"Standing Directly Over A Forgotten Source Of Joy..."

We depend on photographs to link us to our past, but they are static, dimensionless things and they fail us. In fact, sometimes they make looking back harder instead of easier -- the past they show seems to exist in its own world, curiously remote and emotionally inaccessible. "Now" and "then" seem to exist independently of each other, showing no signs of overlap, regardless of what we remember.

What I like about the Looking Into The Past project's photos is that they force our physical and emotional awarenesses of time and space to intersect. By informing the eyes, heart and mind simultaneously, they are sort of hyper-realistic. The truths they tell are slightly truer because of their complexity, and whatever lies they tell us are no worse than the ones we are already telling ourselves.

The illusory difference between "then" and "now" is an ever-darkening line that we are always struggling to erase. When we find a way to reach back and connect vividly with our own history, it heals us in both directions, giving purpose to our past while also pointing us onward to the future.

Don't get bogged down in the hurts and dead hopes of the past. "Nostalgia," Don Draper reminds us, "literally means 'the pain from an old wound.'" But neither should you refuse to commune with yourself. We bury our happy memories like so many acorns, hoping they'll help us survive the winter. You may be standing directly over a forgotten source of joy, stored just out of sight. Hungry? Cold? Miserable? Find a soft place in your memory and start digging. Explore your room, your desk, your computer, until you turn up an artifact that makes you real to yourself again.

I just did this now. Here's what I turned up:



I remember every inch of that yard; I will probably never see it again, will never be able to hold this photo up against it to see the changes wrought by time. In this picture, my mother is younger than I am now. It pains me to see it.

But underneath it all, somehow: "Wheeee!"

[Via]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Six of Cups

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"More Subjects, More Objects, More Love..."

When it comes to symbolic gestures, you really can't beat Ecuador's "glass frog". Since the creature lacks any pigment, you can literally see his heart beating through his chest. Awww... More awwws for this barely-there gecko, also recently unearthed. Researchers are racking up the discoveries down there, but they're still only the beginning -- National Geographic speculates that, all told, we've only identified a tiny percentage of all the world's life forms. And I bet you thought we'd more or less sorted it all out by now!

The glass frog is my hero today. I've put him at the helm of the Three of Cups because of his all-too-poetic transparency -- I ought to channel his fearlessness a little more often and let people make of my lungs and pancreas and feelings what they will. But really all these "new" animals deserve a spot on the card, because collectively they are a reminder of the life our planet is teeming with, the opportunities yet to be discovered, and the vulnerability that is universal among all life forms -- as superior as we humans consider ourselves to be, what with our chain-mail and wisecracks and neatly pressed khakis, we are not much different than a horde of pencil eraser-sized lizardettes swarming across the jungle floor.

While the love in the Two rebounds back and forth in a closed loop between two subjects, the Three invites you to open up in search of more -- more subjects, more objects, more love. It heralds a season of availability and generosity, regardless of how this jibes with your fastidious economic principles. Conserve through giving -- when it comes to emotion, ecology trumps economy every time. [Via]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Three of Cups

Summary only...

"I Managed, Even In My Preposterous State, To Blend In..."

This is the eleventh installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).

Years ago when my sister Leah applied for a job as a bank teller, she was caught off guard by one of the interviewer’s questions: “What’s the craziest costume you’ve ever worn?” She figured it was just one of those insidious getting-to-know you questions meant to give insight into her character. Ever the good sport, my sister admitted to having been a bag of jelly-beans once, for Halloween. She got the job -- but instead of ending up at a regular bank like she’d expected, she was assigned to one embedded in the side of a Wal-Mart. She didn’t draw a connection back to the interview question until the day her boss sent her wandering up and down the aisles of the store with a giant sombrero on her head, handing out fliers for free checking accounts.

Surrendering control over one’s appearance to another party is an exercise in humility that few adults are willing to endure -- and with good reason. We’ve already wrenched that control away from our fanciful (if well-meaning) parents. We’ve outrun the image-obsessed peer pressure of high school. We’ve fought damn hard for the right to determine our own self-image, even those of us who rarely change out of our bathrobes. We curate ourselves like overpriced historical exhibitions, a conferring this responsibility requires a lot of trust; otherwise, you’re just letting someone trot you around in a funny Mexican hat in exchange for a paycheck, making everyone who looks at you feel very sad.

This fall I found out that a friend of mine who's an opera director was desperately looking for a tenor for his upcoming show. I’m not an opera singer by anyone's standard, let alone what you’d call a tenor. I average about a C+ on karaoke exams. I’m not even really an performer anymore; I abandoned the idea in my early twenties when I left Arizona, a place where the local community-theatre pond was much smaller and safer to paddle around in. All of these details are the basis for a very funny joke I decided to make, in which I sent Scott a message offering my services. Wouldn’t it be hilariously awful, I wrote, if you tried to pass me off as a real singer? Just imagine.

When I woke up the next morning, there were an emails from Scott containing a rehearsal schedule, a synopsis, and a full vocal score.

This was no classical piece, it turns out -- it was an original work of operatic satire written by a thrice-Grammy-nominated composer. The part Scott was desperately trying to cast was the titular “know-it-all, full-of-himself, sadomasochistically well-endowed hog” who flees the farm to become a famous painter. Rehearsals were to begin in five days. Opening night was in three weeks.

I felt ill, felt as if I’d accidentally swallowed some kind of poison bait. Just as I was about to induce vomiting, the phone rang -- Scott calling to follow up. Despite my misgivings I picked up, afraid that if I didn’t answer he might start showing up at my house.

I have to wonder sometimes if Scott's success as a director is completely owed to his supernaturally mellow voice and light, rational demeanor. He may have missed his calling as an obstetrician. “The conductor and I have agreed that having a trained singer in the role isn't important,” he reassured me. “An actor would be just fine -- someone who can dive into the character and keep up with the rhythm. You can just speak-sing all your lines, just like Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady!” Scott had directed me once, years ago, he reminded me. I'd been part of his chorus of horny sailors in a community-college rendition of South Pacific. He was charmed at the idea of working together once more, and seemed convinced that I could pull this off.

Also, the job would pay five hundred dollars.

I stalled at the edge of this decision quite miserably. I was terrified of humiliating myself and disappointing a friend -- maybe even ruining his career by casting permanent dispersions on his judgment. I'd have to seriously upset my work schedule to account for the show’s three-week run. And not least of all, I was intimidated by the costume, which would include, as he gently put it, “a full-body leotard and a fourteen-foot prosthetic dick.”

But then I remembered how wistful I get whenever I go to see a play. I always leave feeling so proud of the actors, and so jealous, remembering the excitement I used to feel onstage. I wasn't about to actually go out and audition for anything, but I’d always thought that if an opportunity ever “happened along,” I’d be game.

And again, five hundred dollars.

"I'll do it!" I said. I expected that once I committed to the project, I’d feel much more at ease; what happened instead was that I barely slept for the next three nights. Scott’s endless affirmations aside, I could not come to terms with the fact that I had accepted a lead role in an opera -- a sexually explicit one, no less. The only explanation for this seemed to be that I was mentally unstable and could no longer be trusted to care for myself. I lay awake those nights as if I was awaiting the executioner's axe, imagining the dismay my classically-trained cast members would feel the second I opened my mouth. The bewildered silence of the audience. The gleeful bitchiness of the theater critic. The sight of my thirty year-old, sedentary ass in pink spandex. For the first time since high school, I prayed for God to kill me and spare us all.

By the evening of the first rehearsal, I was definitely holding out hope that Scott would realize his error and replace me while there was still time. To my delight, everyone else in the cast seemed just as nervous as I was. A petite soprano named Melanie put me at ease by anguishing over how drastically under-prepared she was. “I’m going to be the person here who makes you feel much better about yourself,” she groaned as we prepared for the conductor’s signal. A moment later, she leapt into her part, singing gloriously and fearlessly through the opening scene. I couldn’t help feeling betrayed. All around me, voices braided in harmony, perfect to my ignorant ears. When it came time for the Pig to enter the farmyard, I growled and sneered through my lines like a good sport. It was as though I'd tracked mud into the music box, but nobody seemed to balk.

At the end of the night, our director gave us a pep talk. “I know this is scary, but we have no time to indulge in insecurity," Scott said in dulcet tones. "I guarantee you, veryone has something unique to contribute. At this point we all have to sort of drop our pants, look around, and get an idea of what we collectively have to work with.”

That evening he and I went costume shopping, hitting up Times Square's few remaining adult boutiques. He’d already rigged up a long coil of pink PVC hose to serve as my megafaunal shaft, he told me; now we just needed a way to anchor it to my body, and something to cap the end. And we must be very picky customers, as whatever we bought had to last the full run of the show. There were nothing left over in the budget for replacement “parts”.

After comparing several different strap-ons, both in and out of their boxes, Scott proclaimed a winner. He was afraid the black faux-leather belt might clash with my pretty pink leotard, but, he mused, it could always be painted to match. I eyed the thing begrudgingly. “Scott, the belt has a vagina,” I complained, pointing out the easy-access gap positioned just below the nubby dildo attachment. “It’s made for a woman. Don’t you think it’s going to look… well, strange on my body?”

“Oh, it’s going to look strange all right,” he grinned, lapping up my discomfort. He held up a round magenta knob from a nearby bin. “How about this for the end? I want it to be something that fits in your mouth, in case we work that into the blocking. You know, for when they gag you during the trial!” I weakly admitted that I could probably manage to make it work. No doubt impressed by Scott’s natural air of authority, a passerby interrupted us to ask for recommendations. “For my wife,” the old man clarified, “...She likes ‘em pretty big.” My acting may be pretty rusty, but I still know an exit cue when I hear one.

The next evening I came to the studio early to try on my stretchy pink leotard. It had little pajama footies at the bottom and a zipper up the back, and was just close enough to the color of my actual skin to make me look strangely naked, like a carcass in a butcher shop. “You’re going to have to wear different underwear,” Scott observed. Looking down, I could see my dark briefs showing through, the seams standing out in bas-relief, like welts. I might as well have been wearing them on the outside.

Hearing voices approaching in the hall, I began struggling back into my clothes. “I just need a minute to change before everyone comes in!” I grunted. “I think you’ve misunderstood,” said Scott. “From now on, this is your rehearsal gear.” He tossed me two pairs of black socks to cover my hands and feet -- my “hooves” -- and then opened the door to let the others in. My humiliation lasted only as long as it took for the rest of the costumes to be passed out; there were enough udders, frilly tutus and rubber animal noses flying around that I managed, even in my preposterous state, to blend in.

Over the next two weeks I struggled to grow into my costume; I figured out exactly how to spool my cumbersome yards-long hose over one shoulder so that it would unroll from my groin in perfectly flaccid coils. I learned how to adjust the cords of the nightmarish strap-on belt so that everything looked… well, symmetrical at least. In the final scene, after the Pig was slain by the greedy Farmer, I had just a few seconds backstage to wriggle into an enormous pair of feathery wings, re-emerging as a filthy porcine angel. I got through these rehearsals by pretending I’d been cast in a John Waters movie, where there were no rewards for a half-hearted or self-conscious performance: only through an unwavering commitment to pure nonsense would I be redeemed.

It was in this spirit that I decided to perform a little surgery on my crotchless strap-on garment, counterbalancing its feminine construction with a huge set of fuzzy pink testicles. Crafted from a three-dollar pair of ankle socks and pinned dangerously close to my real anatomy, I had to admit that the balls were quite eye-catching -- a final absurd touch which I hoped would give me an extra boost of confidence on opening night when I finally faced the firing squad. I submitted my new junk to Scott for director-approval.“Those are… well, they’re really out there!” he said. If even he seemed doubtful, I knew I had to be on the right track.

As I crouched behind a dark curtain on opening night, awaiting my cue from the orchestra, I practiced blocking the audience from my mind entirely. I planned to go onstage as if I was diving into cold water; I'd jump, swim to the edge in a panic as soon as I landed, and get out as fast as I could. And then I'd cover up with a towel.

When the moment arrived, I held my breath and walked out onstage. Instantly there was a brief pause as air was sucked out of the room by gasps, followed by a whoosh of laughter as it was exhaled. Laughter! I'd been taking my dilemma so seriously, I totally forgot there would be laughter. When the Farmer yanked my schlong out of my hoof-hands and unrolled it so that the chorus-girls could use it as a jump rope, the hoots from the crowd drowned out whatever inhibitions I had left, like a balm spreading over my brain. It ought to have been the ultimate humiliation (by my mother’s standards it probably still is) but my fears of exposure were laughable as well. I was invisible -- my real persona was perfectly hidden behind a veil of snout and fuzzy balls and gravelly pig-voice, to the point that I vanished utterly the moment eyes were laid upon me. It was, after all, just as Scott promised. All they saw was the cartoon, not the screen it appeared on.

The spell only lasted as long as the performance itself. During the audience meet-and-greet after the curtain, I received heartfelt congratulations from my friends, but among the lingering strangers there were few who could look me in the face; everywhere I looked I saw eyes skim over and past me, smiles shyly averted. Crap, I thought. Without the "magic of the theatre" lending credibility to my skinny shanks and unforgivable protuberance, I realized, it had turned out to be just another one of those sombrero moments after all.

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Fool

Summary only...

The Cup And The Tower

I give an awful lot of readings, but it's not often these days that I get one myself. Last night a friend of mine laid out an incredibly personal one. The first and main card was the Ace of Cups, and the card crossing it was the Tower. It was a Waite-Smith clone deck, and we were immediately struck by the symmetry of the two cards. We laid them end to end so that together they seemed to form a single bipolar structure, terribly concrete and finite on one end, spectral and eternal on the other.

This is the loop I am caught in lately. I feel an incredible connection to what I'll call the "subtle realities" I've discovered, which fill me with a great deal of hope and peace, but I am also painfully aware of the limitations of this material existence and all the ordeals and that lie in wait for me somewhere within it. I fly back and forth between these two modes of awareness lately like a yo-yo. They follow and chase and consume each other, and I get dizzy trying to accept both of them simultaneously. They do not negate each other, but neither do they dwell comfortably together.

The reading showed me the parts of myself that set all this into motion, focusing on elements of duality in my life that I am well aware of but understand poorly. I think I have an idea how to proceed, but the first thing I did afterward was create the image above, a literal conjoining of these two cards that illustrates what I've been experiencing. It's amazing how they fit together -- look at the little yods that flow through both backgrounds, notice how the spouts of water seem to extend the tower's dimensions, how the people fall or rise through the watery barrier into a bizarro-world.

My goal for the new year is to stretch out on one of those lily pads floating on the thin skin between worlds, and camp out there for a while.

Summary only...

"You Rare Stallion Among Shady Ladies..."

Meet "Markus", proud bearer of the dubious title "America's First Legal Male Prostitute." A technicality in Nevada law which accidentally excluded men (something about legally mandated cervical exams for all sex-workers) has been overturned, and the Shady Lady Ranch ("Voted Best Small Brothel for Seven Consecutive Years") has recruited this painfully earnest 25 year old to boldly go where no man has (legally) gone before.

In the interview with Details linked above, young Markus explains the deeper aspects of his work -- in his opinion, a gigolo must have "the heart of a saint, the mind of a philosopher, and the skills of the devil." He reviles any comparisons between this job and work in pornography. "It's closer and more personal," he says. "Whichever woman may walk through the door, she's appreciated. A surrogate lover will love that woman for a whole hour, or however much we charge here [$200 for 40 minutes], and she'll leave feeling much more empowered, and much more confident in herself."

In this case, "Prince of Coins" is more than just a witty pun. (Get it?? Because he sells himself for... ah, forget it.) While it's clear from his comment comparing himself to Rosa Parks that young Markus still has much to learn about life, I find the spirit in which he's setting forth on his quest to be rather endearing. It's the classic folly of youth, masquerading as hard work; he's going through the motions of establishing himself in the world, in hopes that one day he will have something definite to show for it. "A gigolo knows how to cook, clean, and do the things necessary to upkeep himself," he says. "He's totally independent. He can cook a 3-course meal, and at the same time, serve wine." He's made up an entire charter of principles he hopes to maintain on his journey, imagining that his time at the Shady Lady will make him healthy, wealthy, and wise. His optimism is... well, it's cute. Totally misguided and ridiculous, but completely devoid of irony and cynicism, which is refreshing at least.

We typically think of the Prince of Coins as being... well, husband material, a patriarch in training: dependable and staid and intense, nearly single-minded in his determination to learn the lay of the land so that he might one day own and cultivate it. But this kind of energy manifests in all different ways, and sensuality is one of them. It very well may be that Markus's naivete will confine him to eternal Princehood, never to become a King. His plans to dazzle countless women with illusions of love, empowerment and independence don't sound like they'll leave him much energy to invest in more tangible, enduring relationships. But that's what our youth is for, isn't it? We see our errors through, we test-drive them until some adult crisis or another forces us consider a more sensible approach.

Markus, you rare stallion among Shady Ladies, you have my blessing. Go forth and nail thy charter to the door of the lesser brothels, plow the fallow fields of Nevada and bring them to fruit. The day may come when this all seems like folly to you in retrospect, but until then I hope that, as you sow, so shall you reap. [Via]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Prince of Coins

Summary only...

"Perhaps You Are That Messenger..."

I'm pretty sure I know what my next destination is. How do I get there, now?

Looking at the concept artwork for Kolelinia, the transportation revolution designed by architect Martin Angelov, I look forward to a time (however far-off) when I can depart from the road and glide through the air on my own steam. Maybe it's nothing but an elegant dream that will never exist in real life, but if you've ever risked a bike ride through city traffic, you probably got the same giddy feeling looking at this thing that I did. The concept scratches an unconscious itch in the hearts of bicycle commuters, it captures the imagination and shows us how fast things can change.

If you look at the diagrams, you'll see how it's supposed to work -- the bike tire fits in a deep groove that keeps you balanced perfectly upright as you zip along, your handlebar secured from the side to prevent any wobbling. I can't help fantasizing about crossing the East River this way -- it's way more exciting than the water taxi.

Consider the Eight of Wands as a messenger already in flight, on its way to present you with news, inspiration, or 11th hour revelations. Or perhaps you are that messenger, calibrating yourself to land perfectly in the right place and time to alter the course of events for others. Either way, the lines are open and the wheels are in motion. Keep your eyes on the skies, work those thighs, and don't forget to moisturize. Okay I'll stop now. But you get the point -- the wind that blows at your back is pushing you forward, and the wind that blows in your face bears traces of what is to come. Use them both. [Via]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Eight of Wands

Summary only...

"As Reliable As The Numbers From One To A Hundred..."

Maybe everything is a lot easier than we think it is. Maybe there are better ways to do things, keys that unlock the potential hiding just under our surfaces. I was charmed and astounded watching this video of a child solving math problems quickly and accurately using Chisenbop, an form of finger-counting that may date back to the abacus. See if you can figure out how he does it:

Here's a tutorial. Chisenbop has cropped up in American curricula from time to time, but it's largely unheard of here. Why is that? I can understand the need to instill kids with a completely conceptual grasp of how sums and multiplication tables work, but not everyone's minds work the same way. And anyway, this is like walking around with a calculator in your pocket -- bound to come in handy at some point.

The Ace of Swords exists to usher new decisions and perspectives into our lives, pointing ever forward. All we need do is sail on its wind, relaxing our grip on obsolete or irrelevant ideas and embracing progress and self-knowledge. Is there a better way to do something? Then so shall it be done. Is there potential hiding beneath the surface? A series of swift, careful incisions ought to free it.

We are often urged to "know ourselves" and "be ourselves", but there is no knowledge without learning. Study yourself just as ardently as you study your surroundings. In your sharpest moments, your consciousness is a membrane between the inner and outer worlds -- a line carved into the fabric of reality, as thin as the edge of a knife and just as difficult to balance on. The Tarot's suit of Swords describes our attempts to maintain that balance. If the failures seem costly, it's because they are blows against our very identity and sense of purpose; try to keep in mind that equilibrium is only ever achieved through a series of errors and counter-errors. With a little discipline and effort, the contents of your own mind may one day seem as familiar to you as your own hands and fingers, and as reliable as the numbers from one to a hundred. [Via.]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Ace of Swords

Summary only...

"Damn The Gods!"

There seems to have been a lot of uproar about Warner Bros.' decision to remake creaky old Clash of the Titans, even though everyone knows it's only considered a classic because of Ray Harryhausen's spectacular low-tech special effects. I'm a Harryhausen fan myself, and honestly I don't think even he would mind seeing "realistic" CGI effects used to spruce up the myth-inspired dragshow that is Clash.

The overuse of digital effects is typically one of my biggest complaints about new movies, but when it comes to incredibly expensive, incredibly trivial pieces of pop-cultural ephemera like this one, I can't help but become 9 again. Giant scorpions! Evil gorgons! I want to see them. For a little point/counterpoint action, here are the trailers for both the original and the remake:

As opposed to some of the inexcusable and out-of-left-field remake attempts (stuff like The Pink Panther or the announced remake of Hitchcock's The Birds) the new Clash is arguably a true update -- we have experienced a real special-effects revolution in the twenty-*ahem* years since it was made, and the trailers certainly showcase the difference. As to whether it will effectively upstage its predecessor, only time will tell. When it comes out, people will tug back and forth over it, everyone claiming that one version clearly triumphs over the other. Why bother? Even the original was completely frivolous. I (perhaps foolishly) maintain that there's room in our memories for both combatants.

The Seven of Swords is all about this desperate need for validation, for unambiguous victories to be declared, however tenuous the real circumstances. In the Waite version of the card you see one person fending off numerous (perhaps only perceived) threats from above; the card is designed to make you immediately identify with the defender and not the attackers, but no one gets to be the former without first being the latter. Graduating from the Six to the Seven of Wands seems to bring this out in people -- give us a taste of success or encouragement, and we squander it by losing focus on our original mission. We become unsteady, defensive, insecure, prideful, easily distracted -- but hopefully for just a short time, because there is actually still plenty of work to be done before a solid victory is declared.

The film industry seems to exhibit all our ambition-related personality quirks and deficits, exploding them into huge expensive debacles and full-on wars. Clash of the Titans is not only up against every other movie coming out in March, it's also got to stand up to its over-hyped predecessor. When it's all over, who will even care? We all will have already moved on to the next over-hyped challenge.

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Seven of Wands

Summary only...

"My Eyes Open In The Darkness..."

This is the tenth installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).


I try to keep track of all my bad dreams, even the waking ones; what follows is a list of all the times since moving to New York when I’ve been awakened from a deep sleep by something terrible.


1. I am 23 and brand new to the city, sharing a crummy second-floor apartment in Greenpoint, practically next door to the local sewage treatment plant. I adjust pretty quickly to all the bumping and shouting downstairs -- the landlord's family lives right below us, and they're one of those vibrant households who show love for each other by screaming at the top of their lungs, slamming doors, and heaving large objects at one another from across the house. So when I'm roused one night by thumping in the hall, I just roll over and begin to fall back sleep. Moments later, our door rattles in its frame and the landlord’s twelve-year-old son pounds on it, squealing, “Fire, fire, there’s a fire! Everyone get out now!”

I sit up in the dark, wondering what I should grab on my way out. It’s useless -- I just moved across the whole country, so I’ve already gotten rid of anything I can spare. Everything seems equally essential and non-essential; deciding that people will feel much sorrier for me if I’ve lost everything, I don’t even put on my shoes, I just wrap a quilt around my body and skid down the stairs, just in time to meet the firemen at the door.

It turns out that it’s not even our building that’s burning, it’s the industrial laundry across the interior of the block. We can’t even see the fire, though there is smoke and ash in the air. After hunkering on the cold sidewalk for about fifteen minutes, we're allowed back inside: the authorities have decreed that the fire is no longer in danger of spreading. I'm a little disappointed that my first "this is not a drill" fire proves to be so anticlimactic. However, once back inside, my roommate and I discover that our kitchen windows afford a truly astonishing view of the burning laundry; the fire doesn’t actually look even remotely contained, we observe happily: huge greasy flames surge two stories into the air, blotting out the sky and giving off heat we can feel on our faces through the window glass. We fill an entire roll of film with pictures. Later, neither of us ever remembers to get them developed.


2. The following summer. There is an ear-splitting, drywall-rattling explosion. In a brainless panic I lunge out of bed and run toward the window to scan the skyline, my vision already blurry with tears in anticipation of what I'm about to see. Or not see. This is what I get, I scold myself, for moving here so soon after the attacks. FUCK. Car alarms from every direction are screaming in unison. I yank open the ratty screen and stick my head out the window, looking up and around wildly. A raindrop hits me right between the eyebrows; otherwise, all is calm.

Still panting, I go back to bed, feeling sort of stupid. I swear on my kneecaps though -- never before or since have I ever heard thunder that god-damned loud.


3. One year later, I’ve moved to new apartment -- three bedrooms, ground floor, a stone’s throw from Bushwick Avenue near the L train. Tex will move in and share my room eventually, but for now he just camps out several nights a week. We discover right away that having a street-level bedroom is sort of like having a tent pitched on the sidewalk. We hear every vehicle, every conversation, every footstep that passes. On one of my first nights in the new place, the two of us are jolted awake by a shrill mechanical roar from just a few yards away, as if a very large vehicle is seconds from ramming the wall overhead and running right over top of us. Lights shining in through the windows above us seem to confirm this possibility. Tex and I wail and clutch at each other convulsively like frenzied toddlers, until we realize that it’s actually just the hydraulic song of our weekly garbage pick-up. You sort of get used to it after a while, we discover.


4. My sister Kelly has graduated from college and moves into the next room. One night soon afterward, I find myself suddenly awake for no reason I'm aware of. When I roll over I get a jolt: Kelly is in our room, creeping towards the bed on her hands and knees, her long hair hanging in her face -- rather like that little girl in The Ring. I shout my surprise and dismay. When she responds in stifled gurgles, I realize this is an emergency. Help, I can’t breathe, she croaks almost inaudibly, her windpipe clenched to a pinhole.

My sister has had asthma nearly her entire life; the attacks sometimes trigger anxiety attacks which worsen the asthma symptoms, creating a dangerous negative-feedback loop. She has an inhaler, but if she panics and takes too many chuffs on it, the overdose can actually make symptoms worse. All of these details run through my head as I bolt over to her, trying to decide whether I should call an ambulance. She can’t speak well enough to tell me what’s wrong, she just keeps choking on her own throat and gasping I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. I’m pretty sure she’ll be okay if I can just calm down, but what if I’m wrong? What if she dies because I’m wrong?

Her body is half-rigid, so I lift and half-carry her back to bed, telling her she’s okay, she’s okay, she can breathe, she just needs to relax and let it happen. I am still not sure that this is the case, but I keep saying it, hoping to will it into truth. I lay down next to her, stroking her spasming back and shoulders and drawing deep, sympathetic breaths, encouraging her lungs to remember their natural rhythm. Together we begin coaxing ragged inhalations and exhalations from her grateful lungs; now she can finally think and breathe clearly enough to cry.

This may have been a closer call than I thought -- she tells me about waking up with an itchy throat, her mouth full of hives, her throat drawing closed. As it turns out, this is also the story of how Kelly finds out she has become allergic to raspberries.


5. Six months later, Tex and I have moved into the larger, quieter back bedroom. My eyes open in the darkness because of a sound that I can’t quite place -- a steady tapping coming from the wall near the foot of our bed. Groping blindly for the wall, I press my palm flat against it, hoping to get a better sense of where the sound is coming from; instantly a sleeve of cold water floods over my hand and down my arm. Cursing, I leap for the light switch. I literally can’t believe my adjusting eyes: there is a waterfall in our room, two feet wide from ceiling to floor. I begin hurling blankets and towels grabbed at random, stanching the spread of what turns out to be the upstairs neighbor’s dirty dishwater -- a pipe has disintegrated somewhere within the walls, and the water has rerouted itself to follow the path of least resistance.

"It’s an old building," the super explains the next day with a shrug and a daft grin, "What can you do?" Not much, apparently. That summer, the adjacent outer wall remains so perpetually damp that a carpet of weeds sprouts from the soft, crumbling wood, pushing toward the sun through cracks in the aluminum siding.


6. During our last month in the Bushwick apartment, I receive my first actual middle-of-the-night emergency phone call. It is just after 4 AM. Kelly is at the police station. She is literally not herself -- despair has distorted her voice, rendered her unrecognizable. My sister was out with friends at a bar, she tells me. One of them decided that she’d had too many drinks to walk home safely, so with the best of intentions, he hailed a cab for her -- one of the sleek, black outfits from the neighborhood car service -- and pointed her homeward.

Kelly no longer lives with us, so “home” is a little farther away than it used to be. Midway through the journey, the driver pulls over to the curb and stops. They are nowhere, she realizes, idling somewhere in a desolate maze of factories and industrial warehouses. Alarmed, my sister struggles to overcome the alcohol in her brain and asks the man to keep driving. He doesn't respond. Then the vulnerability of her position begins to dawn on her, and she begs him to keep driving. He demurs, switches off the ignition instead. He gets out of the car. He opens her door. He climbs into the backseat.

On the phone Kelly recalls these events out of order, shrilling out the details as they occur to her. I am too heartsick to hear any more than necessary. She begged as he groped her, she tells me. She was too scared to fight, too drunk to think clearly, and had nothing to bargain with except the contents of her purse, which ultimately he accepted in exchange for not taking things any further. The man ejected her into the street lost and disoriented, paying himself over a hundred dollars in cash in the bargain.

I get dressed in the dark. She is on her way to the hospital now, where they will inspect her bruises and officiously comb her for evidence -- a hair, anything -- that could tie her attacker to previous cases. At this late hour, the only way for me to get there in a hurry is by car service. I stare at the back of the driver’s head in stony silence, wishing I could stop his heart with the force of my irrational anger, wishing I could freeze his innocent blood into icy sludge.

Kelly bounces back fast. It’s what she does. During the next week she accompanies police officers on nighttime ride-alongs. The cops are, thankfully, as eager as she is to identify the false driver before he hurts anyone else. They tell her that to impersonate a driver, all someone has to do is steal the tags from a car-service vehicle and apply them to a similar make and model. It happens more often than we think.

They prove to be incapable of hunting down her assailant. As weeks pass, I am surprised at my capacity for impotent, unfair hatred -- walking through the neighborhood, these cars and their drivers are everywhere. I try to remind myself that mostly these are men with families, with sisters of their own. Still, it is a long time before I can see one without fighting the urge to flag him down, to lean in through the passenger-side window and hiss into his face: I know it was you.


7. Tex and I finally find our very own place, just the two of us. It’s less than three blocks away from my first New York apartment, but they’re three significant blocks, and our newly renovated one-bedroom apartment is in a grand old building with a real lobby and a generous view of the Manhattan skyline. I’m excited -- five years of toil and hardship in the city have finally yielded a result I can be somewhat proud of. We move in over Fourth of July weekend. We enjoy the fireworks from our very own roof.

A few nights later, we are rattled out of sleep by a series of rapid-fire reports coming from somewhere very nearby. BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM! BLAM-BLAM! BLAM! We grip the bed in involuntary paroxysms of fright. “Someone’s shooting up the street!” Tex pants. No, I counterpoint, it’s just asshole kids setting off their leftover firecrackers, like they do every summer. Fucking asshole kids. We lay awake for several minutes listening for sirens, hearing only silence. “See?” I say. “Go back to sleep.”

The next morning I get up and leave early to meet a friend for coffee. When I skip down the stairs and out the front door, I’m greeted by streamers of yellow tape running up and down the length of the block, barring any cars and passersby. A single officer stands guard over the entrance to the apartment building three doors down from us; there is a body lying on the ground at his feet, draped in a white sheet -- too small to be an adult, I think. The pool of blood emanating from beneath the fabric has already begun drying at its sluggish edges.

As I pass through, I meekly ask the officer what happened. “A drug bust,” he tells me. Police were raiding the apartment when the dealer’s dog lunged at an officer -- was fired upon in self-defense. Glancing over the officer’s shoulder I can see bullet-holes in our neighbor’s sliding glass doors, right at street-level. The Sanitation Department has been dispatched to come pick up the body, the officer explains. But it’s Sunday. Could take a while.

That explains why we hadn’t heard any sirens, I realize. The cops were already here.

The next day we see an older man attempting to hose the bloodstain off the sidewalk; a faint shadow persists until after the first snowfall that winter. A lot of people move out of that building during the fall-- there always seems to be another truck parked outside of it, boxes coming in or out. Near the gutter where the dog’s body bled out, someone plants a tree; an early cold snap seems to stunt its growth, and after that all of its branches grow straight down.

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Tower

Summary only...

"Refrigerate For At Least A Week Before Eating..."

I didn't set out to collect bad cookbooks, it just sort of happened. Maybe it's all the bizarre "homestyle" cooking I was exposed to in farm kitchens as a child; maybe I was just born this way. Whatever it is, nothing gets me going like really terrible pictures of really terrible food, accompanied by instructions to help you actually make said food. I found today's selection on sale at a thrift store for one dollar. It's brought me at least five times that much enjoyment already.

There are no pictures in Recipes From Peggy's Cove, which was published "in aid of the Peggy's Cove Preservation Society". Well, no pictures of food anyway. There are a few gritty b&w photos of the Cove itself, which purports to be a grim little fishing hamlet somewhere in Nova Scotia. Even the color photos I've found online are in b&w -- you actually have to photoshop Peggy's Cove to make the colors show up. I found

After a hard day of scraping out lobster traps, nothing warms the knuckles like a helping of "Lasagna Salad", chased with a handful of "Savory Gems". Or perhaps you'd prefer a "Clam Whiffle" appetizer followed by the evocatively named "Smothered Rabbit". If it's dinner for one, you may elect to make "Hobo Dinner" and then fall asleep in front of the TV with a half-eaten "Almost As Good As Poundcake" in your lap.

I'm not just picking on the names. In most cases the ingredients or directions are just as discouraging, such as the recipe for "Cherried Cranberries", which contains no actual cherries. If you're going to use "cherry" as a verb (and I beg you to refrain), then the person, place or thing you are cherrying deserves the real thing.

Meanwhile, here is the second half of the recipe for making "Solomon Gundy":

"...In medium size mason jars, put alternate layers of herring and onion rings. Cover with cooled vinegar solution and seal. Refrigerate for at least a week before eating."

If you want more, you'll have to get your own copy.

I think that by now most people know that trends in folk cuisine, such being able to make a meal with literally any part of an animal, are born out of necessity. Hardworking, isolated people have to do the best with whatever they've got handy, and if that means eating "Salmon Luncheon Roll" and "Family Dessert" three nights a week, then by Dagon, that's what they'll do! People cling to familiar tastes, even as generations go by and fortunes improve. No one these days eats "Livers Paprikash" because it tastes wonderful, they do it because it's traditional.

If you're currently struggling, the Five of Coins urges you refrain from confusing your current station in life with who you actually are and what you really want. You can (and will) do better, it says. All the Five-cards in the Tarot represent that "it's always darkest before the dawn" period that precedes the restoration of harmony and balance. If you accept your present hardship as your lot in life, you may cling to it reflexively and fail to grab at whatever is meant to take its place. We are all transforming, and what we are now is not necessarily what we will be.

I shouldn't pick on Peggy's Cove too much, its wiki page claims that tourism is its primary source of income. Nor do I think that a town is incomplete without a four-star restaurant. But if it's fund-raising assistance the town needs, the town might have been better off avoiding cook-books and bake sales. Better stick to car-washes in the future, just to be safe...

Previously On Arcanaloge: Five Of Coins

Summary only...

"...A Price For Human Progress."

There's this video that people keep forwarding to me that shows the Manhattan Bridge (which is an suspension bridge, after all) swaying gently as the subway runs back and forth across it:

The video is usually accompanied by a degree of semi-panicked goggling as people speculate whether that's actually an okay thing for a bridge to be doing. Short answer: it is, at least for now. And chances are that when something really is wrong, you'll know in a hurry.

Take for example the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which collapsed into the Puget Sound less than a year after its completion. You want spine-tingling documentation? At the time of the disaster, a local camera store owner managed to capture footage that makes the Manhattan Bridge thing look quite harmless:


There were no human casualties from the Tacoma Bridge collapse, though there was a dog trapped in that car you see, and it was unable to be rescued before everything fell apart. The video is hypnotic, I've been watching it all day. It evokes a very complex emotional response, something right out of a terrible dream -- one restated beautifully in Gary Peterson's pen and ink drawing, excerpted in the card above.

The event was a failure on a grand scale, and it wound up changing the way all future bridges would be built. But standing and watching that day -- as you can see people doing at the beginning of the video -- I imagine everyone must have felt a profound sense of wonder and vulnerability. All of that money, all of that hard work and scientific derring-do, blown out of the sky by a little bit of wind. Just the wind, that's all, triggering a little-understood principle called "aeroelastic flutter". Scratch any large-scale disaster, however, and you usually find a purely human failing just beneath the surface -- in this case, consultants had replaced the original plans with a speculative design that had cut costs nearly in half.

In drawing allusions to the Ten of Swords, I freely confess that I'm just cribbing from Wikipedia by including this quote by Othmar Ammann:

"The Tacoma Narrows bridge failure has given us invaluable information...It has shown [that] every new structure [that] projects into new fields of magnitude involves new problems for the solution of which neither theory nor practical experience furnish an adequate guide. It is then that we must rely largely on judgement and if, as a result, errors, or failures occur, we must accept them as a price for human progress."

That's cold comfort if it's your car or dog or peace of mind that's left to undulate in the breeze, but I can't think of any path through life that doesn't require each of us to occasionally pay this price. We don't always know what is happening or who is to blame -- the ground is literally dropping out from under us, we don't have the time or the presence of mind to wonder whether it's the inclined cable-stays or the eight-foot-deep plate girders that are causing the problem. It's only after, if we survive, that we find out. It reminds me of that Portia Nelson poem that Buddhists and AA'ers are always quoting:

1) I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost...
I am hopeless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

2) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I'm in the same place.
But it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

3) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in...it's a habit
My eyes are open; I know where I am;
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

4) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

5) I walk down another street.
[Via]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Ten Of Swords

Summary only...

"A Psychotic Ordeal, But Not Without Its Secret Center Of Ecstasy..."

This is the ninth installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).


Working phones is simple in theory: people call the restaurant to place either a delivery or pick-up order, or walk in and order something to go. I take their orders and their money, and when their order is ready, I pack it up in brown paper and put it in their hands -- or into the hands of the delivery rider, as the case may be. The phones shift is only three hours long; it's a stopgap, meant to straddle the peak of the dinner shift when the servers already have too much to handle without that whole mess, the point when activity reaches a fever pitch and the various Rube Goldberg production mechanisms that keep a restaurant running smoothly crest at a white-hot blur. It is a psychotic ordeal, but not without its secret center of ecstasy.

Dinnertime. I am squatting on a slippery rubber mat in a stifling kitchen. Balancing on the balls of my feet, my forehead inches from the mouth of the deep-fryer, tucking myself into a ball to keep out of everyone’s way, I fill small paper bags with fresh tortilla chips. They're too hot to touch with my hands, so I go at them with a pair of metal salad tongs. It’s like a skill-crane game in which all the toys are greasy, scalding hot, and extremely fragile. It puts the chips in the bag, I tell myself. It does this whenever it’s told. Now put the fucking chips in the bag! Above and around me, four cooks and three servers hurtle through the tiny room in meteoric loops. From somewhere behind there is a deafening crash, a puff of smoke, a cry of “Chinga tu Madre!” I don’t risk a glance upward, I keep plunging the tongs wrist-deep into my crunchy payload until all the bags are full. I take my time, I get it right. These few moments are all the preparation I have for what is coming. And then it happens -- somewhere nearby, a phone rings. And rings. And then another phone joins the chorus. Someone else may answer, but everyone knows that the calls are for me.

Sometimes the storm has already landed by the time I arrive -- both phones ringing, a fax order coming in, a line three people deep at the counter, three boxes of tacos cooling to trichinosal temperatures on the counter. The waitress stuck dealing with it looks like a horse in a lightning storm, and she's got three tables that haven’t even seen menus yet. I leap gallantly into the fray, biting back the urge to turn and walk right the hell out of there. But there’s also a sacred feeling, as if I’m an angel descending onto the battlefield at the critical moment. Hark! I want to say. Suffer no longer, for I bring tidings of --

Two cordless phones are thrust into my hands. “There’s a lady on hold for a delivery! We’re out of guacamole! If anyone from this address calls and asks, the food had to be remade and will be on its way, ASAP! The second server called in sick, you might have to take tables…” These words fading in volume as the unburdened soul is sucked back into her elliptical orbit through the kitchen, where mountains of grilled-fish tacos beckon with purple cabbage grins, awaiting her bearing.

I like the job because it’s impossible. There’s simply no human way to process thirty orders in thirty minutes without making colossal mistakes. Over the months I have reformatted my body and brain to meet the challenges on a synaptic level, limbs acting independently and unconsciously of each other, brain frantically calculating my trajectory around sharp turns and other bodies in motion while also answering questions and trying to remember to smile. It’s the final level of the hardest video game I’ve ever played, complete with blaring music and hidden bonus rounds. Oh help, I think. I don’t know how it could be, but both the despair and the satisfaction seem come from the same locus, somewhere at the very bottom of my heart.

When I was young, there was nothing I resented more than futility in labor. I gave up on math in fourth grade when it dawned on me that it was a limitless challenge -- it would just get harder and harder, year after year, class after class. The more I learned, the more aware I’d become of how much I didn’t know. I went home early that day feeling genuinely ill, and my grades declined steadily from that point on. Math for its own sake -- work for its own sake -- was not a fact of life I was willing to accept.

This was a pretty radical position to take in my father’s household, where work existed to be done, and we all existed to do it. Dad grew up on a cattle ranch in eastern Montana, an environment which required every man, woman, child and animal working together in concert, vigilant against the rising tides of ruin and humiliation. How lazy and spoiled and relatively suburban my sisters and I must have seemed to him, our childhoods uncomplicated by barn chores and seasonal labors that he’d endured ever since he was large enough to grip a hoe-handle. From this, I’m sure, came the perverse thrill he derived from assigning us the very nastiest chores, all of which seemed to require being outdoors in Arizona’s 115 degree heat. We scratched weeds out of the dry earth year-round, we washed the family car on days when the water vanished off its surface before you even had a chance to wipe it away. My sisters and I bond now over memories of being rented out to our grandparents for the purpose of gathering up a full year’s worth of dried dogshit from their backyard. Manufactured by their two well-fed Pomeranians and left to bake in the sun, the nuggets were nearly indistinguishable from the pale gravel, and almost as plentiful. Armed with one plastic glove and one heavy duty trash bag, the elected child would spend hours bending and squinting and bare-handed scooping in exchange for a few dollars and a cold soda.

The lesson I took from this, of course, was that work was for suckers, a fraud perpetrated upon those too weak to pull free, too dumb to think and do for themselves. Growing up and moving out, I applied for the kinds of jobs where you could get by for a long time on the bare minimum of effort, counting on my ability to stay one step ahead of my managers despite barely meeting their incredibly low standards for grooming, civility, and punctuality. I shirked my sidework as a graveyard-shift waiter at Denny’s, I fabricated positive results as a cold-calling insurance telemarketer. During my stint as a retail clerk, I held a paperback under the counter with one hand while ringing up customers with the other. This approach to making a living endured much later into my life than I’m altogether comfortable admitting. Whenever my resolve threatened to strengthen, I’d call my dad and complain about my job. “When I was your age,” he’d warn, “I was working on the killing floor of a slaughter-house, slitting throats from dawn till dusk.” It was an instant re-affirmation of my chosen path.

Despite how it beckons to dreamers, New York is a city that delights in sloughing away its fools and layabouts -- the poor ones, anyway. Very soon after I arrived it became obvious that my survival here would utterly hinge on my willingness to bend my neck and accept the yoke. At first, the only way I could tolerate this was by making the work as personal as possible, holding myself hostage with thoughts about who might get hurt or go hungry if I didn’t do my job. This managed to float me through gigs as a babysitter, a substitute teacher, a personal assistant. When I finally found steady work as a freelance writer, I learned the other half of that lesson -- you either finish the work or you don’t, and there is no one to outsmart, betray, or starve but yourself. It doesn't get more personal than that. But would it ever translate into an ability to do the kind of work that I spent a lifetime avoiding? I had to know this. Working phones is more than just my backup paycheck. It has become my alchemical laboratory.

I chose this, I remind myself as I answer the phones. Every night, I choose it all over again -- feathers becoming ruffled, people crowding up around the counter hungrily (hangrily, a co-worker of mine would say, referring to the onset of crabbiness owing purely to famine) and growing more irritable by the minute as some other person’s order comes up, and then another’s; pens drying up in my hand, paper tickets fluttering away out of sight, rendering whole orders untraceable. The brainless phones or ding-ding “food’s up!” bell interrupting every divergent gesture or thought. Completed orders bagged and then lost in the vortex as I scramble from one emergency to the next.

I put on a brave face for customers, hoping they’ll notice my speed, precision, and flexibility instead of my sweaty face, my twitching eye. I coax them through the hoops of ordering as gently as time allows. I answer the phone for the sixth time in a minute, and a tinny voice lisps into my ear, faint as a trans-atlantic radio signal, asks if I will take a credit card over the phone. And do I have any soups? Any recommendations for someone who isn’t actually very hungry? What kind of tacos do you have? How long will a delivery take?

My brain begins to hurl itself against the walls of my skull, hearing this. Our tacos, I want to hiss, are forged in a cauldron of strife. They are wrought in suffering. By the time you receive them, your tacos will have tested the limitations of at least four desperately busy, hardworking people. Hands quivering with fatigue, neck tendons visible, hearts hammering, we will put the sour cream on the side for you, we will add the extra salsa. These, I would say if I could, are blood tacos.

“It will be about forty minutes,” I say instead, scribbling down the wretched card number and moving on to the next call. That’s yet another way in which pressure eats at my sould; it turns out that all my horrible suspicions about human nature are waiting to jump to the forefront at once, desperate for opportunities to be substantiated, to lie to me about who someone is and what they’re really like. Even banalities like hearing someone botch the pronunciation of the word chimichanga are enough to stir them awake. Probably, nobody loves you, I’ve thought at someone as they handed me their money, and I can’t say I blame them.

There is nothing to do in these moments except move on, and on, and still further on until I become blind to the unfairness and imbalance of the world and lose myself in pure, mindless movement, the terrifying dance of energy and matter. This is where the work itself often becomes mysteriously transcendent; I have begun to think of each shift as a crucible, an abridged crisis just intense enough to boil away the scant flesh of complacency, the worst in myself, the sores in my psyche. Sometimes they vanish as soon as the air hits them, like toxic vapors. I emerge raw, cleaner. It’s like a trip to the Russian bath-house, where you sit in underground rooms so hot that it literally hurts to breath, and just when you feel like you may panic or suffocate if you don’t get out right now, someone dumps a ten-gallon bucket of ice-water over your head. It shocks you sputtering and swearing back to your senses, resetting all your gauges. After several blurry hours spent hurtling from one extreme sensation to the next, my very bones feel pliable, my muscles buttery smooth, my skin practically bioluminescent. Suffering and submission are not inherently ennobling, I remind myself as the chips shatter in the grip of my clumsy tongs, but the potential is always there.

I think of my father often when I’m drowning my way through a shift on the phones, dispatching orders with a relentless intensity and accuracy. When the restaurant becomes like an WWII submarine movie, all strobing lights and jets of water and flame, I know of no one else to credit for my instinct to dive into the smoke and begin pulling my fellow mariners out of the fire. I have witnessed dinner-shift miracles that I can’t explain, battlefield crises that should not have been rebounded from. My colleagues and I bask afterward in the lull, nerves humming as we drink in enormity of our collective feat. It’s silly, I think later, it’s only a restaurant, nobody cares, we’ll all do exactly the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, until something breaks in us and we can’t take it anymore. Pointless. But there is no mistaking the pride I take in my work while I’m doing it, an experience so relatively new that I find it nearly intoxicating -- nourishing, even. Quit this job? And lose the chance to be beaten like soft lead into some new, better shape, twice a week? It means more to me than I ever thought possible.

Dad is in his fifties now, and degenerative arthritis has seized up most of his joints, slowing him down considerably; he claims that he can dislocate his knuckles by making a tight fist. He’s been dragging himself toward the finish line of retirement with full benefits for years now, but due to various unforeseen complications and some-restrictions-may-apply, that line keeps inching out of reach. One more year, I have heard him say for several years now. One more. It hurts him to stand, it hurts him to sit, it hurts him to ride his motorcycle to work but he does it anyway because it thrills him. We talk on the phone about our jobs and the respective shit-heads who complicate them, exchanging the heavily salted dialogue of people who routinely work harder than absolutely necessary. I used to think that I’d be better off never being able to speak his language. Now, weighing my lifelong desire to do things my own way against the sympathetic twinges I feel when he describes his ailments to me, battle scars accumulated during a lifetime of grueling physical work, I come up even every time, both hands equally full. How is that possible? I wonder. This man, with whom I once hauled rocks out of dry creek-beds and built a stone wall around our yard’s perimeter, doesn’t have an answer, doesn’t need one. “It is what it is,” he says at least once every time we talk. I really hope so, I think.

Previously On Arcanalogue: Temperance

Summary only...

"Search Your Heart. Also, Get Over Yourself..."

Since kids are hellbent on using their technological privilege to utterly destroy themselves and each other, it's time to reach out to them with a message of common sense, compassion, and reason. The courier of this message? James Lipton and his magic beard:

I like that the message at the center of these PSA's isn't merely "Don't do this because it's BAD!" Rather, they're saying "Think about this carefully before you make a decision. Ponder the consequences. Search your heart. Also, get over yourself." And the avuncular Lipton is the perfect funny, non-parental, and (apparently) non-judgmental figure to impart this wisdom. He cares about you -- he would take his beard off for you.

I'd like to think of the Six of Swords as a rite of passage, the moment when that Liptonian beard lands on your face and you find yourself examining your situation from all sides. It announces the arrival of a certain maturity, it encourages you to set off in bold new directions and make prudent use of technology, it quiets the lower instincts that keep you embroiled in back-and-forths unworthy of your attention. And afterward, if you still wind up sending someone a picture of your junk, you'll know that it was not an act of impulse, but one of deep consideration -- was, in fact, the only logical choice. [Via]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Six of Swords

Summary only...

"Will The Emperor Clothe Himself?"

I can't decide whether the use of LEGO blocks to fill in the gaps of old Roman buildings at a recent arts festival strikes me as an illusion of reinforcement or a reminder of infirmity. It's interesting to me that they flesh out the crevices and corners in a way that lets you see the space that the buildings once took up. The LEGO's remind you how old and powerful the buildings are, but they also point out the places where repairs are necessary. I wouldn't be surprised if this purely cosmetic "renovation" winds up leading to an actual bricks-and-cement renovation afterward; now that the gaps have been pointed out, they're all anyone will see when they pass by. Now that artists have joshingly pointed out his partial nudity, will the emperor clothe himself?

The Four of Coins relates to edification and security. For some, this is less about solving real problems and more about keeping up appearances -- like when people refer to the airport "security theater" of the TSA. Purely presentational gestures of stability can only keep people fooled for so long; eventually those who depend on you will require gestures of real substance. This card highlights the conflict of interest that emerges when you have the power to accomplish tangible results; to what extent will your results be mitigated by your pride, or your fear of becoming powerless?

The suit of Coins has interesting things to say on the matter. If you look at the cards in numerical sequence, you'll note that the early cards seem obsessed with power and status. Once the true, harmonious nature of the suit asserts itself in the Six of Coins, the concerns with status all but vanish -- the onus shifts onto the actualized individual to tend his own crop and make peace with the natural ebb and flow of the material world, no matter how it wears and tears at the edifices he or she has built. Observance of that philosophy is what creates the enduring happiness and wealth we see in the last two cards. [Via]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Four Of Coins

Summary only...

A Series of Trumps At Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade...

"It seems that the illustrations are informed by the popular symbolism of the day, possibly from the depiction of these characters in actual parades. In the same way, in modern American culture, one only has to hear the name Santa Claus to see in the mind's eye a fat, bearded man in a red suit riding in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. All of the images found in the Tarot were popular images at the time of its creation and would be as easily recognized then as an image of Santa Claus is now..."

In Robert M. Place's excellent book Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, he explains how the Tarot's suit of Trumps can be read as a parade, in which each new figure symbolically triumphs ("trumps") the one that came before it, a la Petrarch's I Trionfi.

All of this leapt into my mind again when I took my mother to see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in person early (so early!) yesterday morning and watched the floats and balloons gliding by. I caught myself wondering -- in what way does each triumph over the one before it? How does the introduction of new balloons comment on our ever-changing cultural lexicon? I started snapping (terrible, gray, hazy) pictures so I could record the order of balloons and pick the question apart later on.

Since the Tarot's trumps seem to be organized in groups of seven, here are the first seven major balloons that came down Central Park West. (As the slack-jawed spectator, I represented the Fool, of course.)

Spiderman was first. Like the classical Magician (or juggler, or acrobat, or whatever), Spiderman is basically just an average citizen who has risen above his lowly "everyman", managing to stay in the spotlight on the merits of his miraculous feats. He is the half-step between the world of the human and the superhuman, a nice introduction to the more fantastical figures we're about to meet. He's a protective and re-assuring figure, and his presence at the head of the pack indicates that we have nothing to fear from any of the characters who follow him.


How does Kermit trump Spiderman? Like Spidey he's a dualistic heroic protagonist, but he's overcome his puppet/puppeteer duality and transcended his need for a "secret identity" -- in our imaginations, Kermit isn't reliant on any human component to emote or locomote; none of that is part of his character. He has a human's tenderness, a puppet's fragility, a frog's defenselessness (unless he has any venom glands we don't know about...). He is less of a man than Spiderman/Peter Parker, but he is a more complete human. We will say that he represents the amphibious nature of a soul's journey into less substantial, less human realms. He takes us further down the path into a world of strangely human fantasy creatures.



Next we have Abby Cadabby, a muppet who is also a fairy. She's the next stepping stone into the world of the unreal. She is fully fantastical and also fully childlike -- she doesn't share Kermit's self-awareness about being a puppet, and this departure from reality is what confers her the magical powers that she's learning how to use. She only exists because of Kermit, but she's able to occupy his world more innocently and curiously than the world-weary frog ever could.


Pikachu is the Emperor to Abby's Empress. He too has magical powers, but while hers are gentle and used for exploration and self-expression, his are violent and used for conquest. At the very center of our set of seven, Pikachu represents the middle phase of evolution -- his lesser form is Pichu and he may still yet evolve into Raichu. Though he's the first figure we've seen who is wholly unreal, he embodies a spirit of equilibrium: he is both loving and beloved, powerful and tender.


Ronald's triumph over Pikachu is the power of the immaterial to conquer the material world. The first full-on corporate icon we've seen so far, Ronald is the high priest of mass-market consumerism, and as a magical demi-human he is more of a mover and shaker in his own fictions than Pikachu is in his -- the lightning mouse can't even say anything except his own name. For the first time so far, the "human" qualities of a character, however secondary, turn out to be damning weaknesses rather than redeeming ones. Ronald is more of a puppet than Kermit, less of a man than Peter Parker. This is the instability that results from stepping out of that strong central position.


Like the sun breaking through the clouds after a rainstorm, we see a return to innocence in the emergence of Spongebob. He's not as cuddly as Pikachu or Abby Cadabby; he's shrill, jejune, chaotic, mostly powerless. But Spongebob represents an important counterbalance to Ronald McDonald, a complete retreat from the complex human world and its politics. He lives in a simple world almost entirely devoid of human contact -- at the bottom of the sea no less, about as far from mankind as one can get. He is the petulant prince rejecting the world he has inherited from his parents and predecessors, living for the sake of living. He is blissfully unaware of the merchandising of his own image.


Mickey is sort of the product of Spongebob's awkward adolescent phase. He occupies a world occupied almost exclusively by non-humans, but is way more comfortable embodying recognizable human qualities. He's more emotionally mature than Spongebob, more virtuous, more intelligent. That's probably why he's also more iconic than the two-dimensional Ronald McDonald. He seems to have found a way to weild the power of his corporate identity without sacrificing his sense of wonder. In a way, he epitomizes all of the qualities we've seen so far, blended seamlessly and polished to an immaculate (and rather bland) shine.

You get the idea. Check out Place's book for a thorough examination of the Tarot-as-parade. I'm out of steam or else I'd look at the original old-school Macy's balloons in the same light. And besides, I have Mom and leftovers to deal with.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Summary only...

"One Night That Fall, My Doorbell Rang At 2 AM..."

This is the eighth installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).


My friend Owen had the thickest New York accent I’d ever heard in real life. I learned later that he’d left home some years back as part of a criminal sentence -- the judge offered him a choice between jail time in New York or rehab in Arizona. What junkie hoodlum teenager wouldn’t elect to go West under such circumstances? He took the treatment program very seriously, enjoying years of perfect sobriety -- his first since about 7th grade. Owen found steady employment, a long-term relationship, a sense of purpose. But then he slipped, and kept slipping until you couldn’t even really call it “slipping” anymore. Before long he was in worse shape than ever, disappearing for days on end and returning home to his frantic girlfriend with no knowledge of where his cuts and bruises had come from, or what had happened to his shoes, or how they would pay their rent.

This was when I first met him; we were both waiters at a fancy restaurant in Arizona. He wasn’t what you’d call a reliable co-worker. He was a frequent no-call, no-show, and he was churlish and red-eyed when he did show, though he’d perk up considerably after a trip to the walk-in refrigerator where he and the cooks could sample cocaine in peace. He’d already been fired five or six times, but the owner’s wife had a soft spot for this lost boy and could never resist taking him on again if he asked contritely enough. Also, I think that when he actually came to work, Owen was great for business. Customers who’d actually traveled a bit were charmed by his authentically rude, supernaturally charismatic New York flavor. He was an exotic, a welcome relief from the cheerful armies of local high-school graduates that all the chain restaurants hire. And of course, he was very familiar with the wine list.

We became good friends, for some reason. Owen was no occultist, but he admired Aleister Crowley, often quoting from his poems or the novel Diary of a Drug Fiend. He introduced me to Crowley’s Tarot deck, pointing out the Hanged Man card as the one he’d always related to the most. The man on the card was formless, nailed down by his hands and feet. The significance was obvious; Owen regretted that his entire adult life had been spent mitigating his sickness, but his awareness of this fact had somehow never translated into freedom. His addictions had impoverished him physically, financially, and mentally, and still there was no slowing his descent; he once confided in me through a bilious blood-whiskey haze that the only sensations he was capable of feeling acutely anymore were pain and thirst. I was very relieved when his long-suffering family in Queens agreed to welcome him back home to New York and supervise his return to sobriety. It happened very quickly; within days of the news I was saying goodbye to Owen at the Greyhound station. The gritty five-day bus ride from Phoenix to Port Authority would be his longest stint of sobriety since we’d known each other -- a trans-continental mandatory detox. I cried a little when he got on the Greyhound. I promised I’d come visit.

I kept my promise and then some, moving to Brooklyn two years later. I’d looked forward to seeing him right away, but as weeks went by it seemed he was still a no-call, no-show. We hadn’t talked much, and I’d heard from mutual friends that he hadn’t exactly straightened things out the way he’d planned to -- that in fact he was worse than ever, and that his family had given up hope and washed their hands of the whole mess. Perhaps he felt he’d let me down too, and was embarrassed to show himself. Or perhaps he was just fucked up and oblivious, and didn’t care about being friends anymore. I figured that, like any stray animal, he’d turn up whenever he was ready.

One night that fall, my doorbell rang at 2 a.m. The sound startled me out of sleep and sent me stumbling all the way downstairs in just boxers and a t-shirt to answer the door -- I assumed it was some kind of emergency. I was so glad to see Owen standing on the stoop instead that I accidentally let the front door of the building close behind me -- I hadn’t grabbed my keys. “That’s okay,” he said, “Come on, there’s something I want to show you.” Something about his demeanor was oddly unfamiliar. Nevertheless, when he beckoned I followed him to the curb. A car was waiting there. I was barefoot and the sidewalk was chilly. I thought, Might as well see what he wants before I wake up the house trying to get back in.

Then it occurred to me what was different: Owen was drunk. Scary, blackout-league drunk, but holding it all together by sheer force of will just for my benefit, the way career drunks can. This was not down-and-out Arizona Owen -- this was New York Owen in all his terrible, unchecked splendor. My self-preservation instincts tingled. There was no way on Earth I’d let him drive me anywhere, I decided, and told him so. "Nah, I know," he said. “Go around over there and just sit down for a minute.” He pointed to the passenger side. I balked, but he reassured me, “Don't worry. Look, we’re not going anywhere.” Well, okay then. I padded gingerly across the pavement and into the street and opened the passenger-side door.

There was someone passed out across the back seat, a guy I didn’t recognize at all. “Need me to help get rid of the body?” I asked. I rested tentatively in the passenger seat, leaving my door wide open and hanging one leg out, careful not to give the slightest impression that I was along for the ride. But it was cold and I wasn’t dressed, so when Owen said he wanted to turn the engine on so he could run the heater, I didn’t protest. We dwelt there in ridiculous silence, the three of us. “So what did you want to show me?” I finally asked. I was tired and growing disappointed. Owen perked up. “Oh yeah... Okay, close your eyes.” And the second I followed his instructions, of course -- of course -- I heard the gearshift scrape and pop in its socket. The car leapt away from the curb.

Inarticulate yelling from me as I jerked my leg into the vehicle to keep the door from swinging closed on it. Pleading and demanding as the car hurtled around the corner onto Provost Street, still picking up speed. Owen smiled and ignored me, concentrating on the road, and it occurred to me that if I wanted to live, I should shut up and let him focus -- nothing I could say would sway him. I buckled my seat-belt. I tried to calm myself and take inventory of the situation, but all I could think of were the things I didn’t have. Clothes. Phone. Keys. Wallet. Money. Identification. In fact, no one even knew that I’d left the house. If we crashed and died -- something which I figured by now I totally deserved -- it would probably take over a week for them to figure out who the hell I was.

Our reeking friend in the back seat must have had similar concerns. Our speedy departure had rattled him awake, and he too began pleading for Owen to pull over. “C’mon, man... Slow down... You’re gonna kill us!” he whined. The pleas only motivated our driver to accelerate. We blew through a red light without slowing, then another and another as if we were being chased. My whole body clenched, awaiting the inevitable. When Owen finally braked a bit to turn a tight corner, the guy behind me seized the opportunity -- with a garbled scream he popped open the back door and threw himself out into the street. Looking over my shoulder I had a diminishing glimpse of him crawling out of the gutter. Neither Owen or I said a word. The door to the backseat snapped closed again on its own as we hauled ass up the ramp toward the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Now that we were alone, Owen started talking again, though I found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying because of his aggressive indifference to freeway lane-markings. He punctuated sentences by correctively veering toward the median in a way that made me (and some other startled-looking drivers) suspect he’d eventually try to cross it. It turns out that the thing he wanted to show me was the grave of Harry Houdini. The body was interred somewhere in one of the many cemeteries of Forest Park, deep in Queens, and Owen knew just where. As the speedometer quivered at 90 he told me the story of the magician’s tragic downfall, the one which everyone already knows, about the unexpected punch in the stomach which ruptured the magician’s appendix and sent him to death on All Hallows Eve, 1926. I could relate to the poor guy -- I was about to die my own very pointless death. I was utterly convinced of it. I began mentally catalog the unfinished projects I’d be leaving behind, soon to be discovered by my survivors as they pawed through my leftovers looking for answers, wondering how in the world they never noticed how totally fucking stupid I was. Stupid!

“Owen,” I said, straining to sound fully game, “Maybe I should drive. Why don’t you let me drive us there?” He either pretended not to hear me, or really didn’t; I don’t know which possibility was more unsettling. But we exited the freeway, so that was something at least. Where the hell were we? My entire knowledge of New York geography was based on the subway -- not much help here. An elevated subway track ran parallel to the road, I squinted to see if I could tell which train line it belonged to. There was no park in sight. I asked Owen where we were, careful to sound only casually interested. He found this question to be very funny. “We,” he smirked with homegrown pride, “…are in the ghetto.” He pulled over to the curb and parked.

He explained to me, looking straight in the eyes for the first time that night, that he was going to get out and go use the pay phone, and that afterward this dude and his girlfriend were going to drive over here to sell him a bag. "They won’t sell it to me unless I get in the car and ride around for a bit and taste it with them," he added. "So you just sit tight, and I’ll be back soon.”

“I thought we were going to the grave, Owen.” I had to admit that the original plan was beginning to sound a lot more alluring.

“Oh we are, we definitely are,” he laughed. And then he sprang out of the car and was off down the street. I checked: he took the keys with him.

Shivering in my underwear, I had plenty of time to curse myself. But then, who makes all their sharpest decisions after being suddenly awakened in the middle of the night? I resolved to focus on the present instead. For example: who knew when -- or even if -- Owen would return? I opened the car door. The world around me was strangely still, no pedestrians, no cars. Stepping carefully around the floral pattern of crushed green glass on the sidewalk, I realized that I could actually see a subway station in the distance -- the sign said Jamaica, the last stop on the E line, about an hour from home. I was overcome with relief until I remembered that I had no shoes and no money. Would the attendant let me through the turnstile without paying if I shared my sob story? What if there was no attendant? Maybe a police officer would give me a ride home if I explained my situation? But what if there was no officer? Meanwhile, there was always the chance that Owen could come back while I was gone and strand me here.

My backup plan was to call for help, or at least to let someone know what had happened. I scrounged in the car seats for change. What vehicle doesn’t have at least twenty-five cents in it somewhere? A junkie’s, I thought -- even the cup-holders and floor-mats were depressingly void. But as Owen was in no hurry to get back, I had plenty of time to search, and desperation as a powerful motivator. Eventually, I had a dime and three sticky nickels in my hand. I only knew two New York phone numbers by heart: my own, and my friend Alice’s. And Alice knew about Owen, would know what to do. Inching up the street again, I set my sights on a pay-phone and gave her a call.

The call went straight to voicemail. That caught me off guard -- I gave it my best shot: “Uh, hi Alice! This is Tom. And I just wanted to let you know in case something bad happens that I’m with Owen, and that he is pretty fucked up and I have been sort of… abducted? And I’m near the Jamaica stop of the E with no clothes or shoes. I mean, I have underwear on. And a shirt. I don’t mean to… scare you, but if I’m not home when you wake up and get this, you should probably call the police? Uh, okay, I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Bye.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I hung up the phone, listening as it digested my coins. Unsure about Plan C, I retreated to the car and locked the doors, miserably.

I must have fallen asleep -- at one instant it seemed that I was all alone, and the next the engine was turning over. Owen had a new light in his eye as he drove -- the score must have been good. “Owen, I thought you said I could drive now,” I complained, hoping I could get him to mis-remember our plans.

“Oh yeah, sorry about that,” he said, grinning. “We’re not far off now, anyway.” By the time on the radio display, if it could be trusted, it was almost four in the morning. A few minutes later we pulled over alongside a steep embankment in Forest Park. The earth was damp and spongy and I was still barefoot, but Owen was unfazed. “There’s a pair of old boots in the trunk. Help yourself!” Owen called, flipping me the keys and scrambling up the slope, out of sight. The keys! I slid into the driver’s seat, praising merciful Jesus, promising Him converts..

So why didn’t I just leave? Surely I could have eventually found the way back on my own. Surely he’d manage somehow -- it wouldn’t be his first time sleeping in the park. I sat there for a minute, weighing my logic against my loyalty. Well, I thought, I’ve got the keys. After all this I might as well at least get to see the damn grave. If it's even there. I crammed my bare feet into the crusty, overlarge boots and followed the sound of laughter up the slick embankment, into the trees.

This was one of the places he’d spent his childhood, a place where boys ran wild. Owen had always been full of these tales, and I believed them all, they were too wild to be made up. He told me about the time he and his friends climbed onto the roof of a warehouse and assaulted the windows of passing J trains, throwing bricks and screaming like demons from hell. The windows were virtually unbreakable, the bricks bounced right off -- but, he told me with relish, the passengers didn’t know that, and they were pretty freaked. He told me about the time that a dozen or so boys mobbed a convenience store, grabbing up everything they could get their hands on and laughing at helpless screams of the owner, confident he’d never be able to pick any of them out of a lineup. One of the boys actually got away with an entire rack of sunglasses, the kind that spins, which they had a hell of a time fitting into the back seat of the car as they made their getaway. Owen knew these stories were outlandish, and he made them really funny when he told them. But you could tell he also knew they were sad, and that’s what made him such a great person to know.

He led the way over the misty, garbage-strewn hills of Forest Park. He didn’t want to admit he had no idea where we were going -- at this point he just wanted to talk. He wanted to tell me everything, I realized; my head was just an empty space for him to fill up with all the best and worst parts of himself, the shards worth gluing back together. Despite all, I was touched that Owen would seek me out as a confessor, taking me out among the trees and strange noises of the park where reality could not intrude upon memory. It terrifies me to think of how often that warm, cozy feeling of obligation I felt must be mistaken for love.

My victory that early morning wasn’t one of good sense, it was one of pure endurance. Losing steam, Owen finally gave up and allowed me to aim us back toward the car. I got behind the wheel and drove, so grateful for the ridges of the pedals under my bare foot. My friend dozed next to me; I prodded him whenever I needed directions, and when in doubt I followed the Manhattan skyline, now clearly visible in the pale pink air. By the time we got back to my house, the sun had already risen. I double-parked and woke him to say goodbye. In the daylight he looked gray and unwell. Very casually, so as to disguise his great need, he asked me if he could please come up and sleep at my place for a few hours. Just a few hours.

I made hasty, lame excuses, as I handed him his keys. My refusal seemed to let all of the remaining air out of him. I turned and left quickly to keep from losing my resolve, leaving him slumped in the car, alone.

I thought he would come find me later, after he’d sobered up a bit -- maybe he would realize what he’d done, how bad he must have scared me, and apologize. Maybe it would scare him too, scare him enough to help him. I figured that we’d at least end up laughing about it together sometime, me recalling details that he had no memory of whatsoever. And I confess to holding out a small hope that he'd really fix himself and that maybe one day we'd even venture out to where the great Houdini was actually buried. Perhaps by then I would have stories of my own that he'd be interested in hearing. But the truth is that I never saw Owen again after that, and whatever bond held our friendship together during those short, eventful years expired that night, somewhere above the embankment of Cypress Hills Street -- remains buried there for all I know.

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Hanged Man

Summary only...

The Court Of The (False) Crimson Queen...

I recently noted that our esteemed sponsor, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, has fragrances in its Mad Tea Party collection themed on the playing card characters in Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. Since regular playing cards are somewhat analogous to the four suits of the Tarot's minor arcana, I couldn't help wondering what these particular scents would have to say about their respective cards. So here's what I ordered:

THE KING OF HEARTS
"Rosewood and black cherry with white musk, red rose, red musk and a spark of lavender."

THE KNAVE OF HEARTS
"Crushed roses and blackcurrant tarts."

THE QUEEN OF HEARTS
"Lily of the Valley, Calla Lily, stephanotis and a drop of cherry."

TWO, FIVE & SEVEN
"A huge bouquet of squished rose petals: Bulgarian rose, Somalian rose, Turkish rose, Damascus rose, red and white rose, tea rose, wine rose, shrub roses, rose, rose, rose... and just an itty bitty bit of green grass."

I had planned on incorporating all of these into a big post on the suit of Cups, but when I sat down to do it, I hit a serious roadblock: the original Tenniel illustration showing the Two, Five, and Seven painting the roses red (as seen above) portrays them as spades. Spades. That ruins everything -- or does it?

Before I go too far down the rabbit hole of wild speculation, let me say that I'm quite aware that Carroll's book is a work of pure fantasy and shouldn't be expected to hold up to the scrutiny of real-world logic. If anything, the fantastical nature of the work invites us to comb through it playfully, trying to make sense out of nonsense. So here goes...

I allege that the entity presenting herself as the Queen of Hearts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an impostor. In fact, I further allege that the entity in question is non other than the sinister Queen of Spades (or Swords, as the case may be). Think about it: the shouting, the tortured logic puzzles, the ruthless competition of the croquet match, the unrelenting desire to punish and decapitate. Are these the qualities of the dreamy Queen of Hearts? I think not.

If there's anything we've learned by now, it's that the Swords are not to be trusted. They cut the man who wields them just as easily as they cut his opponent. In fact, from the moment when Alice first enters the courtyard, we witness a fraud being perpetrated by the Two, Five, and Seven on behalf of the Queen's dogmatic insistence on red roses over white. The Queen's decision to have her servants executed is, no doubt, an effort to conceal her true identity -- she certainly can't reveal herself as a Spade-sympathizer in front of the whole court.

The timid King plays much closer to type, which makes me wonder about the power the Queen exerts to control him. I suspect blackmail or worse.

The samples from BPAL have tipped me off to new evidence. The Queen can mask herself behind red paint all she pleases, but she can't beat the smell test -- out of the court cards present, she's the only one who doesn't smell like roses. In fact, one could argue that the scent of calla lilies is a dead giveaway here -- they're incredibly toxic and commonly associated with funeral arrangements.

In a sort of poetic final argument, I'd like to present a few lyrics from the King Crimson's 1969 release "The Court of the Crimson King", which I believe may contain some elements of backstory from the King of Hearts' perspective:

"The rusted chains of prison moons are shattered by the sun / I walk a road, horizons change / The tournament's begun."

Hmm. Perhaps there is more at stake in the Queen's croquet game than we've ever suspected. Don't play, Alice! If you lose, you'll be sent to a holding tank for lost souls in a parallel dimension!

"The black queen chants the funeral march / The cracked brass bells will ring / To summon back the fire witch / To the court of the crimson king..."

Creepy! But not nearly as revealing as this:

"The gardener plants an evergreen / Whilst trampling on a flower..."

How can this not be a comment on the hapless Two, Five, and Seven?

Ultimately I decided to memorialize my search for the truth in a post for the Seven of Swords, a card that warns of fraud and cowardice, of resistance and futility, all of the qualities that the "Queen of Hearts" stands for. Incidentally, the fragrances were lovely. Special thumbs up for the Knave of Hearts, which smells like something magical baking in the oven. But I'll save the dossier exploring his crimes against the state for another time...

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Seven Of Swords

Summary only...

"These Artifacts Are Not My Property..."

This is the seventh installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine (Click and scroll down for large version).


There are lots of reasons why it’s hard to be a writer, but most significant among them is that it seems to be a career path specifically designed to hurt your mother’s feelings. For some writers, that's the entire point -- if the old bitch isn’t keening into her handbag over everything they publish, they don’t feel they’re doing it quite right. As much as I’d love to be one of these bitter, dysfunctional individuals for whom the term “writer” was invented to describe, it turns out that, appearances to the contrary, I am still too fundamentally sensitive to my mother’s mental and emotional well-being to make that leap.

Not that I’m a perfect angel. I dropped out of college to be a writer, something which she still isn’t happy about. And I have certainly posted comments about my personal life on sites like MetaFilter that would make her weep the Nile if she read them. My professional writing gigs have consisted mostly of horror movie interviews, bar reviews, and at least one stage musical about lesbian erotica -- I doubt I could have chosen more alienating subjects. Mom, I tell people, is a gentle soul. Mom is a clean, honest, trusting, light-hearted individual who is made to cry easily. Mom won’t watch a movie if she suspects it has an unhappy ending. She finds catharsis to be overrated. Her own life, she claims, is hard enough already.

My sisters and I saw little evidence of this vulnerability as children. I guess that at least compared to kids ten-and-under, Mom was a pretty tough lady. No matter how far we were from home, misbehaving on a shopping trip got us frog-marched out of the store and driven straight home in blistering silence, and God help you when your father gets home. She was perpetually sending back her food at restaurants if it didn’t arrive exactly as ordered, or driving all the way back to the grocery store to get a refund on a bad melon. It was generally agreed upon that she was utterly delightful company, girlishly generous with her laughter and her attention, but we who were her responsibilities knew that she lived for responsibility itself. Her principles provided the script and direction for the play we were all putting on together. Contributions from Dad came in colorful, temperamental bursts -- art direction, I suppose -- but Mom moved us all forward as steadily as a glacier.

But these, I have learned, are merely the masks adults wear in front of their children to reassure them that someone is in charge -- they ought not be mistaken for actual personality traits. This is why a child’s view of a parent, no matter how informed by decades of observation, is dangerously incomplete. It pains me to have to accept that nearly all of the personally significant experiences of my mother’s life happened either before I born or when I was safely out of the room. But those are the facts -- the woman has always been a master of obfuscation. Only now that she’s in what she frustratingly refers to as her “crone years” is she slowly learning how to reveal herself to us. We're now privy to her unfiltered opinions, her concerns for herself and for the world, of which we still make up a significant part. Her tears, once a rare and terrifying sight to us, have finally lost their mystique. They’re regrettable in the way that all mom-tears are, but they’re also queerly similar to our own adult tears -- just one more bucket of suds at the car wash.

My mother has no script to consult as she learns how to fret over grown children -- she lost her own mother at the age of twenty-three. My grandmother, Mina, suffered a brain event while she was babysitting my cousin and I, a blithe pair of three-year-olds. My memory of that day is faint but it exists: overhearing Mina's phone call to my aunt when she felt something strange coming on, being sent to play in the spare room so that Grandma could lie down and “get some rest”. When we were finally allowed out, she'd already been taken to the hospital. My aunt prepared a pensive Spaghetti-O lunch while we kids sat at the dining room table with our coloring books. From a child’s perspective, it was an abrupt but mercifully quiet exit.

What a testament to Mom’s masking abilities that this was the extent of my loss. Somewhere, completely beyond my realm of awareness, a young mother of two -- with a third on the way, meaning she’d already spent the better part of two years either pregnant, caring for a infant, or both -- was struggling to survive a major crisis as I scooped gravel in the yard. Meals were still served. Books were read aloud. They say kids are scarily observant, but that vision must be terribly myopic. Mom perfunctorily explained Grandma’s death to me, and I’m sure I understood the sadness of it, but there are Pink Panther cartoons that left a deeper impression on me.

Mom still doesn’t like to talk about these things. Her life, remember, is hard enough already. But as we continue to age together, every now and then another hunk breaks off of the glacier, revealing important anthropological artifacts. In the middle of otherwise uneventful conversations we find ourselves tripping over exposed fossils of memory, old loves and hurts that were flash-frozen and preserved intact, perfectly incorrupt. What am I supposed to do in these moments? Leave the remains where they lay, walking a wide berth around them? Do I dig them out and examine them, or dig around them so that they can be buried? Neither of us seem to know.

One night on the phone, Mom began describing to me all the ways in which raising kids has changed since she was a young mother. She surprised me by off-handedly mentioning how hard it had been to raise her small children without her mother there to help. “Wow, I never thought of that before,” I said honestly, and delicately. I didn't want to push for details that might upset her.

She surprised me by continuing the thought on her own. “Plus I had to help make all of these decisions and funeral arrangements, and I was six months pregnant with Kelly at the time, so it wasn’t easy!” she said, laughing uneasily. “Did I tell you that I even had to do her makeup for the funeral?”

And before either of us knew what was happening, Mom began telling me this story, the details disgorging themselves in ragged bundles. She told me about the long hours at the hospital that night with her father and brother, helping them parse the medical terminology that described Mina’s state in her final hours. She told me about the time days later, when the three of them went to the funeral home together to view the body, and about the shock of discovering that her mother’s dehospitalized corpse had been left completely unadorned -- no “naturalistic” makeup, no makeup of any kind actually. No hairstyling, no pursed smile of eternal rest. Just this unkempt thing, dressed in her mother’s clothes, something no one was ever meant to behold. Mina had been a beautiful woman and was vain about her looks, she would never have wanted to be seen under these conditions. She had died in her prime, her early forties. The thought of displaying this unrecognizable ruin before an audience was utterly offensive to my mother. It jeopardized the way Mina would be remembered; it was an assault against a person who was not there to defend herself.

She told me how the funeral director apologized, informing them that they simply had no one on staff to provide that particular service. And how, with the actual funeral now mere hours away, she made an urgent case to her father and brother for a closed casket so that this wouldn’t be anyone else’s final glimpse. And how my grandfather rejected the idea on principle -- a closed casket would give people the idea that something unseemly had happened to Mina, that something was wrong. And how she kept trying to convince him that something was wrong, that there was definitely something unseemly about presenting a virtually untouched cadaver to the bereaved, whom were even now on their way into town to pay their final respects. And how ultimately, despite her laments, the family could not be compelled to cover up the sight. The lid would remain open

So, she told me, she drove home. Which is to say, she drove through a haze of tears to her mother’s house, where she gathered up the dead woman’s cosmetics. She plundered rooms and drawers where perfume still lingered, rounding up the toiletries and devices and articles which were part of Mina’s daily beauty regimen. She told me how she drove back to the funeral parlor, hell-bent on maintaining the image of this woman whom, until quite recently, would never be seen in public without lipstick. And about how upsetting it was to discover, firsthand, while painting her own mother, that cosmetics designed for living flesh do not actually work so well on the dead, how the dry and unyielding skin laughed at her efforts. And how defeated she felt, washing everything off and starting over, smearing and washing and crying, pawing through the magic puzzle pieces that were supposed to fit together and form her mother’s face, coming up short again and again. Three generations of women inhabiting the silence -- one resting in death, one awaiting birth, and one frantically working to beat the clock. The end result, she told me, was the best you could hope for under the circumstances. The effigy that greeted guests that afternoon may not have been a masterpiece, but as the final gift from daughter to mother, it was better than nothing at all.

My mom’s voice was strangely neutral as she recalled all of this, as if she’d forgotten she was still speaking. On my end of the phone I’d been holding my breath, afraid of breaking the spell. When she finished, I wanted to ask lots of questions, including: “Are you taking any new prescriptions?” But instead I began with, “Why didn’t you ever tell me this story before, Mom?”

“Oh, you know," she said. "I guess I mostly just try not to think about it too much,” she laughed again, nervously, in a way that hinted that the suds were catching up with her. “It was a long time ago.”

“But Mom. We’re your kids. Don’t you think we need to know these things? I mean, how long have you been holding that in? Twenty-five years? Don’t you need to talk about it? Don’t you think it would help?”

“I don’t know,” she said, laughing and sniffling. “It’s bad enough that it happened at all, why would I want to ruin anyone else’s day?”

That is the glacier talking, its inhuman patience and fortitude, its faultless geologic memory. And at the time, I'm sorry to say, it was the despicable writer in me that spoke back, warning her that I might want to write something about what she'd told me, probing for permission, knowing full well that it wasn’t my story to tell. These artifacts are not my property. Besides, you can bet that she's still keeping all the choicest bits under lock and key, and the same applies to all the other stories that she’ll take to her grave rather than risk ruining my day. But she said yes, I was welcome to write about it if I liked, though she couldn’t imagine anyone finding it very interesting.

Hi Mom, it’s just me talking straight to you now, knowing you probably won’t ever read this far down the page in your own story. It is interesting, and worth sharing, even if I have to fight myself and my concerns for you in order to write it down. You have your unknowable version of the truth, and I have mine. For the time being, I'm content with simply telling the story of you and I and the long distance phone call we shared, in which your tears became profound and terrible to me once again and I realized the near limitlessness of your endurance. As long as you continue to have a writer for a son, you're going to need it.

Previously On Arcanalogue: Strength

Summary only...

INTERVIEW - Cynthia von Buhler Revisits The Shakespeare Oracle

Though Cynthia von Buhler is currently touring to promote her critically-acclaimed children's book, But Who Will Bell The Cats?, she still has fond memories of the insane month which she spent churning out paintings for A. Bronwyn Llewellyn's sumptuous Shakespeare Oracle in 2003. In this wonderfully candid interview, von Buhler relates some of her experiences as a flourishing author, illustrator, fine artist, and possible descendant of the Sforza family. Read the interview...

Tom Blunt: So you told me earlier that this wasn’t exactly a collaborative project in the sense that people might assume, is that correct?

Cynthia von Buhler: Yes. I never spoke with the author. I did not have any say in who was chosen for the cards, and I depicted them any way I chose.


TB: How large are the paintings?

CvB: They were about five by seven inches. I tended to do them really quickly. I had one month to paint all of the cards. This is why I chose to do them as small oil paintings. I had to do one every ten minutes! It was rough. I wish I had more time on them. It was a tremendous amount of work in a short period of time. I would have liked to make them all huge 3-D paintings, but I would still be working on them now. They were a little bit larger than the actual cards -- but they’d at least by the right size if you wanted to read someone’s tarot with them. Originally I thought I could sell [the paintings] as a whole deck that someone could use, but then I started selling them individually because I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to buy the whole thing. It would be quite expensive!


TB: I think that there are probably many artists and illustrators who would probably like to do a deck, but the idea of spending that much time to do each card exactly the way you want it would just be overwhelming. It would probably be much easier as a collaborative project.

CvB: I actually did that once -- worked on a deck of cards, like an actual deck of cards. It was basically four artists, and I was given the hearts. So I did all the hearts!


TB: Sounds great. What is that deck called?

CvB: Oh, it wasn’t called anything, it was just like a deck of playing cards, done for a promotion for some company -- I can’t even remember which company. It was lovely. Even doing just all of the hearts that was a lot of work. But I did do them 3-D, and I actually used pig hearts, but then they ended up thinking that was too scary, so I ended up using milagro hearts, you know, like the Mexican milagros that you nail on.


TB: That 3-D component seems to be a vital part of your other artwork.

CvB: Well usually I make things that are 3-D, but when I don’t have a lot of time I still do 2-D paintings. I don’t normally work so small either, I work quite large. So I was really pumping these [cards] out -- I went to my parents’ house in the Berkshires, and I just sat there at the table and was a one-woman factory.


TB: Were there any particular paintings in this deck that you felt a special connection with? Or that you would have wanted to spend a whole lot more time on?

CvB: Definitely… The Queen, and the Fool. The Hanged Man. There are a few of them that were my favorites, that I actually still own the paintings. And I still have the cover. I actually painted Shakespeare a few times, for a few different projects, and I really like painting Shakespeare. I have very strong opinions about Shakespeare and how to represent the person. You’ve heard the whole thing about how Shakespeare may not really be Shakespeare?


TB: Oh yes.

CvB: Yeah. I don’t really think Shakespeare was Shakespeare.


TB: The first time I looked at the Hanged Man, I felt like you’d put special love and attention into that card.

CvB: Yeah, I liked that one. And I really did a lot of research. This was a while ago, you know, but I had to really immerse myself in the plays and study them.


TB: I can imagine so.

CvB: Luckily my mother reads the cards and knows a lot about them, and gave me a lot of input. Sforza was my grandmother's maiden name (on my mother's side). She was from Italy and rumor has it that we were related to the famous Duke. Leonardo DaVinci painted his mistress and also did his plumbing. In Italy the Sforza name is like Rockefeller or Kennedy in this country. And my mother actually had that deck, the Sforza deck, and showed me that. I think if I had more time I would have liked to make my deck look more like that one -- older and more decayed looking. I just love that deck, it’s so beautiful.


TB: I love using it too, I have the one that’s inlaid with the gold plate or whatever. It really is beautiful.

CvB: And also the cards were large. And they were strong cards, they weren’t flimsy.


TB: What kind of input did your mom give you? What did she contribute to this?

CvB: Oh you know, if I had a question about what a card meant, she would explain it. And explain both sides of it, you know, all of the cards are both good and bad. She would just explain it to me, and you know I didn’t have a lot of time so I really just had to know a quick answer. What does this card mean? You know, I don’t read them myself. Obviously I’ve had them read, I’ve had my cards read many times -- although my mother doesn’t like to read our cards. Superstitious!


TB: Did you give her a deck of these cards?

CvB: Oh, of course. They did actually send me a decent number of the decks.


TB: That must have been very exciting for her.

CvB: I think she really liked it. But she gets very involved in all of my projects. My mother is actually quite artistic herself and I think that she kind of lives through me in some ways. So now when I work on books now as an author, when I work on children’s books, I always send my stories to my mother to give me input on what children will like. I don’t have children and she’s had a lot of children, our whole family had six children.


TB: When did you start writing and illustrating books?

CvB: My major in college was actually children’s books. And my minor was fine arts. When I finished college I had a book I was showing around to some of the publishers and I just couldn’t get any interest in it, so I started doing illustration for magazines and books. And that led to working with Houghton-Mifflin, doing many, many covers for young adult books. Then they asked me if I had any of my own stories, and I said, “Yes, I have many.” And then from there I started doing my own books. So I actually illustrated a few children’s books before I was given the chance to write my own. It’s a really hard field to break into, but once you’re in, you’re sort of accepted. But it’s also very hard to be and illustrator and then have them take you seriously as a writer.


TB: Yes. I can imagine that writers who can’t illustrate their own work would feel threatened by that. I think as wonderful as it is for anybody who has multiple talents and can do so many things, there’s always a flip side to that, trying to gain acceptance as one thing or another when you can actually do both.

CvB: Right. Also, with my book, I created the sets in 3-D and then I photographed them. So I really like to do everything -- because I’m a little control freak and I like to have control over the whole project. So it was really hard illustrating other people’s stories, because they weren’t necessarily how I would have wanted the stories to go. And I also think that it must be very hard for the writers to just be given an illustrator. They really don’t have -- unless they’re at a very high level -- any input in how books are illustrated -- not even the cover. So I like to have control over the whole project. In my contract I actually made it so they have to hire my designer, who I’ve been working with for a really long time. He really knows how to design my art. And it’s such a big part of it, the design, even things like choosing the paper. The coating on the paper, the typography, it’s all really important. And a lot of times when you’re working with a publisher, it’s just sort of whatever they give you.


TB: How excellent. So the fact that you never spoke with the author on the Shakespeare deck isn’t particularly unusual then; considering the work that you’ve done you’ve probably had a lot experiences like that.

CvB: I actually have, and it always sort of baffles me. And I always sort of feel bad for the author. You know, many times I’ve sort of illustrated a book cover and afterwards they’ve called me and said, “Oh, I love that!” Usually I wind up talking to them after the fact, and hopefully they like it. Usually they seem to, but I’m sure that they don’t always like what I came up with! In some ways it would be helpful to talk with the author. I think with the Tarot deck it probably would have been helpful, but that in some ways it would be horrible -- I think that sometimes the author could get in the way. Because the best art comes when you have the most freedom.


TB: Exactly. Once the floodgates are open for input to go input to go back and forth, then where does it end?

CvB: And also, when it’s someone who isn't used to working with an artist, that’s a disaster. You know, with an art director or an editor who was worked with many different artists, I think that they know how to talk and know how to deal with artists and I really honestly feel the more freedom given, the better the artwork. But you know, I actually did a project with Martha Stewart -- I illustrated one of her stories, and I never met her. I still have to talk to her about it, I don’t know if she likes it.


TB: Ultimately, if an author doesn’t like the way it’s come out, I’d hope they wouldn’t blame the artist. It seems like an grievance they’d have with the publisher instead.

CvB: Usually it goes well, so I think publishers know what they’re doing. I think there’s a good reason why they keep those two things separate. And so many people I know who want to do a book, they think they need to come at it with an illustrator in hand, and that’s totally not the case. If you’re a writer, they just want you to show your writing, you don’t need to find someone to illustrate your work.


TB: I think that must be hard for any writers to accept, because I think visualization is such a key part of how you write a story, so I imagine they just want to go into it offering as clear an impression of their work as possible.

CvB: Are you also an artist as well as a writer?


TB: Not in any meaningful way. I’ve done a lot of art and design work, and I’ve had some art shown here in the city, but it’s not my main way of expressing myself. I don’t think I have the chops to make a Tarot deck all by myself, for example. So, tell me a little more about this possible family connection to the Sforza family!

CvB: Well, as I said, my grandmother’s maiden name is Sforza, so my whole life we’ve always talked about how our family comes from the Sforza family. And my family is very fair, we’re actually almost Sicilian… Calabrian? And we’re very fair-skinned -- blondes, redheads. Which is unusual for that area, though actually not quite unusual, because the Vikings came through and raped and pillaged. But still we say, “Oh we’re fair because of the blue-blood connection, and he married a Polish woman and you know, whatever.” I never really looked into it to find out if we really truly are related to the Sforza family, but we have the same name so it’s likely at some point it goes back to that family. The funny thing is that side of the family was possibly involved with the mafia.

It’s actually a very sad story, because when my grandmother came to this country with her husband, and I guess somehow they had a speakeasy -- her stories about the speakeasy were really interesting -- and an ice truck. Who knows what they were doing with the ice truck, if they were delivering alcohol or whatever during Prohibition. One day my grandfather went to collect a debt and he was shot. And that same day that he was shot, my grandmother, who was pregnant, gave birth to my mother. So my mother was born on the same day that her father died. It’s a pretty intense story, and I’ve been meaning to go back and research the murder. I think it’s kind of fascinating -- you know, why was he murdered? I guess it wasn’t really explored...?


TB: Yeah, especially because by the time these stories are passed down to other people, everybody has sort of imbued them with their own narrative and made it into a personal story, so often the facts turn out to be really surprising.

CvB: Right. I’ll say to my mother, “Yeah, you know it sounds like the mafia,” and she says “It’s not the mafia, he wasn’t in the mafia, he just went to collect a debt!” It’s like, Mom, he just went to collect a debt? Come on. You’re in the Bronx during Prohibition, dealing in alcohol and fireworks.


TB: You talked to me about the Visconti-Sforza deck. Are there any other decks that you really admire?

CvB: You know, when I did the research I looked at many, and it astounded me at how many decks there are. Some of them are really beautiful and some of them are kind of haphazardly put together.


TB: I keep forgetting that this was a while ago for you.

CvB: I know, I’m so sorry. I probably should have gone back and done a little research and pulled my files before I talked to you. I have a whole file, I did a lot of research, and I did look at a lot of decks. You know I actually had to have a lot of these paintings that don’t have the characters on them. That’s another thing, I would have loved to have characters on all of them.


TB: Yeah, I have to say I was initially disappointed when I first heard that the Minor Arcana cards didn’t have characters of their own. But now I think that the inclusion of quotes for each card is a really brilliant idea because it really provides a memorable hook for each one.

CvB: Exactly. Okay, my four most favorite cards that I had to illustrate were: The Emperor, The Empress, The Magician, and the Tower.


TB: There are so many different kinds of scenes portrayed here. Some are just portraits but others are like little action scenes. So you really do get a glimpse of a full range of your painting style, because you wind up having to do different things to make each card stand out.

CvB: Right, and there are little details on a lot of these cards, whether it be a rabbit or a bird or something in it, and it all has meaning for that card. So when I was doing my research I tried to get all of the symbols in. To try and assemble things which have something to do with this character or the card.


TB: I know you didn’t choose who would appear on which card, but at least it appears that A. Bronwyn Llewellen put a lot of thought into them.

CvB: Right, right. I definitely think she did. I agreed with a lot of her choices. Most of the choices I thought were pretty good and the connections was actually pretty interesting. And I really was able to just do whatever I wanted as far as the imagery, which was good. I’m looking at the cards now. Oh, the Hermit. I do like the Hermit.


TB: The Hermit really surprised me because I was expecting someone like Prospero to show up in the Hermit card. At first when I saw Caliban instead, I thought, “Wow, I don’t know if I really get that.” But within seconds I recognized it as a bold choice and a beautiful picture, and so I thought, “You know, rock on, that’s amazing.” And then when I saw Prospero on the Temperance card instead, I thought, “Well now I have nothing to complain about. It all comes together.”

CvB: It was really fascinating. You know, that’s one of the things that I like. I do fine art as well, but one of the things I really like about being an illustrator is to learn about things. You know, I will get an assignment to do something and it’s something I may not know too much about, but I learn because I have to research it, and it’s just fascinating to me. I think you can probably tell from my cards and see what I was looking at when I painted them. You know, I was probably looking at certain decks and thinking “Oh, I really like this,” and then steal an idea here, steal an idea there.


TB: The fact that the backs of cards are mostly black seems to give them additional weight. They just look more mysterious. And the background on a lot of the Trump cards is a black night sky.

CvB: If you look at the card carefully, it’s not just blacked out. It’s actually painted, you can see the texture in it a little bit. I like it that they didn’t just use the black ink.


TB: You’re right, I’m looking at a card right now and I can definitely see it.

CvB: I wanted the texture to show, because that’s the one thing I really liked about the Sforza deck. I really loved the texture of them, and I wanted my deck to have that. I got excited because the publisher said I could include a 3-D element in the cover illustration, the picture of Shakespeare. My parents have this tiny Old World globe. And I wanted to have that kind of floating in front of him -- a real globe floating in front of him, like he’s levitating it.

So I had my parents send it to me, and it never actually got to me! You know, I couldn’t find it, and I had this really horrible, evil landlord in my loft. Well, later I found the box in the hallway of my loft, so I think that my landlord stole the globe! He was just a horrible man and he stole my globe. I know he stole my globe. So they’d said I could use the 3-D on the cover, and I was going to do it, but then I didn’t have the globe so I couldn’t do it. I was just looking at the cover and I was just remembering that and how mad I was when he stole my globe.


TB: That’s terrible. I guess you’ve still got a tribute to the globe there on the cover, except for every time you look at it you’re just going to remember how that guy stole your globe.

CvB: Yeah, it’s true. Later I found one somewhere else, so I just bought it and thought, “Okay, I’m just gonna keep this around. Someday when I need a globe for a painting, I’ll have one.” But you know I was on such a tight deadline at the time that I didn’t have time to go and find another one. I had to just to not do it. But speaking of thieves. He reminds me of certain evil characters.


TB: [Laughs]

CvB: He’s like an evil character from a Charles Dickens novel. Or like a troll!

Previous Interviews On Arcanalogue

Summary only...

INTERVIEW - The Terrible Tenderness of Beth Cavener Stichter

We often refer to an artist's subject as being "captured" in the work, but this expression has never been more true than in the zoomorphic sculpture of Beth Cavener Stichter. "On Tender Hooks", the artist's new exhibition at NYC's Claire Oliver Gallery, is a menagerie of all-too human struggles in the form of animals pinned or posed on the walls like heavy stoneware butterflies. The creatures seem to be complicit in their own display, some presenting their weaknesses vainly, others piteously.

I attended Cavener Stichter's opening reception last week. Upon entering I was greeted by the example above, "Humiliation By Design," which seems to bemoan the deceptively simple mechanics of impossible situations -- I couldn't help recalling the Waite-Smith deck's Eight of Swords. Just around the corner, however, you'll find the ultimate expression of freedom in the form of "A Rush of Blood to the Head". The centerpiece of the show, this six-foot sculpture stars two (extremely) male goats locked in embrace, their mouths sealed together passionately. I'm very excited to present this conversation with the artist, in which she comments at length upon her strange beasts and the even stranger humans who behold them.


Tom Blunt: You say that these are actually portraits of humans. Can you explain what led you to abandon the human form in favor of animals?

Beth Cavener Stichter: There is a sense of Otherness when you see something that isn't quite normal; when I was doing more human figurative work, I would slightly distort body shapes, and as soon as I did, people would stop identifying with the images. They didn't want to imagine that altered figure as themselves. It didn't take much – even sheer nakedness would become alienating. In order to try to coax people into empathizing with the work, I switched to using the animal form to express the human condition.

People often ask me, "How do you know animal anatomy so well?" and I just chuckle. If you were to see a real goat next to my sculptures, you'd see that something is terribly wrong. These figures are human bodies that have been subtly morphed into other creatures. They have belly-buttons, collarbones, and surgical scars that I bear on my own body. Most of them have human genitalia. A good deal of the time, these details escape immediate notice.


TB: Certain animals recur often in your work, such as rabbits and goats. How do you determine which animal you'll use to capture a particular person or trait?

BCS: It all stems back to when I was a really young -- we moved every two years of my life, all the way up until high school. I was always in different schools, which meant I would always be the outsider, the stranger. In response I developed a defense mechanism in order to classify people into groups, in order to figure out how I fit into that situation -- more subconsciously than consciously. Since I was a child at the time, these categories were defined in terms of animals, because all the picture books I read categorized human behavior this way. You know, the pigs are this human character type, the wolves are this other type. I'm interested now in what that says about the person making the distinctions rather than the animal being personified.

When I was in graduate school I decided to make the shift into using animal forms, but I was worried about doing it because there are so many animals and cultural associations with particular species – how would I establish developed characters if I used a random animal every time? So I chose three distinct animals that would embody three different personality types: the victim, the bully, and the manipulator. At the time I chose the hare, the wild boar, and the goat to represent those three character types. They were way over-simplified, but it was fun to subvert that – how could I make a manipulative victim? Or a bully-manipulator?


TB: We spoke a little about the book Geek Love, which you claimed as one of your favorites. I'm curious about the ways in which your appreciation for horror has manifested in these deceptively sinister sculptures.

BCS: I love to read more than anything else. I've been drawn to horror because of the intense psychological profiles of its characters -- you have to care about them before it's truly horrible to watch what they do. However, my favorite novels aren't horror novels at all, but ones that really get you inside the characters heads, and make you feel and think like another person and really intensely share their experience. I think as a young person growing up, horror novels were an introduction to that kind of character development.

That was a big move in my own work, too. When I first started making work, I felt I had to tell people what to think. If I wanted to, say, talk about a primal element that's hidden inside, I would marry a primal element with an image of a human. The hybrid figures I made early on were all about that. But it was definitely hitting people over the head with a baseball bat: "Here is my message! And I'll even title it for you so that you'll understand it!" It wasn't until I started applying to graduate schools, where you have to write about what it is you're trying to say, that I realized that I was more drawn to things that were subtle and sneaky and sinister in some way. And they're sinister because they're quiet… I'd rather bait my hook with something that's alluring but still has that sharp, pointy jab. You can't just stick a bare hook in the water and expect to catch anything with it.


TB: You described yourself to me as shy. People have incredibly visceral reactions to the sight of animals in peril, so I have to wonder: do you ever become self-conscious about making, presenting, and defending work that you know will incur dramatic emotional reactions?

BCS: Not when I'm making them, ever. But boy do I build up a lot of anxiety standing in front of the work while people have that emotional reaction directed at me. I've had people approach me near tears, or wanting to mother me, or claim an emotional intimacy with me because of something they've felt in the work. I love that they felt that, but I get alarmed when it's directed at me.


TB: You've described your medium (clay) as having placed you in an artistic ghetto, one that is usually considered a means to "craft" or "design" rather than "art." Can you explain the challenge this has posed to you as an artist?

BCS: I'm cautious about framing my work in an environment that's primarily devoted to design. Up until now I've been shown with other clay artists, so sometimes I'm sitting next to pots and functional work -- which is just a weird context in which to say the things I'm trying to say. I love my fellow clay artists, they've been a very supportive and awesome community, but it's been important step in my career to find a gallery that would represent me, not as a material specific artist but as a sculptor.


TB: Do you ever consider switching to a medium that doesn't carry this association?

BCS: I do have an intense preference for this material; clay is so much like flesh. When I'm working with it, it's as close as you can get to molding another person's body. It responds to touch, it remembers your fingers… everything about it is so sensual. Creating a human form (which, again, is essentially what I'm doing) out of any other material would feel like secondary translation. Which is not to say that I won't work with other materials. I love working with metals, for example -- the way that they change over time and react to the environment. But those other media will always be supplementary.

I’m really excited about my new representation with the Claire Oliver Gallery in Chelsea. I think it’s going to open so many possibilities for the work- both in material, concept, and audience. Showing alongside the kind of talent she has in the gallery, I am more than ready to see how that pushes my work -more risk-taking, experimentation with materials, and a new way of looking at the way that my pieces interact with a specific audience. I am ready to travel into those dark places in my head that I have been afraid to enter- I both excited and nervous to see what the next 5 years will bring.


TB: Seeing [the work] in person at the Claire Oliver Gallery, it really struck me that while "A Rush of Blood to the Head" is obviously an earnest expression of sexuality, it is foremost an earnest expression of love. And I think that's what seems to win people over -- it's shocking at first, but the longer you look at it, the less dirty it seems. Does this mesh with your hopes for the piece? Do the reactions to "Rush of Blood" seem different than the reactions to other pieces in the show?

BCS: Quite a few of the works in the exhibition deal with some of my own personal struggles in my career as an artist as well as the personal and autobiographical stories. The smaller works in particular seem to provoke a distanced or thoughtful reaction from the viewer rather than evoke a moment of intimacy. The three larger works are meant to engage this more visceral sense of empathy- using both human scale, gesture, and an indirect gaze to seduce the viewer into a sympathetic state. As a group, the medium and smaller pieces in the show return the gaze of the viewer, addressing the frame of the space and the context of the encounter in a confrontational manner. These emotional states require another's presence on which to focus their attention. Conversely, all three of the larger works are locked in private inward moments.

"A Rush of Blood to the Head" is the centerpiece of the entire exhibition, because more than any of the other pieces, the sculpture of the two kissing goats deals with something that is profoundly human. The kiss is specifically a gesture of human intimacy. The passion and tenderness of the embrace is likely to provoke a sentimental response, despite the fact that is completely unnatural for two animals to display affection with their mouths in a kiss. When you are just looking at the upper half of the goats, you are dealing with issues of human intimacy and passion that are identifiable by almost anyone. But then we come back to that initial reaction - why does viewing the sculpture in its entirety so often change the viewer’s reaction? When you are viewing the sculpture as a whole, it addresses a complex and controversial social issue which everyone is familiar with. My goal was to make this piece as alluring and passionate as possible, so that there’s always an element that calls to people to remain engaged despite any uncomfortable feelings with its sexuality.

The initial impulse for creating these sculptures is the struggle to overcome my own assumptions about the thoughts, motivations, and feelings contained beneath the surface of the people around me. I am often tangled in a mess of frustration with my own limited experiences, inhibitions, fears, and prejudices that create a barrier between understanding and communicating with the people around me - whether they be strangers or my closest acquaintances.

What really drives the work is the attempt to lure others into confronting these same issues. This is the main reason that I shifted from using the human form to the animal figure. In my experience, I found that most people empathized more readily with animals than humans. There is an assumed moral and emotional innocence that we associate with the animal image which allows me to delve into territory which we normally find too uncomfortable to dwell on. I want to create images that address some tough questions, while at the same time addressing why we find these questions uncomfortable.

Photograph © Beth Cavener Stichter 2009

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