two on tarot
The Story of Swords
There’s a photograph of my grandmother that I often return to. She is sitting bareback on a white horse in 1945. Her floral dress is the same grey colour as the barn behind her. There are soft clouds in the sky. Her hair is long and full, her cheeks dewy, her white socks pulled half-way up her calves and tucked into leather loafers. My grandma is sitting sideways, no tell how she got onto the horse, no tell how she will get down. Although I know my grandma to be demure, in this photograph she appears plucky, a farm girl who rode fearlessly without a saddle. Here, my grandma is almost at the age when she began to hear the voice of Death.
A few years ago my friend was reading Vita Sackville-West’s biography of Saint Joan of Arc. He was a few pages in, reading about Joan as a young girl in the cow pasture, when he mentioned that Joan reminded him of me. I thought it flattering to be compared to a warrior, the thirteen-year-old French girl with cosmic visions and God’s voice calling her to battle. I relished in the images of her, horseback and unafraid. Thumbing through a copy of the book last year, I read those first few passages. Sackville-West describes Joan of Arc as a stout, sexless girl who none would call beautiful. She goes on for pages arguing that no historical description ever mentioned Joan’s appearance, likely because it wasn’t worth mentioning. Ha ha, I am sexless and stout, a eunuch roaming the fields!
When Joan of Arc heard voices, they often came as Saint Margaret, the Virgin of Antioch. The story of Saint Margaret is one of motherly anguish and mythic resistance. After refusing to marry, Saint Margaret was swallowed by the devil disguised as a dragon. In some tellings, Margaret was swallowed with a crucifix that made the dragon spit her out; in another, she was swallowed with a sword which she used to gut the dragon and let herself free. Because of this association with ruptured bellies, Margaret became the patron Saint of difficult childbirth and a protector of young children. Despite surviving her battle with the dragon, Saint Margaret was decapitated for her resistance to marriage at the age of 15.
Joan of Arc refused to carry a sword in battle. Instead, she carried the French flag. She wore men’s armour and cut her hair short. It was in part this cross-dressing that led her to be tried for heresy after she was captured by the English—that, and her claims to have communicated directly with Saints, which was heretic! Joan was imprisoned and subject to an ecclesiastic trial, which resulted in her death at the stake. Before she was burned, she claimed she was pregnant, perhaps invoking Saint Margaret’s resistance, in an attempt to avoid her death sentence. Alas, at 19 years old she was torched.
When my grandma first heard the voice of Death, she was 13. It came in that fitful place between sleep and light. Somehow she heard in her mind that her neighbour had died in a plane crash. And though it wasn’t received well at first by her mother, the neighbour’s death was confirmed a few hours later on the local radio. The next time my grandma heard the voice, she was 21. Again it arrived in her mind; her twin brother had died.
Since my grandfather passed, my grandma has scarcely opened up to me about her spiritual encounters. For a while she mentioned seeing ghosts and going to seances at church. She's refused to read my tarot or palms on a number of occasions, fearing what she’ll find—she has, in the past, predicted death through these symbolic systems. Without my grandfather’s presence, I thought my grandma would have been more open about her whims, but everything has only become more taboo.
It was my friend Frances who first introduced me to the story of swords, the narrative that runs across the suit in the tarot deck. Swords are akin to spades in a deck of playing cards, and share qualities with astrology’s air signs. Frances writes of swords: “They are of puncture, defence, battle, bravery, sacrifice. They are of clarity, thought, intellect, discernment, the opening of the mind. The story of swords: oneself dissolved and commanded by belief—a pierced heart—repose—petty victory— sombre escape—thievery—punishment—waking up from delusion shattered by regret—death of the cycle.” Frances says of the final card in the story of swords, that the character is “utterly slain.”
Tarot cards tell you what you already know. They are not magical, but as Frances puts it, they are “the vocabulary of tableaux.” In that sense, they can be a powerful tool because they provide a narrative and symbolic lexicon for our uncertain futures. The suit of swords typically represents conflicts of the mind. Swords are less about dreamy, subconscious dilemmas, and more about seeking clarity in the thinkable realm.
There are two cards that haunt my tarot readings: The 3 of swords and the Chariot. The first is a card of heartbreak. Three swords pierce a red heart. The meaning can only be literal. I pulled it for the first time as a teenager, and it comes up every birthday, equinox, and solstice—at significant moments of change. Do I dare speculate on the nature of its recurrence? I will say this: The card comes early in the story of swords, well before the narrative reaches a pinnacle. It is a primordial wound, something that cannot be made sense of until after the character is slain. To pull this card so frequently might mean resistance to a necessary death, or a card misshapen by use, so that the hand falls over it often.
The second is a card of war. The Chariot signifies a call to battle that the querent must win at all costs. It represents both material success and a conquering of the Self. Two sphinxes rest on either side of a King, representative of divisive forces that he must unite to achieve his goal. I’ve pulled this card a few times this year. The Chariot reminds me of Joan, an armoured warrior called to battle. Her softness and strength, the duality of intuition and intellect. I think of Joan cross-dressed and torched, of my grandma’s fearlessness on horseback, her shame around spiritual callings. This card says: Fear not! You can carry the sword.
My grandma in Gainsborough SK, 1948; My grandma’s twin brother, Lloyd, in Gainsborough SK, 1948; the nine of Pentacles tarot card in Carlos Casteneda’s The Teachings of don Juan: a Yaqui way of Knowledge (1968), 2022; a found postcard of European storks in a zoo, with clay knot made by E, 2022; my palm, 2016.
Season’s Greetings
30 March 2020
Dear S,
I’m writing to you from day thirteen of quarantine in the green of my living room. Spider plants, stepmother’s tongue, cornflower, a view of the park. This viral fever coincides with spring fever—everyone either inside or at the park, the days longer, brighter, warmer. I’ve felt grateful to think through your work while I shift my priorities inward. I find it hard to write from home—from the couch and from bed. Even in crisis, the banalities of life are the same. But there is some relief in learning to live with time paused, and learning to write from this domestic space.
I listened to Sun Ra this morning. While I think the songs of Sun Ra emanate red, blue and gold, I feel overcome now by green. It rushes through me; it rushes through your work. Green is the colour behind the eyelids when you close your eyes, the colour of a room made of mirrors, of better (other) pastures, of the paint on my nails. Green is the colour of the virus that keeps us in, of spring fever, of isolation, it’s the colour of the heart, which is most active in spring. If red was the colour of revolutions past, perhaps its complimentary, green, is the colour of post-capitalist futures.
When we met over the winter to look at your work, it became clear that we are both equally moved by fiction. You said something along the lines of, no matter how speculative the fiction, it can only address so many problematics. So we talked about refusal and opacity, the decision not to depict what is speculated upon in your work. While fiction undertakes the difficult task of envisioning futures (I’m thinking Marge Piercy, Ursula K Leguin, Octavia Butler), your work instead refuses. It uses what you called “the blind spot” as the juncture between future and fiction. Where fiction sometimes fails to represent, your work guides the viewer to their own vision of the future, their our impossible desires.
I followed the instructions of your work. I closed my eyes, listened to the music, imagined a future. We need conviviality, bohemia, sex, parties, we need dancehall, disco, futurism, we need universal basic income, we need free housing and transportation, we need a living wage, sustainable energy, harm reduction. We need to use this moment to demand dignity and equity as workers, caregivers, and artists.
To honour the abstraction in your work, I pulled a tarot card. The three of pentacles. The suit of pentacles is about manifestation, worldliness, sensuality, presence, opportunity, wealth, the beginning of life and the opening of livelihood. The three of pentacles depicts a sculptor or craftsman carving pentacles into the column of a monastery while two cloaked men stand nearby. Divine readings of the card include labour, nobility and glory, but because it is a minor arcana card, it can be read more literally through the image. This card is about cooperation, construction rather than completion, devotion to creations that are not your own, of artistry without glory, artistic co-operation in spite of—or within—the unknown. This card says, keep making work.
M
from a letter to Simon Fuh in response to the thesis exhibition, Post-Capitalist Futures, completed for the studio component of Masters in Visual Studies at U of T. The corresponding playlist can be listened to here.