The Perversion of Hands

I first learned to shuffle cards during a brief hospital stay. A windowpane by my sick-corner showed the sky perfectly clear. The sun was doubled in pain. Nothing moved in the room but the cards, nothing sounded but the flat slap of cards in perfect rhythm. Supine, I managed to choreograph the slip of fingers and the pressing of palms until the cards defied gravity. Now I can shuffle cards on my back, over my head, upside down- it makes a great party trick. This perversion of our hands must be played with, a triumph of the tactile against an endless sea of surfaces.

I taught myself to shuffle because I was bored and my bruise was bored, a brackish pool of listless blood, anxious under my skin bruise. The shuffling came from passivity, because I had learned to prefer the kind of time that we find through touch: A driver thumbing his matchbook, a cup held aloft, a pencil placed in the hand, a sleeping dog swallowing against your touch. Between the rounds of one sleep or another, deck kept itself pressed between my hands. My fingers parted the cards even before my eyes could open and spent my waking hours shuffling the deck.The tide of the desire to touch carried me to wakefulness, my fingers coaxing the deck into lightness and movement. Shuffling for me became the twitch of blood when my body was dragged in from the ceremony of dreaming. The lip of injury reddened at its horizon, a good sign, the light flushed and swelling. In a flicker of carpals, I felt myself solidifying, returning to the carbon of what I lived.

The doctor says the pain will disappear and in time you won’t hear the wind calling from inside the bruise for more, begging for more over and over. The doctor says, “are you up are you rising are you in pain upon waking?” I wanted to reply, “imagine how your hands will change in a lifetime, innumerable folds, all the objects pressed between them.” Staring out the window and shuffling, I remember thinking : this square of outside is my only belonging, other than a deck of cards. Even though these layers, leafless branches against the sky will not save anyone from the catastrophe ahead, as a possession it is a kind of special knowledge. If touching involves knowing, you can collect the future in the dark by running your fingers along the edge of a table, a banister, a door frame, some shrubbery.

Aphasia machines

As both a sport and tool for divination, the Tarot is firstly a text, though an immeasurably and often deeply personal one. During a Tarot card reading, I expect to see my own story represented to me pictorially. What I see is a like a dream. In my singular tale I find nothing but echoes: dogs howling at the moon, a stony eyed sphinx, a woman sobbing, various mountains, bodies falling from a collapsing castle, children, hands, flames, a faceless traveler, a boat, and a pair of beggars, bandages, a rainbow, and a doorway. I see movement, stillness, celebration and despair. I share units of my story with all the other stories that came before, with all other simultaneous readers’ with a pack of cards in their pocket. I cannot say whether the cards mirror me or I perform the cards. There is no hint in the cards of my own unique subjectivity or my own competence as a reader. Nonetheless, I can say, “here is the issue that I face, here is the sacrifice, here is what I am becoming, and here I see desires, past, and opposition.” I know that the deck is just as aloof as any other language, but I cannot help but extricate my particulars from its endless ambiguities.

Italo Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies, created by and about the Tarot deck, ultimately performs the deck’s same grammatical juxtaposition of infinite repetition and infinite novelty. Calvino frames his narrative by introducing a group of wayfarers who have sought refuge from the enchanted forest in a castle where upon arriving, the travelers find that they, like the forlorn “blocked” writer have become mute. They must resort to a deck of Tarot cards to tell their tales. Each narrator’s tale unfolds as a sequence of cards is laid out, but because the number of cards at their disposal is limited to 78, the players of this silent game must assemble their tales in such a way as to intersect with the cards already played. Though Calvino’s formula is something that perhaps has not been seen from a literary perspective before, the Tarot deck has lasted for almost ten centuries as a literary machine, an endlessly permutational text. For Calvino, literature was a game. The Tarot too, originating from the Italian betting game Tarocchi, is a game, but one that is invested with an unexpected significance.

Though the Tarot deck has been used in contemporary literature as tool for creating narratives, it is also a model for the narrative, the apocryphal text, the hidden or sacred book.[1] The conception of the production of a new literature through the combination of predetermined elements could be criticized for reducing the text to a kind of formula, a violent structuralism that impoverishes the nuanced tones of fiction and experiences, one that cannot possibly believe that the a Tarot spread has any real correspondence with the vicissitudes of memory and desire. And yet all narrative, indeed all language comes from a limited catalogue. The alphabet itself is characterized by the paradoxical interplay between the uniformity of a grammatical system and the multiplicity of its manifestations. Similarly, the Tarot reflects the infinite potential inherent in the combinatory process by which fiction is generated. It is an encyclopedia of narrative, where included in each entry are references to another.

When the entire deck has been played, the arrangement of cards resembles a crossword puzzle composed of cards rather than letters. Soon enough, the main narrator or reader, discovers that “the stories told from left to right or from bottom to top can also be read from right to left or from top to bottom…and the same Tarot is used at the same time by narrators who set forth from the same cardinal points” (Calvino, 41). And so the narrator sets forth producing new stories from the ones already told, simply by reading in reverse. Toward the end of the book, the stories of Hamlet, Macbeth, and the Helen of Troy are “uncovered” in a staggering tour de force. The readers (both of the text and of the cards) must come to terms with a frightening sense that the combinatorial orgy of the deck does not just perform or produce stories, but perhaps contains the stories already told. It follows that the 78 cards surround all stories, those that might be told in the future and those that will never be told.

The silence of the Tarot’s images presents an opportunity, not only a replacement or compensation for a speech that is lost, but a new field, where stories mingle and glisten as they cannot do in other modes. The Tarot deck comes to us hushed, which is perhaps why the meaning of the symbols are considered secret. It is apparent in the tale that Calvino’s group of travelers has been struck dumb by some terrible, unnamed experience. The suggestion is that we can abstain from the excessive and illusory clarities of verbal language only through some kind of calamity, or here, through a shift beyond our own linguistic boundaries. These people along with other readers of the Tarot are not without language, but without a language they remember as their own. This is why Calvino’s narrator allows the look of the cards, rather than any kind of occult meaning speak to him (6). The urge to narrate survives and finds languages of its own, but the use of images to relate a story or situation to the reader is not simply representational. As such, the combinatorial rearrangement of these perceptions by use of metaphor and imagination works to form new poetic realities, rather than simply mirror them.

Calvino's interpretations are not simply imposed on the cards-not any cards would do for any story-but they are not simply taken from the cards either. The besieged city represented in the tarot of the World, for instance, is Pads and Troy, a celestial city in yet another story, and a subterranean city in still another one. The associative memories that create so many opportunities for reinterpretation may operate as a joke, like the magician’s staff resembling a ballpoint pen, or as an extension of a metaphorical universe, like the water in the card of the Star. To discover the (very different) watery associations of Ophelia and Lady Macbeth in a particular card, is not to read these cards according to an intention ascribed to them, it is to forget the stultified notion that name of the card The Star can actually capture anything.

When the ability to speak has withered, the ghosts that language leaves still linger. Whether cards or spoken words do the naming, there can nothing that a signifier ultimately refers to, except for loss. In other words, a signifier is a present absence. A signifier is something that takes the place for a remembered thing, and hence always connotes absence- the “something else” that is referred to, but never there. For Lacan, the absence, “this ‘something else’ completes the symbol, making language of it…the difference resides not in the sonorous quality of its matter, but in its vanishing being in which the symbol finds the permanence of the concept” (Ecrits, 64). Calvino, in a Lacanian vein, insists through the novel that even in a nonverbal system like the Tarot, meaningful relations of signification cannot exist; rather, there are only the negative relations, relations of value, where one signifier is what it is because it's not something else. Wherever Saussure supposes a signified to be, there is instead a lack, a lost possibility of signification (Ecrits, 140-145). And yet the sonorous matter of a word is the only presence that can be offered in place of this absence, an absence we would like to remember as once being full.

The desire that drives the mute travelers to recall takes the form of nostalgia, because it involves wishing for something that cannot and does not exist- whether it is the total memory of the aleph or an experience that exists as anything but narrative. Without the logical demands of verbal language, we cannot help but imagine what the systematics of the cards conceals, pieces of the possible discarded in a game of combinations. Nostalgia involves a sentimental remembering of what never was- the childhood that could not persist, relationships cut short, the wishing for a desired lover in the place of their absence. The silence of the cards, like the silence in the margins of a page, echoes the silent persistence of stories that we do not live, the memories that surge right up to the shore of awareness, only to ebb and subside forever. The point that nostalgia seeks here is in fact the very absence that generates desire.

In Calvino’s story, the travelers suffer from aphasia, the inability to speak- yet clearly their ability to recall and narrativize remains unscathed, even when the only language at their disposal is itself wordless. Language requires the ability to arrange and re-arrange letters and sounds into meaningful statements. Aphasia is the loss of the ability to re-arrange the bare elements of speech. However, similar to Calvino’s wayfarers’ tarot stories, Freud found that many aphasics were still able to produce some recurring utterances that bore witness to their earlier ability to speak. It was as if these linguistic capacities had retrograded to infantile babble and the repetitive utterances found in the speech of young children. In On Aphasia, Freud came to the conclusion that aphasia constitutes not merely a kind of forgetfulness but instead an aggravated form of recollection in which aphasics remember, so to speak, too much, condemned to the perpetual recurrence of one utterance at the expense of all others. As we find in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, the memory of language persists. The aphasic travelers are moved by the passion to keep quiet, plagued by nostalgia for speech, haunted by the phrases they may have once uttered.

Literature works by way of this nostalgia for that which cannot exist except in my imagination- memories of what was read can blend readily with memories of what was lived or dreamed. Robert Hass, in poem entitled “Meditation at Lagunitas” also frames the problem of signification in terms of memory. A modernist poet who found himself writing at a time when most theorists were debating the reliability or meaningfulness of signification, Hass was at a loss as how to treat words. He says:

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this is resembles the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea.

That the clown-faced

woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

Even the word blackberry itself, because of its inability to detain a signified, is borne from an eruption of nostalgia. The nostalgia of the signifier longs for a place suffused with authenticity- either a place of purely originary and unmediated meaning or for the absolute re-union of the signifier with itself, where the word become “elegy.” In On Longing Susan Stewart points out that either scenario comes from the same space of loss around which desire persists. She claims that: “The nostalgic dreams of a moment before knowledge and self consciousness that itself lives on only in the self consciousness of the nostalgic narrative” (23). Despite the Lacanian refusal of a direct signified, nostalgia closes the loop of the signification by remembering this linguistic gap as an absolute presence.

The desire of Calvino’s travelers to tell their stories is borne of a blind faith in the distance between what is recalled by a card (a signifier), and what is left ghosted. For Agamben, what is unsayable or immemorial is not what language cannot say, but that which it can only name: “Discourse cannot say what is named by the name.” What is named by the name is transmitted as unsayable and untransmittable. This is also the immemorial- what cannot be found in the utterance of a name or the sudden passing of a memory. “This structure can preserve itself only by remaining immemorial in memory.” All of knowledge, it would seem, is caught in a dialectic of recollecting and forgetting. (Agamben, 164) Memory is similarly arbitrary, yet its potency resides in this very disjunction between what actually happened, and everything that could have. For Hass, it matters not whether justice or woodpecker can ever properly refer to the world- we can never disentangle the words we speak from an immemorial gulf in which there is no language. Language is sodden with reminiscences and as such can never be univocally reliable.

The act of naming is crucial to the literary operations at work in the Tarot deck. Names such as The Lovers, Temperance, Three of Swords, seemingly aim to capture the final referent, the ultimate or purest manifestation of love, balance or heartbreak. Yet the silence of the cards, despite a tendency to act as words, is an ever present harbinger of the lack of fixity or closure in their mode of signification. The death card is unable to evoke the idea of death fully, because it cannot say what is named by the name Death. As such, the “forgetting” of death implicit in the act of naming it leads to a kind of generalized desire for a pre-nominal origin, an unmediated experience of oblivion, or at least a recollection of it. In other words, if to name something is also to forget it in some respects, then naming is complicit with the desire to forget either the signifier or the signified- simply so that it can be recollected again.

But as Hass finds, “thinking this way, everything dissolves” and in the voice of his friend, he “detects a thin wire of grief.” Poetry cannot ignore this nostalgia for what has been forgotten, a direct correspondence between words and things, a relationship that formally never existed. But for literary writing, the same problem is not regarded as something around which to maneuver. It seems that literature is primarily motivated by the same tendency as the Tarot - an infatuation (even if a tragically flawed or absurd one) with the name. If nostalgia is always for a place that has never existed, then the desire to name is also concomitant with the desire to return, to imagine the immemorial inability to speak, to touch the "before."

We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the
thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed.
There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Hass seems to insist the particularity of a word must be praised, despite the gap between a sign and what it signifies, because it is the ground that allows movement. The sign blackberry, as well as the Tarot cards, behaves like the aphasics’ “speech remnants”- they allude to the sublime immemoriality that accompanies much of our lives.

The travelers who tell their stories show that the urge to narrate is not first born from a urge to remember, but from a desire to forget. Thus, the way that the tarot deck is able to proliferate meaning comes from the erasure of speech. Muteness and remembrance are intimately mutual because by means of this exiled or forgotten language, the Tarot, we are more attentive to that which articulated language flattens or misses: silence, ambiguity, and the experience of the sublime. The fact that Calvino forces singular cards to be read in myriad ways attests to the silent and the immemorial: the stories that hide in or accompany the stories ostensibly being told. In the last chapter of The Castle of Crossed Destinies Calvino "discovers" the stories of Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, described as "Three Tales of Madness and Destruction," lurking among the tarot cards already laid out, already used for other stories. He can do this, of course, only if he and we are willing to believe that any story can be found in the tarot deck, even those we have known and forgotten already.

The idea of reading takes an interesting turn here. The images of the cards no longer suggest to us stories we do not know and must piece together, or stories we have lived and wish to communicate to others, but stories we have forgotten. We recover these forgotten stories, the ones we have already read, from the recesses of our memories in the images set before us. By means of accessing the pre-nominal silence that gives the cards such ambiguity, Tarot provides the reader with a sense of discovery- to remember an event that has been forgotten is always to discover it in its difference, to notice it in a new light. However, the pre-nominal is not simply like a collective unconscious. This is because the forgetting is what precedes the prenominal- it must be forgotten in order to be preserved as a referent. If my memory can lose something, it does so without remainder since what it loses does not and could not have presence except in my forgetting of it(and possible remembering).

Of course, in order to narrate, one must start from a secret, an element of the not-yet-thought. The iconography of the cards, as alphabetical units, ensures their ambiguity. The cards are mute precisely because they are constructed on the very grounds of their own occlusion. As Robert Hass points out, to name a woodpecker is to obliviate a pre-linguistic memory of the impression of a woodpecker. . When you say tower you might mean a card in the tarot pack, or Paris, or Blackpool, or London; just as the card may mean Elsinore or Dunsinane or the castle Lear has lost. Because the cards are laid out wordlessly, each story instantly transforms itself into a riddle, a kernel of ineffability concealed in complexity. The Tarot deck affords us with multiple interpretative options, yet to settle on any one of these interpretations occludes all the others. And so the tarot oscillates between an awareness of the wealth of its images and an uncanny sense of its secrecy. In “Two Tales of Seeking and Losing” Calvino makes sure to emphasize the riddle at work in the tarot, suggesting that these narratives are more like Zen koans. At the end of this tale, Faust claims that

There is not an all, given all at once: there is a finite number of elements whose combinations are multiplied to billions of billions, and only a few of these find a form and a meaning and make their presence felt….like the seventy-eight cards of the Tarot deck in whose juxtapositions sequences of stories appear and then are immediately undone.

Where as this would be the (still temporary) conclusion of Parsifal: “The kernel of the world is empty, the beginning of what moves in the world is this nothingness, around absence is constructed what exists, at the bottom of the Grail is the Tao” and he points to the empty rectangle surrounded by all the tarots.

The empty square here signifies what the Tarot cannot name, cannot remember, cannot know or capture. It is the concomitance of both the forgotten and the unthought, around which all the cards are activated.

Because conceptual systems, like that of Calvino’s master-grid, expand our possibilities of thinking, they are in reciprocal rapport with their subjects, figured as expanding their own dimensions. The deck’s endless combinatoria gravitate toward outer limits that are both immemorial and sublime. And yet while the fictive substance of the Tarot may be inexhaustible the point of reception is always particular to the human reader, the true vanishing point of every Tarot spread. Thus a Tarot reading places us in a dually and abruptly shifting perspective in which we vacillate between the familiarity of the cards, their resemblance to our experiences and a dizzying apprehension of its boundless systematics, which is monstrous and Other. If the deck is indeed mystical or divine, it is only because of its vastness. The ineffable sublimity of the Tarot and our subsequent discomfort is born from the epistemological problem of human consciousness’ inability to keep the infinite in memory. It is this forgetting on behalf of the human that allows the Tarot deck to be at once strikingly intimate and inexpressibly infinite.

The juxtaposition of nostalgic remembrance and the not-yet-known is an important aspect of the desire and the ellipsis that helps to form the relationships among the cards and the travelers. Not only are the storytellers essentially strangers to one another, but they must rely on using a language that has been traditionally inaccessible, secret and occult. For the narrator of the cards, there is something inside the grid that he has forgotten, but still desires to recognize: "the chaotic heart of things, the center of the square of the cards and of the world, the point of intersection of all possible orders" (33). This unknowable, inexpressible heart of the master-grid fuels the quest to know or express it. And yet we see from the second grid in the novel that at the very literal center of the system is an empty square. Calvino alludes to this confusing spatial sense in which the intersection of order is in fact nothing in “The Tale of Astolpho” where the protagonist ascends to heaven, the Moon. He seeks to inhabit the very center of the moon, assuming that all sense perhaps converges within “the universal rhyme list” he expects to find there. But in fact, the chaos of sense in the world emerges not from the depths of its layers, but in the limitlessness of its surface:

“No, the moon is a desert.” This was the poet’s reply, to judge by the last card put down on the table: the bald circumference of the Ace of Coins. “From this arid sphere every discourse and every poem sets forth; and every journey though forests, battles, treasures, banquets, bed chambers, brings us back here, to the center of an empty horizon.” (39)

We might try to “look deeper” into a card, but somehow an element of depth has been subtracted. Everything seems to point towards the external, the outward appearance. Though I experience this nostalgia as carving out a sort of interior space of remembrance, the movement of this kind of memory is always extensive, because as Hass points out. “desire is full of distances.” The narrativization emerges from this horizon of immemoriality. We understand the narrative relationships among the icons we recognize in the images, yet we are obliged each time to reopen spaces of sense in order to orient ourselves.

The Tarot is a conceptual system, despite its stigma of being associated with secrets, mysteries, and the esoteric. The cards, as both signs and symbols, are not truly archetypal because they present themselves to us first as pure surface. During a reading, the cards are not in us, rather we find our stories externally, horizontally, grafted onto the pictorial algebra of a Tarot spread. And though the rules of the game eventuate toward self-reflection and imagination, a definite architecture of interconnectivity and proliferation is inherent to the deck. There is no spirit in the cards themselves, they are only bones. Firstly, the Tarot is an interactive language, a set of 78 components whose values and functions become predictable. The identity of this Tarot-machine, which surely belies its complexities and nuances, nonetheless becomes conflated with its repetitive function and ability to reproduce its own action. Furthermore, like the alphabet system or mathematics, the Tarot employs units (cards) which comprise entities, acts, functions or points of view. The meaning of the cards may change according to their grammatical position in a spread, but the Tarot as a system purports to deploy these units consistently at all levels of operations, that is, systematically. Lastly, and most importantly, the regularity and finitude of the Tarot catalogue endows the deck with a kind of functional expansiveness resulting in infinite manifestations. The trajectory of this movement is always extensive, or outward bound.

When the narrator of The Castle of Crossed Destinies has laid out the master-grid he tries to find his story in the labyrinth, “he can no longer say which it is” and announces that his own entry in this infinite encyclopedia is lost, “confused in the dust of the tales, become freed of it” (41,6) The hint is that in the combinatorial perpetuity of the deck, every one has a “lost” story, not because it is buried or repressed, but because it is dispersed and fooled around with in all kinds of figurative or displaced forms. The inhuman dimensions of the systematic medium of language, whether pictorial or verbal, in which even our most private, inadmissible and intimate thoughts are couched here is figured as complex series of matrices, a labyrinth of fictional units in space. We cannot disentangle what is interior and personal from everything else we see.

Jorge Luis Borges’ story tells the tale of this virtual meeting place for this tenuous juxtaposition between the human and the immemorial, between desire and the systematic naming of its coordinates. The epistemological problem that Borges sees in the aleph is similar to the difficulty of reading the Tarot. The narrator, suffering from heartbreak is bound up with tiresome literary conversations with his lost love’s cousin. He learns that the friend is in part inspired by an “Aleph, ” a small point of 2-3 centimeters projecting a concentrated vision of the entire universe. The narrator takes a look at the aleph and

in this gigantic instant I saw millions of pleasant or wild acts; none surprised me like the fact that they all occupied the same point, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes say was simultaneous, what I transcribe is successive, because language is (192).

What he finds is not revelation, but disintegration. The loss of narrativity caused by the simultaneous co-existence of things is simply too much for language to bear. The infinite is too soon forgotten, but the urge to narrate is not. His bewildered attempt to catalogue or enumerate the infinite is one motivated by loss, and he is forced substitute his despair for a cohesive and comprehensive representation of what he saw.

In the aleph, he must have seen everything that resists signification. But nevertheless, he can only weakly catalog his own perspectives, his own love.

I saw the horrible relic of what was once delicately Beatriz Viterbo, I saw the circulation of my own dark blood, I saw the meaning of love and the modification of death, I saw the earth in the Aleph and in the earth the Aleph and the Aleph in the earth, I saw my face and my guts, I saw your face, and I was dizzy and I cried, because my eyes had seen this secret and conjectural object, who name usurps men, but which no man has seen: the inconceivable universe. (193-4).

Faced with an inability to fix something timeless by means of unavoidably temporal language and consciousness, we forget. The narrator thankfully forgets the implausible universe hid under the basement stairs, but the residual memories that he attempts to enumerate are the personal ones, and when the infinite has faded from his consciousness, he is left with the agonizing reminder that included in the horrifying systematics of infinite things is his own heartbreak, paranoia and longing. Here is a man who has faced all- and yet there is still that loss, the same calamitous loss that strikes Calvino’s wayfarers speechless. The urge to narrate here is contemporaneous with the moment of forgetting. The attempt to recollect the aleph and its refusal to become anything but immemorial is one and the same movement. Infinity is thus preserved as oblivion.

When we attempt to shuffle ourselves into a new structure, the place we arrive is still always already prefigured back home, the empty horizon of the immemorial. The cards, like the aleph, create a map of the universe, but this same map is also a map of our own desires. Calvino wrote Invisible Cities as an attempt to map a disintegrating, forgotten empire. The book is primarily written as a dialogue between an explorer, Marco Polo, and an emperor, Kublai Khan. Each city-story is a new entry into Venice, or any city in which one’s desire and memories are at home, just as every card in the deck is a reminder, or entry into our own “lost cities,” our own forgotten origins. The lost city here is named Venice, a lack around which every city is constructed. Every city is informed by Marco’s own desires and memories of his home in Venice, an origin which is irretrievably lost to Marco.

Polo said: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice”

“When I ask you about other cities, I want to hear about them. And about Venice, when I ask you about Venice”

“To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must first speak of a city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice.” (Calvino, 86).

In a sense, this endless re-telling of Venice is an effort not to forget it, but the length of the vignettes seems to produce a kind of systematic forgetting as one moves through the book. The stories seem to unravel or diffuse even as they are created. But the loss of forgetting is instead turned into a productive lack. Forgetting the cities impels me to improvise, to imagine possibilities in the space of a void.

Like Invisible Cities, reading the tarot is a series of attempts at creating new architectural and spatial relationships with desire. This spatial metaphor is helpful for understanding a map of memory- we signify always through space of our memories, whether it is projected or real. Polo does not create his cities according to the chronology of his travels, just as we do not create stories according to the succession of the cards, but in terms of nostalgic proximity and distance to the one truly absent city of Venice, to the centripetal heart of our desires. In the cards, we take ourselves to the edge of the human and find that there is more humanity there than we expected.

When Borges stares into the aleph, he finds that the aleph stares into him, into the very void in his consciousness that causes him forget infinity. The tarot deck, too, despite its reiterative production of infinite stories, seems to cancel itself out by virtue of the cards’ very arbitrariness. The systematicity of the deck and the universality of the aleph seem to be the farthest we can turn from the concrete matter of our selves. We attempt to color this void with the images in the cards, or the mystical alphabet of the aleph. In the tarot cards, all that is needed is to cancel the ordinary context of things, the temporal ways we are used to dealing with them , the expectations we have formed as a result; and in the transient local emptiness we have created, manifold modes of self-hood will begin to crackle.

Though the speaker in “Meditation at Lagunitas,” the narrator of the Aleph, and the wayward travelers of Calvino’s novel have been stuck speechless in some capacity, language has not been truly forgotten. The tarot cards, born with their own aphasia, let us understand that muteness is accompanied by a surfeit in a different kind of memory. Aphasics perhaps have a better memory because it extends to the age of infant babble in which every individual life begins. Tarot cards encourage us to forget the systematics of one language in exchange for a glimpse at the immemorial blankness to which no sign corresponds. In this sense, nostalgia has the same operation in the tarot that it does in literature: we create meaning by means of an immemorial expanse in the topology of our desires. The forgotten will not leave us, even in the most fantastic or imaginary places; the rhythms of its appearances and disappearances are those of the inevitable silences that punctuate our speech. Silent, the aphasia and ambiguity of the tarot cards obstinately bears witness to what has never been written or never been said- because the cards have not forgotten the inability to speak.

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[1] Milorad Pavic’s Last Love in Constantinople, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Crystal Vision, and Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies are some example of novels whose plot and characters are modeled directly after the Tarot deck.

The Court of the Fool

As the parade of Tarot Trumps returns in legend, we see they’ve been disguising a secret for centuries. The unhappy juggler, the throned empress, the lion tamer, the Triumphal car, the arrow wielding angels, they haven’t breathed a word of the secret. This privacy takes the form a question, the inquiry made of every tarot spread. Within the structure of the Trump cards is a singular entity, one who renders in incomplete and sets it into motion- an empty-headed Fool who has lost his wits entirely. The Fool is the grand joke of the Tarot, the trickster whose practical jokes never quite seem to come off, he is the retarded orphan left at home in ashes while the rest of the Triumphs go off to battle. He attends the Mardi Gras, Carnivale, Dias de los Muertos, the Running of the Bulls and Fasching- he is always present for one last outbreak of nonsense before the rectitude of solemnity. In Triumphal processions, he was represented by a hollow effigy created only to be burned. Wide awake and eternally vigilant, he moves through the world consuming nothing and grasping little; leaving always a disturbance in his wake. As he inhales and exhales, his silence seems to say “I am who I am not.” His is the inquiry at the beginning of every journey, a hesitation, a gasp, a sigh. His breath kindles the Tarot deck. Most tarot decks depict the Fool poised at the edge of a precipice; it appears as if at any moment he might throw himself into the void. In an earlier deck, the Gringonneur, he towers over midget human figures, the Giant of Folly (Butler, 110). It is with his divine madness that the cards are alight; for in any reading of the Tarot is the Fool who asks and the Fool who answers every question.

The errant liberty of the Foolish escapes the consecutive march of the Trumps- in the Tarot he is given over to 0, the numerical symbol for nothing. Our word for zero is derived ultimately from the Arab sifr, which means cipher. The word is translated from the Sanskrit sunya meaning “desert, empty place, naught.” (OED) In this light, 0 is a puzzle, a cipher. For how can nothing be identified as a singular entity? It stands as a placeholder, a signifier of absence. Sometimes it is nothing and at other times it is something. Place a zero in front of another digit and it might as well be invisible and unexpressed. Here the Fool leaves but a light mark on the world. But write a zero after a number and suddenly it becomes something, a transformation of magnitude. Multiply a number by nothing, and there is only nothing. Here in his suspended changeability, the Fool is potentially capable of both creation and annihilation. A point in space occupies zero dimensions, yet to be sure and certain; the point is definitively an entity. The Fool, like zero, is at once distinct and obscure- his positivity is the presence of a problem and a question. He is always oblique, a presence made of absence, a number twisted out of vacuity, a lively zero, a signifier that does not signify.

The paradoxical entity of the Fool and his zero is perhaps what Deleuze would call “the empty square” a term used express the radical underpinnings of structuralism. The dynamic capacity of an ensemble like the Tarot comes from “the place of the dummy, the place of the king, the blind spot, the floating signifier, the value degree zero, the off-stage of absent cause, etc” (LoS, 71) Here, the nothing of zero is a clear singularity. It opens the Tarot up to flux and allows the meanings of all the other cards to drift toward their eclipsed ghosts. The zero of the Fool is always already expressed in the terms and rules of the deck, but barely. As he steps toward groundlessness he is figured simply as both the gap or lack and the depraved desire for pure presence, the principle of the mobility and variety of the deck. And yet it would be ridiculous to say the Fool is nothing, the Fool = 0. Rather, he is also a clear and precise singularity; not the absence of sense but the fullness of nonsense. Nonetheless, he seems to repeat back to us the void in our being as well, almost but not quite mockingly. King Lear’s abandonment is made clear when his Fool says to him “Now thou art an 0 without a figure. I am better than thou art now. I am a Fool, thou art nothing.” (Act 2 Scene 4) We can also the hear the insinuation in the Fool’s declaration , the reverted echo being the reconciled cry of Borges: “The world, alas, is real. I, alas, am Borges.” (The Avatar’s Tortoise)

Here, nothingness is figured not as an empty void, but also as the production or realization of presence: a plane of real possibilities, to which all is immanent. The card of the Fool enacts both unity and nothing at all- and the precision of his operations is like a clearing in the somber opacity of the rest of the numerals or Trumps. But as a nothing, he plunges the rest of his comrades into confusion, because it is impossible to grasp his one-ness as something really distinct. Appearing as if he might simply leap into rocky chasm before him, the Fool is suspended in mid-action. And what he summons in the pose is an offering, a giving over of possibility to airy nothing. The Fool’s zero and its refracted one-ness not apprehended in terms of what is and what is not, but rather in terms of what can and cannot be. In this sense, potentiality presupposes impotentiality because if something can be, it necessarily must also be capable of not being. The figure of the Fool, the no-thing, represents the indeterminacy of this zero-state, throwing the whole seemingly closed system of the tarot into a realm of multiplicitous and unbounded potentiality. The magic of the deck is depended on the power latent in the least conspicuous of characters. A few road distractions can kill a man, a feather can ward of a hurricane. It is the context of the Fool that gives the useless scrap its power.

The number zero and the conception of nothingness have significant implications in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and in the tradition of Cabalistic mystics. In his reading of Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Agamben makes a distinction between the significance of the copyist’s enigmatic response to his employer’s orders, “I would prefer not to” and Hamlet’s more famous and resonant refrain. For Agamben, the prince’s “to be or not to be” simply points to an opposition between being and non-being (Agamben, 259). Bartleby’s phrase points to a third term beyond mere nothingness and mere existence. For Agamben, this term is potentiality. Here, we can understand this term to mean the state of infinite suspended possibilities of what one can and can not do. Agamben identifies here a potentiality that can only be fully recognized in the potential not to. In this sense it is from the nothingness of potentiality that all creation issues forth. Early Cabalistic mystics coined the term Ein-Sof (Infinity) to describe the unknowable-ness of the Divine Creator. The first steps in the manifestation or actualization of God is called ayin, or nothingness. The Cabalists saw God as turning towards creation, so as Ein-Sof (or infinity) actualizes itself, it turns to face both ayin and creation at the same time (Scholem, 94). Speaking of the Cabalistic notion of a nothing from which everything proceeds, Agamben points out that the “obscure matter that creation presupposes is nothing other than divine potentiality. The art of creation is God’s descent into the abyss that is his own potentiality and impotentiality, his capacity to and not to” (253).

But it is the will of God that turns towards creation. Bartleby’s potentiality differs in the sense that when a lawyer asks “You will not?” the scrivener corrects the statement in reply with “I prefer not” (Melville, 2211). Like Bartleby, the Fool dwells so stolidly in the abyss of impotentiality/potentiality without ever willing to leave it. His zero comes not from a will to nothingness, but an affirmation of what might become in the opening of this nothing.

It is a common tradition for practitioner of Tarot as divination to remove the Fool from the deck before shuffling- he takes the place of the Querent (the person who receives the reading) or the Significator (the question of reference for the spread). Here the Fool is figured always as a question, always posed as “if?” The Querent and the Fool’s question a “if” forever offers an invitation to all possible deviations of chance. To be willing to answer is not the same being able to ask, and it is in this disjunction that pure potentiality lies. The Fool’s great secret is no more than the excess of the question. Hovering on the brink of a gulf overlooking the endless ocean, he offers potentiality up to the groundless ground, the desolation of primordial earth, the loss of sense. The zero is that clean opening of the question onto the yet to come - not any answer, real or possible, but that space of difference drawn by the desire to ask, to bring forth something else.

For the magicians in the legends of Tarot and for the new-age occultists of the contemporary tarot market, the Trump symbols are the distillation of an effort; a will for preservation; for the consistency of the symbols and their permanence. For them, the symbols are powerful because they are universal. Yet perhaps the gamblers and betters of Renaissance Europe knew better: chance was the emphasis at the heart of the Tarot’s divinatory powers. Because the cards in a divinatory spread and a game are laid out randomly, everything in the deck exists only as a combination. Here the stolid categories of the earth (air, fire, earth, water, masculine, feminine, complete, incomplete, past, present, future, night, day, internal, external, beast, angel, human, anguish, ecstasy, depravity, fortitude, beginning, ending, desire and fear) no longer exist except as pure differences, pure elements of an entirely novel ensemble of disparities. The trumps, upon their Triumphal return, are no longer identical to what they had been. Always they differ from themselves at least twice, first through the historical determinations of the cards’ use and the interpretation of the image, and second through always being implicated in a unmarked combination that renders their meaning their anew. ]

The movement of the Fool unto itself, or the return of One to the void, is the arrival at an always new combination of potentials. The zero perpetually forgets and remembers the one, the fool's invisible friend. . Through this forgetting or subtraction (1-1=0) , there is a gain- potentiality seems nothing more than the sweet sublimity of forgetting. The zero is teeming with life. Here, just on the brink of the Fool’s oblivion, lightly flutters the possibility of the intimately infinite.

By virtue of the mathematical property of identity (a=a), it is only zero’s selfsameness that constitutes its position as the subject of a return. It is circular or spherical because by virtue of this self-sameness, it can do nothing but return to itself as a nothing, the preservation of potential. If memory can lose something, it does so without remainder since what it loses does not and could not have presence except in remembering. Forgetting impels the Fool to improvise, to imagine possibilities in the space of a void. Rather than containing “real memories” of the one essentially and inexorably lost, oblivion is constituted by its forgotten multiplicities, virtual memories of what could have been remembered but was not, ghosts of slight anticipations. At the moment we perceive any singular card, something of its pure virtuality is at once irrecoverable, zeroed-out. The Fool is a loss in which nothing is lacking, a loss that cannot retain itself as loss because it simply is there, without hollowing out anything we might wish to fill. The subtraction of one from itself, this forgetting of the one, this is the Fool’s modus operandi. He protects his own oblivion.

What does it mean to have zero as a principle of unification? For the Fool, whose element is air, the zero is a giving over to airy nothing, a surge of lightness that corresponds to an escape from the spirit of gravity, or simply the spirit of escape. We are reminded of Huck Finn, Gilgamesh, Dean Moriarty, and Don Quixote. Each deck of cards seems to interpret the Fool differently, a testament to his variability and permutational potential. For the case deck, he is the breath of the beasts in the fields; for the Crowley Douglas deck he is the limitless light prior to all creation. The sadhu decks view him as an arrow in direct but wavering light; for Rider-Waite he is the spirit in search of experience and the sensitive life of the flesh. (B,113). In all interpretations, the Fool is without weight or grounding- he is the pure thrown-ness of human life. deck, he is the subtlety of the “original impulse.” In the Grimauld, thoughtlessness and carelessness; for the knight deck he is the innocence of chaos. In the Buddhist deck, the Fool corresponds to all possibilities of movement. In all cases he is the groundless ground.

For many tarot readers, the Major Arcana, or the Trump Deck, is also known as “The Fool’s Journey.” To be clear though, the Fool card itself represents the moment just before the journey, the anticipation of the yet-to-come, the apprehension of all possibility and limitless choice. The Fool is in absolute relation with the outside, because being faced with infinite choice in this suspended potentiality, choice is never the decision of this or that, rather the Fool’s is the choice to choose, the choice between choosing and not choosing. In the moment of subtracting oneself and making oneself vulnerable only to that which is not-self, the Fool attains the empty place where, seized by impersonal powers, we are made let thought exist through us. Unlike the other cards he is not the spontaneous effusion of a particular trait, a gesture toward the symbolic. Instead the thoughtlessness of the Foolish is only the power won, with the greatest trouble, against language, being detained by the world’s play.

The Fool forges a new kind of intimacy with the world- not one which attracts certain bits of the world to one’s self and thus implies determination and choice, but one whose impersonality suggests a kind of restless mischief in a field where actuality has been temporarily dissolved. This mischief is the same as the waywardness that takes place in a daydream or idle fantasy. The limitless choice bearing upon the Fool upturns the self as yet another possibility among several. The endless and errant hesitation of the Fool before the adventure emphasizes his position as a question, a problem, a wondering. The Fool’s question is a release from the confines of a need for narrative closure or finality, a tactic used by him (and the Querent) to perpetuate, postpone, or defer. The pause before the onset of his becoming is a process of dissolve- of scattering, breaking away, softening. The drift is the condition of potentiality. After all, what is erotic is not necessarily the exposure of hidden flesh, but the possibility of its revelation. (Barthes).

For the Fool, the decision is subtracted from the choice, the answer from the question, creation from the limitless light; the direction of the quest is subtracted from itself, a mind minus thought, leaving only a hovering zero that overspills from its middle. For Deleuze, this principle of n-1 is at the heart of any system of difference like the Tarot, one which has multiplicity and proliferation as its formal principles. For the Fool, it is both the uniqueness of the home and the unity of the destination that are subtracted, leaving only a zero, a frame for nothing, left. The principle of n-1 is cyclical because as “unity is consistently thwarted and obstructed in the object, a new type of unity triumphs in the subject” The cycle is never done, shut, or terminated. Instead, it is ceaseless invented and re-invented as the desire that drives the Fools question morphs as the differing drifts; the n and the one evaporate and congeal, over and over again in an eternal game of hide-and-seek. In card zero, we see the endless difference of the Journey has been momentarily stalled or hushed, by the wind- leaving just the Fool, a univocal anticipation. The triumphal unity is only the selfsameness of the zero, the winged life of the wind, the stillness of the Fool, the equivocation of all possibilities to a pause or a chasm.

To illustrate: Hindu priests think the Vedas to be a transcription, a translation, a dilution of a single syllable- the first breath of Sarasvati, Goddess of Poetry. On the banks of the Sarasvati River, around 1500 BC, priests composed this Hindu chronicle we now know as the Vedas. Around 500 years later, the river had vanished- and its goddess became the river of loss and memory- like the Sarasvati River, a quite real, but invisible source of sound. Sarasvati, like all Hindu gods, has many names: the River Goddess, She Who Lives at the Front of the Tongue, The Power of Memory, She Who Lives in Sound. Most of all, she is the Disappeared River.

Badiou says that “ A truth begins with a poem of the void, continues through the choice of continuing, and comes to an end only in the exhaustion of its own infinity.” (HfI 56) When the Querent or the Fool ask a question, the Tarot responds with a poem. The mystery at the surface of the cards scintillates the same desires that enter into the operations of poetry. The Tarot does not ask to be interpreted, nor does it possess any keys. It simply demands that we delve into its operations. Like a poem, a tarot spread is an event. It takes place. In order to be free with the mystery of limitlessness and chance, the Fool and the querent must dispose themselves to the operations of the spread- literally. The reader must will his or her own transliteration. The anxiety of the exhaustion of infinity, or total completion returns to the suspended fullness of potentiality in the place of the void. The spread reveals itself as a constellation to be translated, brought home. This desire for transliteration, originating in a lack and persisting toward eternal completion is for the Fool is that originary impulse of poetry: breath or exhalation.

Prayer, chant, mantra, formula poem: all are constructs of breath’s energy, attempts to recover that originary force of sound- the naming of the unnamable. The Fool’s poetic impulse, the call to limitlessness is always, as might be expected, yoked to the past. This is because the breath of the Fool is an opening of an originary poem to listening ears- a hymn to, and dream of, his vanished or invisible river, the lost and unexploded time of a Beginning. For Confucius, the past only represents the achievement of a terrestrial order (reflective of the cosmic order) which has never again been accomplished but could be. His nostalgia for his own lost Sarasvati, the river of Poetry and Memory, is neither wanting (we have lost the originary river) nor unstable (we may have our river, but it someday too will be lost). Nostalgia for the Fool is instead a celebration of his own archaic beginning, the moment of anticipation in which the beginning is already being remembered.

A poem without its own archaic, in other words a poem that is eternally still and without a sense of home, can only exist at the time when poetry no longer needs to be written, when it has “exhausted its own infinity,” when the world ends. The Fool’s poem will reminds us that on his journeys, the only ending is a longing for an ending. The saturation of existence by this double desire for the originary and for the yet to come testifies to the constant manifestation of the zero that only anxiety reveals. Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through the Foolish, only slightly in those who are restless, imperceptibly in the “Oh, yes” and the “Oh, no” of all the Trumps; but most readily and most assuredly in those who are basically daring: the Fools, the readers, the questioners. The anxiety comes from the demand of the journey: this depends on you. In the luminous net of relations that the Tarot makes, up the slightest change- even watching- transforms it all. The anxiety of the Tarot is the anxiety of waiting, blindly for the next thing. The anxiety reminds us that the Fools journey is a potentially nightmarish one too. We laugh at the Fool because he makes us uncomfortable; there is a part of us that is disgusted by him. His whimsy boomerangs and guts itself, his adorable frailty skews toward the grotesque. It is no wonder that the Tarot invokes such widespread fear and anxiety: it potential to upturn anything and everything rests solely on that twist of the moment, disproportionate relationship between the seriousness of the Querent and the indifference of the cards’ systematics. It is the anxiety for the terrible thing that has already occurred, the feeling of being swept away by the silence of something that might happen.

Even the exhalation of the fool is love struck- the sighs that his voice elicits is clearly akin to the impassioned exhalations of the swoon, the prolonged breath of nonsense that is decidedly erotic. For Barthes perhaps puts it best when he says that “for the lovers’ anxiety- it is the fear of a mourning that has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment I was first ‘ravished.’ Someone would have to tell me, Don’t be anxious anymore, you’ve already lost him/her. ” (LD, 30). the Fool, the beginning of the affair is already remembered, the end is also already mourned. The paralysis of the zero place is the nervousness caused not just by disappearance or nihilation, but also by the fullness of the heart, its indifference to choice, the chanciness of all risk, the burden of every possible outcome. His poetry is the agonizing reminder that included in the limitless potentiality of infinite things is always the Fool’s own heartbreak, paranoia and longing.

The Fool is making the greatest risk- he frivolously wagers everything for the abyss. The stabbing suddenness of the Fool’s antics wrests from somewhere inside us a flickering weakness; we are dizzied by his daring tricks. He is utterly without grounding, and as such his existence is disproportionate to the rest of the Parade of Trumps: lighter, more humorous, and less ironic than life itself. He is reminiscent of both a pathetic underdog, a dummy effigy forsaken by the Parade, and a heartbroken, inchoate lover, the sitcom jokester; yet something alight leads him on. We can call this the eternal return, borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche and Deleuze. The operation of the Fool card is the eternal affirmation of chance, Foolishness, wild imagination. Of course a home is implicated in all journeys, but in the Tarot the only home is precisely the univocal consistency of potentiality; that is, the selfsameness of zero. The flip side of coming apart from oneself is that all that is available in this bold feat is, again, a part of oneself. The voice that is let speak is not an entirely foreign one. When we attempt to shuffle ourselves into a new structure, the place we arrive is still always already prefigured back home. What the Triumphal Procession returns to is the unique and univocal affirmation of risk, the “yes” that makes the risk of battle worth taking.

To pose the question “if” is to take that risk, to bring matters about to an originary place of pure possibility, where any and all answers could suffice. As such, the maudlin antics of the Fool card sets into motion the play of the all, the lightness of thought, the insistence of laughter in the face of the sublime. The ontological principle of the eternal return is precisely that there can be no model, no essence, no identity, of that which returns, and that everything exists only in combinations whose internal principle is difference. The 'same' things exist as such only in returning, in being repeated with a different sense, freshly determined by some new combination of contradicting wills.

What returns in the eternal return of the Triumphal procession is every thing, but only the extreme form of every thing; every thing returns to zero only insofar as it is capable of being radically transformed, insofar as it goes to its limits rather than resting within them. The forms or senses of kings, stars, lovers, demons, seashores which have stable identities, immutable essences, natures already determined, are abolished in the Fool’s instant of chance, of the single question that re-works the assumptions at work in the cards. Even if the parade of trumps were to be struck dead by some divine force of destruction, they would still return, not even as an absence but as the persistence of chaos, the eternal moment of the bottom dropping out. This is thanks to the particular eccentricities of the Fool Every time the cards are re-shuffled and dealt into another novel spread, the fool returns to a place of stalled repose. We are reminded again of the mages in Morocco, the gamblers and betters of the Renaissance courts, the Hindu priests on the banks of the Sarasvati River: “shoring up ruins” against absolute impending loss.