Strength - "Weird Fishes/Arpeggios" by Radiohead

[This is the only song in the entire playlist that seemed like a complete stretch to me, in that none of the visual elements of the card seem to match up. However, the song does seem to be about submission and surrender, which is interesting. Someone recently told me that she considered the "strength" in question to actually be beauty -- both the lion and the woman are beautiful, and recognizing each other's beauty, they discover a commonality that creates perfect peace between them.]

In the deepest ocean
The bottom of the sea
Your eyes
They turn me
Why should i stay here?
Why should i stay?
I'd be crazy not to follow
Follow where you lead

Your eyes
They turn me
Turn me on to phantoms
I follow to the edge of the earth
And fall off
Yeah, everybody leaves
If they get the chance
And this is my chance
I get eaten by the worms
And weird fishes
Picked over by the worms
And weird fishes
Weird fishes
Weird fishes

I hit the bottom
Hit the bottom and escape
I hit the bottom
Hit the bottom to escape
Escape

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Aesop's Fables - Strength

(Click here for large version)

One thing about these fables that blew my mind as a kid was how certain astonishing details were presented casually, with zero explanation. For example, you are just grubbing along trying to make a living and then one day a lion decides he wants to marry your daughter. It's the kind of thing that would never occur to a parent to worry about. Or, as the story tactfully says, "The old people did not know what to say."

Even as a child I knew I'd like this story more if the lion had actually gotten the girl in the end. It is never really explained why the lion is considered an unsuitable mate; he's a king, he socializes with humans fairly well, he goes to great lengths to prove his devotion. In fact, the girl's feelings for the lion are never mentioned, and no contact between them is ever described. I'd like to consider the Strength card either a prequel or sequel to the actual tale, in which we witness their initial meeting -- or perhaps their elopement.

Previously On Arcanalogue: Strength

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"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, it turns out that I'm 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 write, and she's never let that one go. And meanwhile I've posted comments about my personal life on various Internet forums that would flatten her if she read them. My professional writing projects have included things like horror movie interviews, bar reviews, and 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. We worshiped and envied these magical adult superpowers. The general consensus among adults was 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, heavy on the pyrotechnics -- 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 earshot. 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 mom at twenty-three. My grandmother, Mina, suffered a brain event while babysitting my cousin and I, a slovenly pair of three-year-olds. My memory of that day is faint but it exists: Mina's phone call to my aunt when she felt something strange coming on, we kids 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 whisked to the hospital. My aunt prepared a pensive Spaghetti-O lunch while I sat at the dining room table with my coloring book. 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 in the background of my awareness, a young mother of two (with a third on the way -- meaning she’d already spent the better part of two years pregnant, or caring for a infant, or both) was struggling to survive a major crisis, while I scooped gravel in the yard. Meals were still served. Books were read aloud at sunset. They say kids are scarily observant, but that vision is terribly myopic. Wbe mom explained to me that Grandma had died, I’m sure I understood the sadness and finality of it, but there are Pink Panther cartoons that left a deeper impressions 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 trip over partially-exposed fossils of memory, old loves and hurts that were flash-frozen and preserved intact, perfectly incorruptible. What am I supposed to do in these moments -- leave the remains where they lay and walk a wide berth around them? Can I dig them out and take them with me, or do they belong to the place where I found them? Neither of us seem to know.

One night on the phone, Mom described 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 Mina there to help. “Wow, I never thought of that before,” I said, delicately. I was afraid 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. “I even had to do her makeup for the funeral?”

And before either of us quite knew what was happening, Mom began telling the story, tying odds and ends of details together like rag-bundles. She told me about being at the hospital with her father and brother during Mina's final hours , translating the doctor's medical terminology into plain speech they could understand. She told me about the shock that came days later, when the three of them arrived at the funeral home to view the body: her mother’s corpse on display, exactly as it had been discharged from the hospital -- no “naturalistic” makeup, no makeup of any kind actually. No hairstyling, no pursed smile of eternal rest. Just this unkempt thing stuffed into her mother’s clothes. Something no one was ever meant to behold. A beautiful woman, Mina had been quite vain about her looks, and she had died in her prime, her early forties. To my mother, the thought of displaying such an unrecognizable ruin before an audience of loved ones was utterly offensive. It was an assault against a person who was not there to defend herself.

She told me how the funeral director apologized, informing her that they simply had no cosmeticians on staff. 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 the rest of the family'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 something terribly wrong with presenting the bereaved -- whom were even now streaming into town to pay their final respects -- with a virtually unprepared cadaver. 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 parents’ house, where she gathered up armloads of the dead woman’s cosmetics. She plundered rooms and drawers where the smell of hairspray still lingered, rounding up the powders and cremes and devices of Mina’s daily beauty regimen. She told me how she drove back to the funeral parlor in a frenzy, hellbent on recreating from scratch a woman whom, until quite recently, would never be seen in public without lipstick. And about how upsetting it was to learn, firsthand, while painting her own mother, that cosmetics designed for living flesh don't actually do much for 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 inhabited the silence: one resting in death, one (my unborn sister) standing by patiently, 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 canvas that greeted guests that afternoon may not have been a masterpiece, but as a 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 stammered, “Jesus, Mom. Why didn’t you ever tell me this story before?”

“Oh, you know," she sighed. "I guess I mostly just try not to think about it too much...” She laughed again hesitantly, 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 laughed, sniffling. “Isn't 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 these artifacts are not my property, that she'll always keep the choicest bits under lock and key, details 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, even though you'd probably never read this far down the page in a story about yourself. For the record, 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

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Strength - VIII

1. Courage
2. Joy and excitement
3. Exploring the unknown.

-- David Allen Hulse, The Western Mysteries

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"Deliciously Painstaking, Yet Practically Effortless..."

Any portrait is just as much a reflection on the artist and viewer as it is on the subject it portrays, and the work of Brandon Bird is no exception. At first I was afraid that using his painting Killing Machine (which, as you can plainly see, shows the late great Bea Arthur taking down a velociraptor) as my Strength card would be a cop-out, just a visual gag riffing on the classical image associated with the card. I mean, I probably still would've done it. I'd just have felt a little bad for hitting you a grounder.

As I explored Bird's work further, however, I discovered that a great many of his paintings seem to evoke this symbolic struggle between the human over the inhuman. Take this picture of Christopher Walken serenely tinkering with an android, for example. Or Spiderman being wrestled to the ground. Or Sir Ian McKellen lording it over a bunch of playful ducklings. (And don't even get me started with this drawing...)

It turns out that the artist's own ongoing struggle to discipline himself and master his animal instincts seems to play out again and again, quite nakedly. I'd be curious to learn more about his process, from inspiration to finished product; the concept and pop-cultural contents of each piece seem to occur to him quite readily, but as oil paintings their execution must be quite challenging, probably demanding a great deal of concentration and attention to detail. Each finished piece is a victory of his artistic discipline over the frivolity of his chosen subject, and I think that's what makes his paintings valuable. They appear to be deliciously painstaking, yet practically effortless.

In a reading, the Strength card encourages or acknowledges the cultivation of this virtue as a badge of maturity, one that must be earned before taking on the more abstract challenges awaiting beyond the horizon. How do you know when you've achieved it? Take a good look at the expression on Bea's face -- when you can stare down your own crippling fears, desires, and distractions with that kind of cool confidence and self-awareness, you'll know that you're ready to move on to the big leagues. If you're already riding pretty high on the raptor, then you may want to start packing your bags: a period of profoundly earnest contemplation (see the Hermit) is coming up, which will inform your next steps into the great unknown.

Previously On Arcanalogue: Strength

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STRENGTH

Classically, Strength was the eighth card in the Major Arcana. In the early 20th century, Aleister Crowley posited all sorts of astrological reasons why it should be the eleventh card instead, switching places with Justice. I have often looked back and forth trying to decide which way makes more sense, but unfortunately I'm cursed with enough perspective and imagination to end up with the expert opinion that both interpretations are 100% correct. If you need a more rational, cut-and-dried answer than that, well the Tarot is really going to make your head hurt.

Wherever it ends up, the Strength card is all about taming your wilder instincts. Traditionally a maiden is shown peacefully lording it over a lion, but for our purposes I've decided to hilight the bravery of Adam Warwick, a biologist who saved a black bear from drowning this month. The bear had been hit with a tranquilizer dart, but then it made a sudden break for the nearby shore, not realizing that it was moments from slipping into unconsciousness. Warwick's immediate professional response was to attempt something no common bystander would dare -- he followed it into the water and eased the sleepy bear back to land. These photos and video delighted and awed people all over the world; they tap into an ancient fascination that humans have with dangerous beasts made temporarily humble and harmless.

This card introduces a level of maturity and grace that we attain naturally as we evolve. Suddenly we notice that we have a great deal of control over urges and actions than we ever thought possible; as the master of our own domain, we suddenly have a great deal of power over how much pleasure we feel and how much pain we can tolerate. As we privately discover this threshold, we toy with our new abilities and explore ourselves and each other as if for the first time -- it's no wonder that Crowley renamed the card "Lust." While the experience is universal, some people go through this phase earlier or later than others-- when did you? Perhaps that can be how you decide whether this card ought to be numbered eight or eleven! [Via]

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