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
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
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
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
Polo said: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about
“When I ask you about other cities, I want to hear about them. And about
“To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must first speak of a city that remains implicit. For me it is
In a sense, this endless re-telling of
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
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.
[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.
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