The Last Judgment - "Lucky" by Radiohead

[A wave of relief optimism arrives as life ends and the weary traveler approaches his destination.]

I'm on a roll,
I'm on a roll this time.
I feel my luck could change.

Kill me sarah,
kill me again with love.
It's gonna be a glorious day.

Pull me out of the aircrash,
pull me out of the lake,
'cause I'm your superhero.
We are standing on the edge.

The head of state
has called for me by name
but I don't have time for him.
It's gonna be a glorious day!
I feel my luck could change.

Pull me out of the aircrash,
pull me out of the Wake,
'cause I'm your superhero.
We are standing on the edge.

We are standing on the edge.

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"Straight-Acting"

This is the fourteenth 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 met Earl late one night in 2003 when I was cruising gay chat-rooms on the Internet. Within minutes we figured out that we lived just one block away from each other -- we were typing from less than a hundred feet apart. In the spirit of adventure, he jovially invited me over for a beer. Whatever sexual strings might be attached were not discussed, so I figured I had better be prepared for nearly anything. I wrote down his address on a scrap of paper and left it on my pillow where my roommate could find it if I never turned up again. Three minutes later I was with Earl in his apartment.

He was as handsome as his photograph, a dying art in the world of online hook-ups. He was my age and seemed, in the parlance of hook-up culture, “straight-acting.” Over beers he talked to me a lot about law school and the time he spent studying abroad. He was so warm and engaging that I wasn’t alarmed in the slightest when asked if I “wanted to take some pills” with him. He was just being a good host, I reassured myself. When I demurred he merely shrugged and set to work crushing up the mystery pills with a paperweight on his desk so he could snort them. Already considering the evening’s social experiment a success but not wanting to push my luck, I yawned and made a gracious exit.

Earl and I hung out several more times in short succession, usually over drinks at a local bar. His easygoing nature made it unclear whether he was even remotely attracted to me, and naturally I was reluctant to find out otherwise, so I didn’t push it. When one of my emails and then the follow-up message I sent a few weeks later both went ignored, I figured I had my answer, along with a reminder that chance friendships have their own hyper-accelerated natural life-spans.

Not long ago I met a gentleman at a bar who was from Savannah, Georgia. “I used to know someone from Savannah,” I told him. “Maybe you know Earl?” And that’s how I found out that my old friend had been dead this whole time, nearly six years.

Earl, I learned from my new friend at the bar, came from a prestigious Savannah family for whom a gay son would have been a crushing liability. Well aware that there were eyes and ears and mouths even in New York City that, in one way or another, had connections back home, he was compelled to keep an extremely small and tidy closet. He surrounded himself with beautiful women and straight male friends, publicly dating the former whenever necessary and hiding in plain sight among the latter. Earl avoided making homosexual friends, and had only officially “come out” to one or two people in the whole world. I’d just happened to end up small-talking with one of them.

One evening in 2004, not long after he and I had met for the last time, Earl fell off the roof of an apartment building on the Lower East Side. It was one of those huge parties where people go up to the roof to smoke, and since everyone smokes, everyone is on the roof, laughing and screaming at the skyline and having the time of their over-indulgent young lives. There is drunken horseplay. In rare cases, I have heard, it is possible for a young man, even a second-year student in a prominent law program, to misjudge the true distance between two rooftops, to decide that he could easily leap from one to the other, to inadvertently cast himself into the alleyway like one more crumpled, empty wrapper.

I vividly remember a dream I once had in which my great-grandmother showed up at a family wedding, but refused to come all the way into the chapel. She paced back in forth in the foyer wringing her hands and protesting tearfully that no one had remembered to invite her. It was true, no one had, because she’d been dead for nearly a year. Upon waking up I realized that it was exactly a year ago, to the day, since I'd attended her funeral.

From that morning on, I always sort of assumed that people have a way of unconsciously keeping tabs on one another, even across unpardonable distances. During this encounter with a stranger in a crowded bar, during which our forgotten beers warmed in their bottles, I felt the subtle strings of that web winding around me again. To this stranger I was an important find -- I was proof that Earl had at least been secretly exploring, reaching out over the squalid Internet in the wee hours of the night, making contact, perhaps even having sex. I was evidence that Earl had lived, in some small way, as himself.

For me, there was only a grief gone stale before it could even be felt. Walking home that night I wondered if I’d ever remember anything about Earl except those messages I’d sent over the years, shout-outs no eyes had ever seen. Or the occasional fruitless searches on sites like Facebook -- fruitless because the person I was looking for had long since ceased to exist. It had been so easy to let it go after a few cursory attempts; to release Earl to what I assumed was a busy, illustrious life. If I’d been just a little more curious, I’d have had no trouble finding the page set up by his family to memorialize his “tragic accident.”

It’s hard not to grow bitter, reading those two words repeated over and over in comments posted years ago by people who had never known, would never know the truth. Tragic accident. As if the only the fall itself had been tragic, independent of anything leading up to it. As if some accidents could not be predicted with terrible accuracy by those in possession of more facts.

I wish I’d known them myself when it could have still mattered. But I must admit it was nice of Earl to circle back around anyway, after all this time, to let me know in his way.

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Aesop's Fables - The Last Judgment

(Click here for large version)

In today's version of the Judgment card, it's the trumpeter himself who is judged. Let that be a lesson to any of us who feel we are beyond reproach!

That being said, the beautifully concise moral "Words may be deeds" sets us off down the slippery slope which holds us accountable for our own mistakes down to a practically cellular level, regardless of whether this is just.

The post-apocalyptic awakening of souls for judgment that the card usually portrays has fallen out of favor in many modern interpretations, most notably in the Thoth deck version which was renamed "The Aeon." The newer versions describe the great reckoning as a purely internal affair. We judge ourselves, we take "a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves," as they say in AA. Whereas that's only the fourth step in the recovery process, it's the penultimate step in the cycle of Tarot trumps -- once you have endured judgment by the higher power of your choosing, you are free to ascend to the promised land, graduating out of this world and setting out into a new one. (The Tarot's metaphor applies more to life as it's actively being lived than to what comes at the end of it.)

As much as we'd like to rely on ourselves to navigate these proceedings, it can be profoundly helpful to have some sort of person, belief or idea or idea to reach out to, someone who will advocate for us and ensure that the trial we're undergoing is a fair one. Our poor trumpeter certainly learned this the hard way...

Speaking of trumpeters, don't miss this video. Before 22-year-old assistant band director Brandon Franklin was shot dead this last May, he had casually mentioned to his boss that, were he to die, he'd want "all the bands" to play at his funeral. After his tragic shooting, nearly 300 band members assembled in tribute. The resulting cacophony is a wondrous and cleansing thing, perhaps it will move you to turn your gaze inward, to sort out what you can, while you can:

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Last Judgment

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"Before The Lights Go Out, Before The Flames Can Claim You..."

No one will ever know you as well as you know yourself. Even so, there are curtains drawn around certain truths that shelter you from your own true nature -- they keep you from confronting what you really are and the true meaning of your life. Every now and then, that curtain is torn aside just long enough for us to glimpse ourselves; accepting what we see there can be painful, but the process is an enlightening and inescapable part of life. The greater your capacity for truth, the more of it you will find. The distance your eyes and mind can see outward is equivalent to the distance that they can look inward.

This ultimately defines mankind's concept of "destiny": what we see coming, based on what we know about ourselves -- or what we don't see coming, because of what we refuse to confront. A well-told story entreats its audience to judge characters in ways that neither the characters or audience can judge themselves; it's a symbolic rehearsal for the great cosmic judgment foretold by so many of the world's religions, except we cast ourselves as the gods and our fictional characters stand in for humanity. We play at being Anubis, weighing the hearts of "people" like Atticus Finch against a feather, deciding who is redeemable and who is lost. The more complex a character is, the harder it is to judge -- the challenge this presents is delicious to us.

In the comic Backstage by Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt, we're briefly introduced to an aging burlesque performer named Scarlett O'Herring, a bawdy fire-eater who has clawed and fornicated her way into the spotlight. However, Scarlett's act goes tragically awry before the details of her life and times can be fully explored -- hence the glory of Scarlett Takes Manhattan, a new graphic novel which recounts her backstory in lascivious detail. As the lowly charwoman Shifra Helfgott reinvents herself as a Gilded Age sex symbol, we observe her make all of the decisions that seal her fate, including the moment when she first entertains the notion of fire as an artistic medium.

Self-reflection isn't Scarlett's strong suit, but death tends to arrive on wings of awareness -- at least, that's what we can determine from accounts of near-death experiences -- so who knows what state her soul was in when she met her fate... Death also transforms the lives of those left behind, briefly parting those curtains I mentioned above and dishing out powerful, essential truths. However, one needn't wait for an experience with death; we blunder into powerful revelations unexpectedly on our own from time to time, or grow into them slowly; they can even be summoned or induced when the need is great. Regardless of how you approach it, the ultimate truth is waiting to be known.

As you can imagine, this card wields great power in a reading. It's a riddle, and solving it means finally being able to proceed to the next phase of life with all of your elements neatly arranged and within reach -- nothing hidden or shoved under the bed. Consider this a sort of fire drill for when your own story ends: if there's anything that you know you're ultimately going to have to face up to, you may as well begin working on it before the lights go out, before the flames can claim you.

(Oh, and while working on this post, I found that this Scarlett illustration bears an uncanny resemblance to the Thoth deck's Judgment card. Wild!)

Previously On Arcanalogue: Judgment

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The Last Judgment - XX

1. The final decision
2. Release from restraints
3. Change of roles.

-- David Allen Hulse, The Western Mysteries

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JUDGMENT

Don't be alarmed! Underneath the makeup, this Angel of Death is just an ordinary man: renowned character actor Doug Jones. You might recognize his face (parts of it, anyway) from movies such as Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy, and many other strange, imaginative projects. I recently interviewed him about his work on Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, in which he plays three different otherworldly beings, including the Angel above. It's fascinating to imagine lining up all of the characters he's played and introducing them to each other; they'd look practically nothing alike, each of them would move and communicate completely differently, but deep inside, invisible beneath all that latex and CGI, they are all the same man, all projections of the same psyche.

The Judgment card ("The Last Judgment" in some decks, or "The Aeon" in Crowleyan decks) almost always features an angel; some decks take the apocalyptic thing all the way, showing humans rising from their graves and ascending to Heaven. Whether or not you believe that will happen, all of us arrive at points where we must finally confront our true nature. Perhaps this happens at death, but it definitely happens during other significant moments in our lives, whenever long journeys conclude. We peel back the disguises we've adopted along the way and discard the weapons we've wielded-- what use are they against ourselves? We judge ourselves unflinchingly, eliminating anything that obstructs our view as we peer at the heart of our being, and then as bravely and gracefully as possible, we face the truth.

How does that feel? For some, there is wailing and gnashing. Others feel redeemed, unburdened. Either way, this is the second-to-last card in the Major Arcana, meaning one whole cycle has nearly completed. At least when you start the next one, you'll know (briefly, at least) exactly what you have to work with-- what you are. In Doug Jones' case, he may spend hours becoming physically immersed in a stranger's body, followed by even more time spent acting and thinking as another being-- but at the end of every day he must peel all of that away return to the facts of his life, to his true identity. Are you prepared to do the same?

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