"You Want to Travel With Her, and You Want to Travel Blind..."

If it seems I've relied heavily on musical personae to describe the cards of this cycle, it shouldn't be too surprising. It's widely believed that our conscious mind communicates with the unconscious via symbols, and that "language" is not a purely visual one by any means. Each of our senses serves as a mediator between our ego and our innermost self, though they work best in concert.

Even the most transcendent experiences begin as a mere exploration of one's senses. In 1965 Leonard Cohen composed a surprisingly elaborate portrait of his encounters with Montreal bohemian Suzanne Verdal (pictured above):

"Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that shes half crazy
But thats why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China..."

The famous song that resulted, "Suzanne," employs sense-memory to transport us to a unique moment between two specific people, but Cohen infused his lyrics with such timeless symbolic resonance that the entire world's imagination was captured; "Suzanne" become a popular cover song, and to date has been recorded by dozens of other artists. (My favorite version, by Nina Simone, who herself starred as the last cycle's Princess of Wands.)

While few would debate Cohen's songwriting prowess, in this case he had a hell of a muse. The real-life Suzanne shares her own account of the time they spent together here and here. Forty years have gone by and she still hasn't traded in her rags and feathers for more conventional attire; Verdal is homeless, making do as best she can somewhere in California. You could say that the only steady thing in Verdal's world is her unwavering commitment to an unfettered life filled with adventure and creativity, no matter what the outcome; this is inspiring, but also challenging for most people to accept. That is the magic of symbolism for you; it survives and influences us regardless of what reality presents us with in the end.

This crossroads between potential and reality, including all the personal triumphs and grave dangers that await us there, is the sovereign territory of the Princess of Wands. On the surface she might seem frustratingly impulsive, but it's all part of a larger agenda. By disrupting life's predictible patterns, she creates more opportunities for discovery, for mutation. She may eventually have to cool it and settle down (somewhat) in order to function in the long term, but by then she'll have provided herself a full range of options to choose from -- and even if the outcome doesn't wind up being quite what she expected, she'll at least know that she had a major hand in choosing her fate. Or in the words of a far less subtle songwriter whose song was also frequently covered:

"...For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught.
To say the things he truly feels;
And not the words of one who kneels.
The record shows I took the blows -
And did it my way."

Previously on Arcanalogue...