85. I secretly entertain the idea that he would have lived longer had he gone Zen. The ‘don’t think’ doctrine would have saved him from the brain explosion that he suffered. Calvino thought too much. Couple that with a heightened sense of play, and you’re in trouble. For, you end up tormenting yourself about whether to think or to play. The thinker, by definition, has a hard time with play that allows for all sorts of contradictions. For the thinker, the aim is often to say something instructive and clear. The player, even when following a strategy for play, has his eyes on something else. Self-expression may be part of it, but the smart player will ditch that in favor of creating a space where other things can happen rather than merely deploying the actualization of one’s own ego in popular recognition. After all, the player, also by definition will do anything to escape becoming entombed and impotent within the very world of self-imposed constrictions. The art is, and has always been to rise above limits.

What I like about Calvino is that he was obsessed with Tarot. Especially Tarot de Marseille. In his great book, The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969), a bunch of people – wanderers – end up in a castle on a dark and stormy night. They want to have dinner together and chat like normal people, when they realize that they’ve lost their speech. The owner of the castle provides them with a deck of cards, Tarot cards, and they all start speaking in visual tongues. The stories they tell are most truthful and accurate, heartfelt and hilarious, and there’s no ambiguity about anything at all. Everybody gets the picture. Speaking the visual language thus seems to leave no room for misunderstanding. This is a very nice move. That the image can communicate its message in a more direct way than its verbal counterpart is rather liberating. One is free from having to make stupid assumptions, or having to ask all the time what the meaning of it all is. What an image invites us to consider is the possibility that we might just experience a revelation. And the beauty of a revelation is still this one: that it needs no ‘rational’ discourse to explain it. It’s magical.

Since Calvino wrote his book there seems to be consensus among the serious Tarot de Marseille readers that he raised the bar on sophisticated interpretation. What is more, this sophistication is all about keeping it simple. You have the cards in front of you. There are pictures on them. You look at them and you have two options: to go the cultural way, or the free way. Cultural preconditioning creates a preponderance for readings that rely on repeating set phrases. The gypsies and the occultists prefer this practice. The free-way types of reading prefer the space between your eyes and your nose, and the leading questions are always of observation. What is happening? And how does it make you feel? In my opinion the best Tarot de Marseille reader right now is Enrique Enriquez, who, following Calvino and other no nonsense men, argues for the efficiency of engaging the picture at the querent’s own level. According to Enriquez, the ideal situation in a one-to-one Tarot session is this one: the cards fall on the table. The reader sees them, the querent sees them, and they both know it. Words are redundant. By following the simple rules of observing what elements rhyme with one another when going from one card to the other, and by looking at the shape, color, sound, and rhythm of these elements, we should be able to remember what we already know. Enriquez has even truncated the whole reading method to the idea that:

between

“Once Upon a Time” and “Happily Ever After”

is about going

from warm to cold
from cold to warm

about contracting if you have expanded
about expanding if you are contracted

because you are a lump of clay

(and I mean it nicely).

Calvino was a poststructuralist and a postmodern man. This means that while he appreciated all the binary opposites and beautiful symmetries he was not buying any mythologies. He was no occultist, concerned with learning heavy stuff between heaven and earth by heart, and he didn’t give a damn about the symbol. Calvino was a man of letters. And he took the visual image’s own word for it. For instance, and unlike some Golden Dawn folks who decided that the now 400 years old card of the Lover in the Marseille lore is about the marriage between heaven and earth, Calvino took a good look at what the image communicates beyond the symbol and decided that not only are we dealing here with a man unable to decide between two women, but that if we also looked carefully we could see that that choice has already been made. The Lover, with his hand firmly planted onto the blonde woman’s crotch, while flirting with the smart one over his shoulder, is nothing other than a deceitful bastard merely enforcing what some other clever writers have emphasized ever so eloquently. In the words of Nabokov: men always want to fuck Eve – as she looks like their mother – while being forever fascinated with Lilith – who doesn’t give a damn about reproduction. In the face of having to choose, or pretending that we do, for whatever reason, we have Calvino’s word for it that things are really much simpler than we imagine. Thus he says in the Castle: “Every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing.”

In honor of Calvino’s birthday, I pulled 3 cards for him, wishing to see what he might communicate from beyond the grave, and what might be Calvinesque par excellence. Here’s what I got:

CINQUE DE DENIERS (FIVE OF COINS), LE FOV, CINQUE DE COUPES (FIVE OF CUPS)

Keeping with the tradition, here’s the 30-second interpretation – as it really doesn’t take any longer to figure things out:

Don’t be impressed by the exciting core of things, material or emotional, that are seemingly external to you. You are yourself this very center, forever caught in the paradox of ‘no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing.’ Squeezed between the fives, now you let go of the money – and renouncing the establishment’s cat scratching your balls – now you’re ready to get drunk, giving in to the temptation of believing that love can make you feel special. The Fool is what has always been: the truest to his unstable nature, and therefore the most stable. The one who believes nothing and assumes no responsibility for any claims, except perhaps this one: freedom doesn’t have to cost anything at all.

While writing these words, I’m thinking of yesterday’s event, when, over fancy beer at the local pub, The Bishop’s Arms in Jönköping in Sweden, I pulled these cards for myself in connection with musing over the freedom to do what Calvino did, whatever the fuck he wanted. Read more Tarot. But how? There’s no tradition for it here in Scandinavia, not any that is worth much. I got these cards:

LA PAPESSE (THE HIGH PRIESTESS), LE CHARIOR (THE CHARIOT), JVSTICE (JUSTICE)

‘Jolly good,’ I said to myself: forge ahead with the knowledge you have, and go goddamn professional.

We bow to Calvino tonight, to Enrique Enriquez, and to our partners, who, although not Marseille’ists, pay close attention.

--

Note on the deck: Jean Noblet’s Tarot de Marseille, 1650, as restored by Jean-Claude Flornoy.

--

For more Tarot related posts, go to my Tarot Reflections website.

TEMPLARS

Köln. The day after. The post-conference trip ends with a tour of the Dom, the magnificent cathedral from 1242, which is a close imitation of the one in Amiens. As with cathedrals of this caliber, the legend has it that the first architect made a pact with the devil. I'm thinking of pacts, and what we use them for. If this is true indeed, then what the architect made a deal for was to encode the language of the birds into the stones.

The night before, over beers and weird light at the local pub, I read the Tarot cards for my closest friends. Frank Klaus, one of the three musketeers in the trio which includes Rainer Kaus and Cathrin Grabner, has some doubts: should he continue with the Jesuits or do philosophy instead? We use the cards to get an insight into an alternative reality. The cards fall precisely into place reflecting exactly the nature of his question. This morning, he tells me how on the way to his hotel around midnight he heard the organ very loudly playing in the church. There were no lights on, and there was no traffic around. It was all very quiet, except for the music thundering all of a sudden. “My god,” I said to him, feeling jealous: “you heard the language of the birds. How fortunate.”

While looking at the beautiful stained glass windows from the renaissance, depicting what we often find in the Tarot cards, I initiate the now reduced number of people from the conference into the legend about the nomadic cathedral, the Tarot cards. With the destruction of the Order of the Temple on the night of October 13, 1307, the masons and the architects of the sacred buildings went underground. Their teachings re-emerged, however, around 1400 in Northern Italy, and legend has it that in order to prevent the assassination of masters opposing dogmatic systems, whatever knowledge about how the sacred can be experienced literally and in a direct way, was to be encoded unto a pack of cards. As playing cards, this knowledge survived, and with it, so did the brilliance of the structure of 22 types and 56 relations.

Everyone likes this idea. So we decide to stick to churches. The three musketeers suggest that we all go and see another master, Peter W. Rech, an art therapy professor, painter, and a hardcore Lacanian. Peter lives in a church. A modern church, but a church nonetheless. At some point, when the catholic congregation went over to graze on other pastures, Peter bought the place and turned it into a gallery. He himself now lives in the bishop's rooms right across the main building. The altar is in his living room and filled with postcards of Peter's paintings with variations over Courbet's L'Origine du Monde. Peter never paints anything else. For him, that is the Real. We sit in the middle of the Real and drink a grand cru French wine, while stuffing ourselves with goat cheese and Danish cookies. Peter wants Frank to read some fragments. Very lyrical, which in German, with its amazing falling tone, acquire a certain gravitas. We all feel pulled towards the stone. Frank, the cardinal, has a very soothing voice, and we make him give us a blessing. Courbet is winking. We all know what we know.

We leave Peter's place in Rainer's vintage 1980 blue Mercedes. While cruising through the woods, Die Köningin, Cathrin, is trying to communicate to us what the plan is. This woman gets things done. But Rainer turns on the music, and says: "here's the short version of what the meaning of life is: spend your time wonderfully." Barbra Streisand gets channelled and we all marvel at her voice while she enforces Rainer's point. The song I'm a Woman in Love makes us all nod. And I'm thinking: This IS the language of the birds. Sung in Rainer's blue cathedral, and seen in Peter's Courbet cathedral.

Back home, two hand stenciled Tarot decks await me, sent from another cathedral. Roxanne Flornoy, the wife of the late master cartier Jean-Claude Flornoy sends me her warm greetings, handwritten on an additional special card: The Hanged Man. I read this as a message. The meaning of life is to let it all hang, and let whatever streams through you turn into a church bell, resounding the joy of knowing the children of Maitre Jacques.