Preface

This book is not written for readers who are firmly established in their faith. It is written for the waverers, either inside or outside the tradition of Reading, who, instead of giving themselves wholly over to the sign, either hesitate on its threshold or turn away in the hopes of going beyond it. It therefore has been my aim in these pages to reclaim those pieces of textuality which exceed or elude the demarcations of the sign. Any reader who has held a book in his or her hands and been distracted by the discomfort of the chair which one reads, or the spreading twilight that tightens the eye muscles, or a memory that the words one reads elicit, or a twinge of grief at coming a cross a familiar name printed on the page- this reader will not misconceive the spirit in which these words were written. Thus it is for those whose education or instinct leads them to listen largely to the voices of the earth, the solidity of the book. As such, this investigation of the Tarot deck as a non-linguistic, rather ‘extralinguistic,’ text is one that seeks to recover both the lightness and buoyancy of literature, but also its weightedness; the gravity of the word.

The tarot deck is a semiotic system- what it creates is textual in form. Despite its association with the magic and esoterism, 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.

However, by means of its wordlessness, the Tarot deck peculiarly emphasizes aspects of linguistic systems eclipsed by the tyranny of the sign. The tarot is able to “speak” the silent, absent, immemorial, unspeakable, intimate, forgotten, tactile, intuitive, and libidinal aspects of reading in a way that written language cannot easily approach. Reading the Tarot is blurs the prestige of literacy- it is literally work that we do with our hands. Philosophy of late has seemed to have done away with the idea of “grasping”- and yet reading has much to do with the human hand and the objects that lie immediately adjacent to it. My own fascination with the Tarot was originally founded in the erotics of touch particular to a lover of books. For me, each card- say the Star- was both a refreshingly simple and singular symbol and an encyclopedia of all the ways in which this symbol had been cited, either in literature in my life. The immensity of its decadent imagery and meaning seems as if the Tarot could comprise a seventy-eight volume master compendium, a decadently gilded set that might sit majestically above the mantelpiece, patiently gathering dust. But the Tarot deck is more humble than that- the deck actually fits in your pocket; it yearns to be touched, stroked, shuffled, eroded by sweating fingers, even dropped into the bottom of a purse, only to bump edges with a wallet, a tube of lipstick, candy wrappers and disintegrating wads of tissue. The humble density of the deck appeals to me. So it is here with the gravities of touch- not vision- that this book begins for me.

My interest in the Tarot deck started with the sloth of summer, the particular summer that I lived alone. Living alone in that first apartment required that I populate my solitude with solidity. Solitude involves a lot of sitting around, keeping boredom at bay by conversing with objects or books in lieu of company. Keeping my aloneness at bay from loneliness that first apartment required that I populate my solitude with solidity. A reader in solitude, I learned, is of a type that treats touch as if it were a language, arranging my belongings as if I were trying to fill a paragraph with a delicately white lie. I kept a monogrammed water glass next to my single mattress. I hung a shower curtain, placed a tube of hand crème next to the bed. The secondhand furniture, a tea pot, a hand towel carefully folded and refolded, sugar packets and plastic forks in the kitchen drawer, a broken wicker chair by the window. All sorts of shadows and solidities. A sense of ones own bodily processes is the ultimate private property. That first night, I stood in the dark and wandered through the circle of that studio apartment, just touching what I’d arranged. I put my hand on the window ledge, the doorknob, the stain on the wall. I felt the vibrations of the nightly news the room next door. I held a glass of ice, watched shafts of headlights sweep the room and thought mine;I looked out the window where garish branches brushed up against the glass. They shook their leaves at me and I though mine. The wholeness of the room was a poem made of touch.

In the morning I would leave my home as motionless as a diorama in a museum of natural history. I would return from my job to my front steps in the saggy heat, right as the day’s muscle had gone limp and the evening began to stretch itself against the sky. As I climbed the stairs, clouded with I would imagine my room without me , darkly dim and hot air heaving, waiting for a hand to dip into it. When silence bloomed in that apartment, all of the supplies for my solitude shed their stutterings of value. And reappeared as heraldic devices. The deck simply happened to be one of these devices, an accident resulting from a curious vagary of idleness. I would take my tarot cards and spread them all over the carpet, a garden rampant with color and curve. Or I would arrange them according to number and rank, creating a kingdom of merchants and royalty, beggars and mystics. Or I would arrange them in the classic spread of the Tarot tradition- the cross and the staff. I’d thumb my worn copy of The Dictionary of the Tarot, glancing from the floor to the page, slipping my fingers between pages as markers until my fingers curled with the leaves of the manual. Learning to read a tarot spread requires learning not just meanings of the cards but their grammar as well: to hold in the mind the shape of various meanings, poising the attraction of one symbol according to the resistance of another, preserving the balance of the rise and fall of a card’s vertical position against back and forth of its lateral position to the others. Precarious like my books stacked up- for want of a bookshelf-leaning heaps of pages supported by the walls of that studio.

To take the book or the Tarot wholly as an object of vision is to take it the wrong way. Reading a book, like reading the tarot, requires a linguistic extension of the body. Worn corners of pages and coffee stains prove that the human body’s attributes are embedded in objects- the corners of the page that reflect the shapes and movements of the thumb and fingers, the warmth in a book’s spine reminds oneself of the blood pooling in one’s palm. The grooves worn in the spine of a book are like the fluids of our habits carving out rivets in rocks and soil. When a book opens to a page on its own accord, we are reminded that the bodies of our books are also prone to gravity of memory; their spines remember and share our predilections for favorite passages. Any reader knows that even the smallest stroke of a good book can leave a tiny scar for life.

That summer, I read countless books along with the Tarot. But if I had only read one, it would have been Italo Calvino’s collection of lectures Six Memos for the Next Millenium. These pages could not have been written apart from my encounters with that worn little paperback, especially the first chapter entitled Lightness. In this little volume, Calvino expounds upon the qualities of literature that he would like to see plucked out of the history of the word and inserted into the next millennium: aside from lightness these are exactitude, visibility, quickness, and multiplicity. (The last memo would have been consistency, but the inconsistencies of time prevailed and Calvino died before writing the conclusive essay). They keep invading each other's turf: quickness gets into the lecture on lightness, lightness (a feather signifying precision in ancient Egypt) into the one on exactitude; exactitude into the lecture on multiplicity; multiplicity into the one on visibility. These crossmappings don't appear to be carefully planned, but they are not confusion, either. They help us see that Calvino is looking not at five or six but at dozens of clustered, overlapping, possibly unnameable literary qualities, which are scarcely even signaled by the schoolmasterly labels he holds up. The labels are visual images, like Tarot cards, starting points for thought.

The first chapter, Lightness, stands out in my memory, because at the time I had just seriously begun studying literary theory and my thinking had developed a kind of sagginess, a premature weariness sodden with the weight of so many proper names and histories. I began to realize that my penchant for the weightedness of books and cards came not from a compulsion toward gravity, but from the spirit of escape- a desire for the lightness or gracefulness of thought. I realized that were it not for the airiness of the room in which I lived, were it not for the space it provided, my taste for the tactile would be insignificant. "He is the poet of physical concreteness," Calvino says of Lucretius, "but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies." The immaterial impulses of the written word are as integral to the relationship between the text and the reader as much as the ink printed on the page. These “immaterial” aspects of reading were what I wanted to lift out of the Tarot- silence, the abyss of memory, ambiguity and contradiction, the unspeakable and invisible. Though my tendency to arrange the cards on my carpet perhaps came from an urge for gravitational steadiness, the real thrill came from that transient moment of scooping the grid of cards back into a messy heap, discarding the tidiness of order only to reshuffle the cards and give them back over to the impalpability of chance.

On the one hand, the text of the tarot is conceived by a relation of objects and their attributes, a relation amoung elements that belong to different connotative order and so never quite fit together, can never be bounded into a stable or final conclusion. In this account, though symbolism in cards themselves is to be thought of a metaphorical, meaning in a tarot spread relies on a chain of accidents- metonymic displacements of the reliability of these metaphors. It is somewhat of an endless shell game- like Lucretian emptiness, it is by virtue of lightness that the Tarot partakes of the substance of bodies and objects while never being reducible to any of the experiences it supposedly correlates. If someone objects that the reader gets lost in the play of possibilities that Tarot puts on for us, the question becomes what is the self? "Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles . . ." When reading a book or reading the Tarot, our palms and fingers accompany our eyes, our retinal impressions of words or picture are immediately transferred into strain and pressure in the muscles, of the resistance of my weight, of touch all over the body. A tactile erotics of reading allows us further pleasure in an encyclopedic the awareness of sensation, the exhilarating textures that pulse though us as we attend to the outside world. This is how I want to read the Tarot in these pages-as the metonymic ability of thought to evince, whilst still dependent upon, the course textures of the signifier.

What frustrates me most about being a young writer is the feeling that in order to writer about certain philosophers or theorists, one must participate in a backlog of how such-and-such an idea by so-and-so fits in with or butts up against the entire history of discourse in which it is contextualized. I found that in writing, I became so weary of hauling this history of thought around with me, so tired of having to carve out a critical position by which I could have the authority to situate a beautiful concept within concepts that were boring to me, that I found I had little energy to say anything new or differently. I could not understand why it was necessary to drudge up the immense entirety of a writer’s ouevre in order to properly make sense of a piece of it. The sheer expansiveness of philosophy and literature, like the Tarot, is monstrously immense- like Medusa, its heaviness threatens to petrify any observer. Language, as I have mentioned, is composed of discrete and solid units- but out of my soggy intellectualism, I came to realize through shuffling the cards a decadent picture of what writing can do: produce a world of light and movement from the mere alphabet that makes up the history of human thought, from a poor and indiscriminate collection of human marks: "pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same an always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind."

Therefore, in writing about the Tarot, I have treated bodies of thought as precisely this- a body which can move, dance, lift oneself from the surrounding monstrosity of weight and transport itself somewhere much more fertile. In Lightness, Calvino’s interpretation of the Medusa myth might provide a helpful analogy for how to regard the violence of solidity as something we are simply unable to flee from though there are strategies to evade the stony vice of philosophy. To defeat Medusa, a monster who turns whoever looks at her into stone, Perseus supports himself on the lightest of things, the winds and the clouds and fixes his gaze on what can be revealed only through indirect vision, the reflection of Medusa caught in a mirror. Thus, what defeats Medusa is the reflection of her own body held up to herself. Just as the self-reflexive intervention that takes place in a tarot reading is one where the author and reader and tezt all inhabit the same position, the intertextual landscape of the Tarot provides an intercitational strategy of self-narration, one that allows for a kind of nimble attack on the threat of linguistic or narrative petrification. The tarot cards are malleable, but hardly fluid. The principle of plasticity of matter in the wide sense of the word implies the possession of a structure weak enough to weild to the readers influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.

In these pages, I hope to narrate myself with this analogy in mind. The reader may find that I am glib when talking about certain writers, that I gloss over decades of discourse in order to get to a certain quote. I may elaborate fully in some places and not others. I ask that the reader forgive any confusion this may cause. My strategy, in keeping with the ambiguous and prismatic connotations couched in each tarot card, is citational; I wish to offer up the heterogeneous textures of the texts that have inspired my thinking, not capture their hidden truths or agendas. I wish to transfer some of this linguistic heaviness back to the histories in which we find ourselves already spoken. As for the severed head of Medusa, Perseus keeps it hidden in a purse and hauls it around with him- an act of concealment and that may seem to contradict a prescription for the lightness of bodies. But what is significant here is the transportability of this horrendous monster and Perseus’s ability to master its violence by keeping it by his side, like the deck at the bottom of my purse, as another device in his bag of tricks. The emancipatory power of intertextuality is not due to a renunciation of the historical and theoretical context of a given concept, but rather the ability to use these concepts strategically, to maneuver ourselves in a way that lifts them out of plain sight, yet keeps them close at hand. When the moment calls for it, Perseus re-presents this fragment of Medusa to his opponents, an act of citing her history and his own, transforming the literal detachment of her head from her body into an instrument of use. He uses the strangeness and very materiality of his attacker as his strategy.

Every theory or philosophy is lacking in something- but that does not mean that the good, true, or beautiful concepts hidden within the field should be discarded When the secret weapon of Medusa’s head has fulfilled its uses, like any strategy inevitably will, Perseus must get rid of the head. But instead of tossing it away carelessly, he makes a bed of mosses and ferns in the water and places her head gently and courteously, face down. In the myth, sea-nymphs rush to bring sprigs and seaweed to garnish her decomposing skull. When the flora touch her skull, they turn into coral, creating homes for the sea creatures to dwell in (Calvino, 13). To me, this is an ultimately poetic gesture- primarily because it is so unexpected but also because it enacts poetry’s ability to allow the violence of words fall somewhere lively and provocative- in the sense that it makes strange what once seemed so familiar. The story shows how the concept of Medusa is negotiable and thus transformed through time by the various operations done to it by Perseus, Medusa, and the sea nymphs. Just as the intermingling of texts that come from somewhere else can allow for new possibilities, so too does Medusa’s head eventually serve as scaffolding for the positioning and housing of all sorts of difference creatures in the sea. This approach is a kind of cross mapping organizing the different ontological orders of reading, a braiding together of skin, mind, marks, objects, memories.The nymphs in an act of solidarity commit the last step in estranging the severed head from its defective origins, by turning it into something both beautiful and ultimately functional.

This is where the aesthetic and ethical aspects of lightness coincide- in the decomposition of the word and the refreshingly civil act of rendering it anew, turning the monstrousness of the language in which we must live into something poetic and graceful. This is not to say that combating petrification merely demands a kind of decoration or pretty elaboration which might make the heaviness of taking on a position, any position, more palatable. Rather, what I mean to point out is that there is aesthetic enjoyment possible in the disintegration of what we take be immutable, an enjoyment that also ethical in the sense that it respects and recognizes that healing, transformation and emancipation can be born of our bodies and the objects we touch. This light-hearted approach to philosophy and literature may result in a more pleasing, more whimsical, more poetically sensitive account of truth. The impersonal detachment that the Tarot requires is also ethically attentive, in the sense that it respects the limitedness of our own expressions and the opacity of words without demurring the possibility of a strategic renewal.

In his re-telling of an episode from the Decameron, Calvino points out that for philosophy, there is a lightness of thoughtfulness as well as a lightness of frivolity. In the Decameron, Bocacccio presents an austere philosopher walking alone among the tombs of a church. A pack of his friends approaches him and decides to pick a quarrel with him. They chastise him for refusing their company and poke fun at his renunciation of God. Answering them quickly he says, “Gentlemen, you may say anything you wish you me in your own home.” Then nimbly he rests his hand on one of the tombs, leaps over it, and escapes his attackers. The image to me resembles the way the Tarot deck allows one to literally rise above the grey and piled-up tombstones of the history of words, though the rectangular depictions in the cards of the Tarot may themselves be like these gravestones. The graveyard of self-description is one where the world appears to us in a state of petrified agitation. Cavalcanti the poet rises above the gravity of deadening signification first through the quickness and impersonal airiness of his reply and second through his strategic use of the tombstone’s surface, literally the last texts of past life stories, to sustain his flight from his antagonists. Cavalcanti could have taken this opportunity to tell his friends about his renunciation of God and perhaps try to defend it, speaking from the ground of his own experience. Instead, he enunciates his position only in relation to his friends, referring to their place in the graveyard and not his own.

If the citations in these pages are to be thought of as actually meaning something, they must be treated as tarot cards, discrete fragments that can be arranged and re-arranged in space: a poem made of touch. "Perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart," he writes on the last page of the last completed lecture, "is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape…not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language . . ." This is my attempt- to give speech to touch, to silence, to ambiguity and intimacy. This is my aim in these pages: like Cavalcanti, I wish to support myself on the heaviest of representations in order to move away from the position in which others might locate me. I wish to make use of weight of the texts I stack against my wall, the texts I cite only in order to find a new ground to speak from. Like Perseus, I wish to rescue and replant a few fragments from philosophers who can be and have been criticized on many grounds- thus using the Tarot to create a space for these bygone writers and readers, to affirm the chance of finding refreshment in a language that is at once both old and new. Like Calvino, I wish to show how double drift of reading- how it tends toward the large and the small, the logical and paradoxical, toward both poles of the sign. Our reading will attend to the interlocking of these two extremes: the empty and light-swollen horizon of bodiless rationality as well as a room crammed with relics, a proverb made of of touch.

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