Court of the Fool

The Fool's Cross (I)

2008-04-05T21:28:00.000-07:00

“For he has the territory of harmonicas, the acres of flutes, the domain of violins. And God says, Why did they put you in prison? What did you do to the people? ‘I made them dance and they put me in prison. The soot people hopped; and to twinkle lke sparks on a chimney-back and I made 80 francs every dimanche, and beer and wine, and to eat well. Maitenant…c’est fini…Et toute suite’ (gesture of cutting himself in two) ‘la tete.’ And He says: O you who put the jerk into joys, come up hither. There’s a man up here called Christ who likes the violin.”

The Enormous Room by ee Cummings

The tarot is a world flipped, a pun within a pun. The play of symbols in the cards is always interjected with riddles of the Fool, where the wisdom of certainty is disemboweled into joyous carnival code. Where all that takes place in the name of the jokester: clowns juggle balls toward infinity; a pair of giggling dwarfs spin the roulette of chance; the most chaste of the town’s maidens is lovingly entwined with a lion. Her hand is deep inside its throat. The bishop brays and grunts and howls at the moon, the queen quakes with pangs of desire. Under the trees where fruit hang like heavy like scrotum, the emperor guffaws at all of it until tears stream down his cheeks. Fools themselves, the party doesn’t notice how their central Trickster has slipped into the periphery. Compulsively- almost hysterically- he has somersaulted right out of town, to the very edge of the frame. No matter, the fire is prepared, the castle beyond the carnival preciously collapses. The stack of cards tumbles, the Trumps laugh in unison and the revelry continues, an orgy of stumbling color, like the slow greening of light in the morning. And yet we all know that holiday must end, and so the cards begin to recede into the dusking and somber tones of reality. Suddenly the cards are so orderly - stacked up as the sprawl of the holiday narrows and narrows. They shuffle home in single file. You would never guess that a joke still persists.

Meanwhile, the ‘real’ Fool has flip flopped his way right out of the ranks; slipped away from the rest of the pack. One expects that he might just keep laughing himself into hysterics, deny the hierarchies that must return, fall into incoherence, collapse onto the ground or back-flip right off the edge of reality. Except the tarot card shows the fool miraculously balanced upright. He, like the code of carnival contradictoriness, spins and then gains himself –at the last moment- in gently perpendicular pose. Right when we assume the power of his logic can be found laterally, in his aerial gymnastics, the Fool seeks inspiration in the soil. Emptied of his neighbors, the Fool has hidden the secret language of the carnival and transported its comedy into reality. For all that the Fool has carried in art and literature, in the Tarot it begins with the flip: the fool bodying forth the double essence of pure festivity. Logos is renewed with pathos. And there they are, held together by this trickster- sense and nonsense- so deftly, so slyly married.

The role of the fool and the effects of his twisted logic can be traced to very inception of the European deck and its relation to Medieval and Renaissance practices of play, festivities and celebrations. In this investigation of tricksterdom, Mikail Baktin’s seminal work in Renaissance studies, Rabelais and His World, will help to situate, however complexly, the fool in the context of the Tarot carnival. For Bakhtin, the carnival is a social and literary phenomenon.[1] Images of the fool’s comedic reversals twist through many folklore traditions, celebrating the poor fool who becomes king and condemns the powerful to ruin. Because the figure of the fool so closely resembles a deformed prophet or a deity, Bakhtin’s formulation of carnival seems to indicate laughter and the carnivalesque folk humor did not lose their contact with the holy, sacred, or traditional aspects of religious processions. The Fool consecrates this inchoate holiness only by walking the edges of the Profane; he is the excessiveness of both extremes. It is with his divine madness that the solidity of the Tarot becomes alight.

Most tarot historians seem to agree that the invention of the trumps in Tarot seem to coincide with that of trumps in card games. [2] It is widely assumed among that circa 1425 the standard pack of 52-cards was brought to Europe from the east, most likely by Crusaders returning from Palestine Playing cards developed independently of the trump cards, or the Major Arcana, and were added to standard deck, commonly used for betting or gambling. The four suits of the 52 Islamic “pip cards” were translated and ranked according to four estates evident in European society: in the medieval and Renaissance decks, swords represent nobility; cups correspond to clergy, with the chalice being that of the Catholic mass; coins obviously embody merchants, townsmen, and burghers; and wands stand in for peasants and servants.[i] The court cards represent the noble court according to increasing power: Page, Knight, Queen, and King. In contrast to the vertical ordering of the traditional card deck, the Trumps seemed to have been developed to stand in for theological or philosophical virtues (Strength, Temperance, Justice, Faith, Alchemy, etc.) and for natural and cosmological elements (Star, Moon, Sun, the Last Judgment)[ii].

The addition of the Major Arcana to the standard deck allowed for new games to played. All tarot games revolve around “taking tricks,” where players must follow suit or play a trump card.[iii] Whoever played the highest card takes the “trick.” The fool or trickster is the only card with a special effect, also called ‘l’excuse’.[3] The word ‘trump’ originates in Roman triumphal processions, which were essentially parades for returning victorious Roman leaders. Triumph soon came to mean any political or religious procession involving images of deities, sacred masks, chariots, temple dancers, or priests and priestesses, concluding with a dummy resembling a king, which was to be burned at the end of the procession. After the “fool king” had passed, celebrants raised the cry of Triumpe, announcing the immanence of the divine spirit in all the things presented in the parade. Trump literally came to mean “that which is divine.”[iv]

Bakhtin points out in his introduction that historically the triumphal processions in which the Tarot trumps originate equally tended to collapse the distinction between the defamation and celebration of the victor.[v] However, during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, social and class structure was consolidated to the point where the comic and the solemn could not exist equally in tandem, and the comic was relegated to the non-official festivals in which folk-culture took the form of carnival.[vi]

The context of “the trump” in literature, however, has drifted far from the limits of state sanctioned and orderly parade, though the cards still have one foot, so to speak, in this Roman parade of solemnity. The inversion or coupling of high and the low, the base and the pure is at the heart of the fool. The poles are locked together; any sanctioned period of rest/holiday/feast is always, Bakhtin points out, imbued with philosophical content- nothing is entirely festive per se- something must be added from the spiritual or ideological dimensions. Holidays are made possible not just by the social but by the realm of ideal or eternal forms.[vii] Without this spiritual sanction, festivity is just debauchery.

In another sense, the carnival was neither a safety valve for the transgressive impulse, nor was it a bare negation of ideological hierarchy. Instead the fool ‘s puns and gross jokes express a pointed (and highly rational inversion) of moral and logical expectations, thus making materially possible a creative regeneration of words and reason.[viii] Following Bakhtin through the poetry of Gertrude Stein and the theology of Simone Weil, I argue that the Fool reverses the ordering of high/low in an effort to preserve the distance between them: what is truly sacred in the carnival is not the disappearance of one pole or the other but their fragile relation to each other.

The Fool or Ass makes apparent the material intemperance and baseness of holiness and divinity.[4] Like in the Feast of Fools, a bygone celebration in the medieval Catholic tradition, the asinine extravagance of the Church’s penchant for the profane is a sacred sanction. The Fool, in this vein, irrupts in the pun- semiotic relationship between the savior and the ass, between the holy blood of Christ as a substitute for the sacrificial blood of the lowly beast of the Old Testament. At the end of mass during the festum asinarum, the Word Amen is substituted with a brute and nonsensical utterance: the guttural bray of a donkey. [ix] The holy word is made strange by the vocal and kinetic texture of a bodily sound. The sacred and profane are collapsed into the material otherness of expression. The Fool may gesture toward an immemorial and sacred past, he always blasphemes against it. It becomes clear that this blasphemy is always all ready to be reinscribed into the symbolic as sacred.

And yet the fool of the carnivalesque is not a selfsame archetype, so much embedded within an always sacred before. Instead, he is much more a ritualized interruption in the sacredness of the past, an eschatological break in the consistency of the tradition and the archaic. Whereas sanctioned feasts and holidays, like Christmas or Lent, involve a reinforcement of the existing stable patterns of time marking the triumph of the past as an immutable truth already established in time, the ideals that correspond to carnival images of are those of “making fun” of crises or breaks in the cosmological or biological cycles: feasting, joking, violence, vulgarity and "the material lower bodily stratum."[x] The interruptions of the holy fool dismiss prevailing truths and the collective laughter of the people debunks all transcendental signifiers and submits all official values to satiric parody. Profanity, puns and the disfigurement of “lofty” expression rampage flippantly through the byways and marketplaces of folk culture. In carnival, the unity of the holy word is brought down from on high into the orgy of riddling and sideways expression of the streets and markets.[xi] Where the form of expression was once valued, the material substance of language takes the stage.

These interplays of the comedic are at the root of collective laughter of the carnival. Though joke-telling is a “low” and often obscene form of expression and laughter is often tickled by nonsense, the fool reminds that joke or pun is most successful when it is ultimately rational, especially on two or more contradictory levels. Laughter is born of those methods of knowing which create and belie the transparency of the symbolic, it erupts from the tensions within any matrix of signs and is itself a defense against that which is utterly nonsensical or pointless. Each element of carnival topsy-turvyness yields a comic form- emphasis on the libininal and digestive lower body produces dirty or obscene jokes; the aggression towards hierarchy finds itself in slander and put-downs; the incongruousness of corporeal borders and limits expresses itself in puns and riddles; and the sanctification of the “inhuman” or beastly reveals itself as laughter at giants, dwarfs, clowns, trained animals. Oftentimes these forms reside in one another. Yet they should not be mistaken for nonsense. A joke may employ nonsensical sounds or word, but in the end it always attempts to make rational something apparently non-rational or absurd. The internal rules of jokes and puns respond to paradoxes in logic and language. Though nonsense and jokes are both forms of play, the distinction comes from the fact that laughter at nonsense results from the impossibility of resolving meaning but the joke has a point, a fulcrum around which reason turns.

The pun is perhaps at the height of the fool’s power; he plays tricks with words and sound, often creating a semantic confusion in the sound of a word and also a contradiction in meaning. In a pun, the sensory way a word simply looks or sounds is the base of its complexity- contradictory reasoning and reversal are concretized into a single mark.[5] Take for example the irreverent pun in the joke: ‘How do you get holy water? Boil the hell out of it.’ The materially vocal and kinetic rhythm of the utterance, rather than the concept behind the sign, becomes the source of its logic. Many of the greatest authors, notably Shakespeare, have employed the pun as a form of the highest art form; for example in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio remarks that “dreamers often lie.”[xii] The word lie plays with the double meaning that dreamers often deceive, but also quite literally that they recline in bed. A single manifest word or sound signals at least to differing conceptual functions. Oftentimes a joke will hold up not just the doubleness of the pun, but a sense of hilarity or tragedy which might ensue from misrecognizing the semantic ambivalence of the sign. Take for example the quotation from Joyce: “Come forth Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.”[xiii] Accordingly, the pun shows itself to be more rational than its listener.

For Bakhtin, such reversals of sense express the creative energy of "a carnival sense of the world." Laughter works philosophical changes upon life and society. It may erupt from the collective body, but its most important function is internal; it defends the creative freedom of thought. In carnival, laughter and excess push aside the seriousness and reverse the vertical hierarchies of "official" life.[xiv] The elevation of baseness through parody shakes up the authoritative version of language and values, making room for an assortment of voices and meanings in the world. And so while the jokes of the carnival are often base, dirty, profane or beastly, the jokes told by the Fool and the laughter of his audiences fundamentally set human beings apart from their animal or vegetable kin. Once we accept that we possess two faculties that set us apart from other creatures – the symbolic and laughter – it becomes clear that both the laughter and the need to laugh can only be by virtue of symbolic logic and its tendency to turn upside down and inside out.

[1] In this book, Bakhtin argues that Rabelais' 16th-century novel Gargantua and Pantagruel is based on, and can only be understood through, late medieval-early Renaissance "popular-festive forms." Rabelais and His World describes an elaborate aesthetics of medieval peasant culture, referred to alternately as "the people," "the folk," "the second world," "the unofficial world," and "popular-festive culture," defined against the "official world" of civil and religious duty.religious authority. Bakhtin insists that readers can apprehend the true philosophical importance of Rabelais' book only by listening with the ears of the 16th century, which were finely tuned to the aesthetics of the grotesque.

[2] The Tarot trumps themselves date with certainty from 1392, when Charles VI of France made in the court accounts an entry referring to the payment to Jaquemin Gringonneur for the purchase of three sets of the trump cards. (Polack, 25).

[4] In the medieval celebration the younger clergy chose from among their own number a mock pope, archbishop, bishop, or abbot to reign as Lord of Misrule. Participants would then "consecrate" him with many ridiculous ceremonies in the chief church of the place, giving names such as Archbishop of Dolts, Abbot of Unreason, or Pope of Fools. The protagonist could be a boy bishop or sub deacon. The parody tipped dangerously towards the profane and was condemned by the late twelfth century. The ceremonies often mocked the performance of the highest offices of the church, while other persons, dressed in different kinds of masks and disguises, engaged in songs, dances and revelry within the church building. (Thurston)

[5] The duality of puns often manifests itself in parody. The rationality of the fool’s topsy-turvy punniness is fairly evident in this modern play with puns: “lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that- electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, dry cleaners depressed, bed makers debunked, baseball players debased, teachers declassified, bulldozer operators degraded, organ donors delivered, software engineers detested, underwear makers debriefed, and musical composers decomposed? On a more positive note, though, perhaps we can hope that politicians will be devoted.” (source unknown)

Notes

[i] Nichols, 42.

[i] Pollack, 25

[ii] Butler, 17

[iii] The Fédération Française de Tarot, official rules

[iv] Encyclo- 180

[v] Bakhtin, 6

[vi] Ibid, 7

[vii] Ibid, 9

[viii] Ibid, 16

[ix] “Feast of Fools,” Thurston

[x] Bakhtin, 9

[xi] Bakhtin, 17

[xii] Shakespeare, 16

[xiii] Joyce, 105

[xiv] Bakhtin, 15; 25

The Fool's Cross (II)

2008-04-05T21:27:00.000-07:00

The fool rejoices in flux and mutability, the dynamic and unstable; in his jokes all absolute values are ridiculed and relativised- the word and the world are made strange by their very materiality. Rigid oppositions are joyfully dismantled and confused. The womb and the tomb, the king and fool, body and mind, sense and sound, wisdom and folly, the anal and the angelic are all turned on their heads, disrupting the contradiction of opposites. The punning of the Fool, which holds up the materiality of the word as something devious, is testament to the tricks he plays on the hierarchies of high and low. "One of the main attributes of the medieval clown was precisely the transfer of every high ceremonial gesture or ritual to the material sphere” Bakhtin points out.[i] Thus, the corporeal core of carnival exemplifies this turning all verticals onn their head- this is why all that is “bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable, triumphant.”[ii] The comedy of the fool is where wittiness meets the libidinal- carnival humor evokes all the laughter of gross jokes.[1] It is uproarious, childlike, low-brow and in bad taste.

In the pun, the elevated meaning of a word is turned around by the emphasis on the very body of the word itself. Language of jokes takes on a polymorphous life of its own, generating excitement as it becomes a thing to be enjoyed in itself. “Low” humor and punning have been sanctified in modern poetics as literary strategies themselves. Take for example, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Stein’s poems are not descriptions of things in words, but of words as things themselves, with the same palpability as our own bodies. The aim of her poetic language is to turn the problem of this relation between body and word into an enabling passage, tracing in it the possibility of a transformative practice that opens up the speaking subject to the truths couched the stubborn corporeality of language, those moments of interruptions where we discover the pun of the Fool. Our interest is not just in the work as an example of puns, but also, since puns involve an excess of meaning or ideas, the way in which Stein takes what is low, or base, and uses it to reveal a series of ideas about the sacrificial nature of culture.

Carnival reversal implies a change from principles of stability and closure to constant possibility. The fool embodies for us the contradiction of the ideal completed, atomized being against the collective corporeality of all life. This latter grotesque collective Body is a glut of heterogeneity- always open to the world by one orifice or another. Bakhtin takes the idea of the collective body in carnival from its agricultural and Christian origins as a promise of new growth, and expands it to represent "a feast for all the world," "a feast of becoming".[iii] The cosmic banquet features the collective carnival body, constituted entirely of openings, apertures, and orifices. In images of the grotesque mouths are always open, eating and drinking, laughing, joking, shouting: they take in and commune with the outer world into which they themselves are extended. The carnival body is a grotesque body which

is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits... The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation.[iv]

It is no wonder that an entire third of Stein’s volume is devoted to food- brimming with allusions to reproduction, eating, excrement and death. However, the pieces themselves do not, as in Rabelais, merely present the image of the grotesque body. Rather, the “bodies” of the words themselves- the puns which occur through the sound of cadences and printed shape- mimic the passing of matter through the body. Her experimentation with the fragmented and openness of lexical meaning turns language inside out and reveals expression as an extension of the one’s body into the corporeal world of vegetables, animals, and inert objects. The “rooms” in which she speaks embody the kind of indeterminacy and overabundance of Bakhtin’s formulation of carnival, where language is lowered into digestive, sexual, and excretory rituals in an effort to materialize what is eternal, holy, and good.

The riddling structure of each of Stein’s short prose-poems in Tender Buttons has this same simple, idiomatic nature of proverbs and vulgar jokes in the types of the carnival speech discussed in Rabelais and His World. They are as punning and witty more than they are nonsensical, each fragment presenting itself as something that one should chew on for a bit. They involve the more base pleasures of the mouth as well as the discriminating taste of the listening ear. Through its rich sound cadences, material textures, and capacity to tolerate nonsense and discontinuity, language is couched in the corporeal. Our words are marinated in a libidinal perversity even before we reach for them.

Bakhtin pushes the point that degradation and the lowering of ideals into the belly, intestines, reproductive organs, and buttocks involves a vertical flip, but to push an object, word or idea into the lower body is not to destroy it, but to “hurl it down into the lower reproductive stratum, the zone in which…a new birth takes place…it is always conceiving”.[v] In this light, the simple and inert topics in Tender Buttons (Milk, Purse, Egg, A Hankerchief, Cream, etc.) are seen in a new light, as forms that are fertile and mobile. The bodies of carnival are never closed nor complete; the material bodily principle is always in a state of becoming, of emptying and filling itself with what is found outside of itself.

These puns often come off as dirty jokes, alluding to a double meaning which is erotic or excretory- each poem encounters the material and heterogeneous excess of the body “out there” in the objects, food, and rooms of the world. As such, the pieces seem to be hiding something decidedly erotic or lewd. Take for example the poem called ‘A Brown’: “A brown which is not liquid not more so relaxed and yet there is a change, a news is pressing”.[vi] The poem, alluding to feces, muscular relaxation, and the transformation of food to waste culminates in a double pun- “a-nus is pressing.” Yet the change to which Stein refers is linked to the very digestive aspect of carnival materialism and the inversions of the fool- where what has been traditionally elevated is not annihilated or negated but transformed or dissolved by the incorporations and appropriations of the body. Here, creation is linked with excrement, death, or defilement; what is “pressed” is also “new.”

The grotesque is an image of the eternal triumph of transformation; it expresses hope for the future, of always another chaotic beginning. This sense of time is quite different from a model which starts with an origin and moves in a procession, one which Bakhtin identifies with the "official" preoccupation with the past that renders life hierarchically pre-determined and unchangeable. For the carnival, the origin is obverted, contradicted, and doubled within itself. This beginning, though pre-symbolic and pre-egoistic, presents itself not just as a primordial past but the disruptive possibility of its return as something indestructible.[2] Thus to debase something, to eat and digest it, is to sacrifice it to the eternalpossibility of regeneration.

Images of becoming link the celebration of the body and the material world with the folk philosophical concept of time. By paying close attention to the punning relationships of objects (mouths, anuses, food, excrement), Stein and Bakhtin both reveal the relationships a hidden network of values. Extravagant feasting and excreting, either of food or words, herald the pleasures of carnival creativity, representing "the pathos of change and renewal".[vii] In a similar vein, the ontological relation between the digestive and the divine and permeates Tender Buttons, sharing with the Fool a predilection for punning, a play with the flexibility of the value of "becoming," and its double sense of excretion and Creation:

Pain soup, suppose it is a question, suppose it is butter, real is, real is only, only excreate, only excreate a no since.

A no, a no since, a no since when, a no since when since, a no since when since a no since when since, a no since, a no since when since, a no since, a no, a no since a no since, a no since, a no since. [viii]

To “excreate a no since” is to undo the meaningless of nonsense (no-since), perhaps to uncover innocence (a-no-since). The piece is named Orange In, a pun of a title with multiple internal discordances. Orange In is also perhaps origin or arrange in. When the musical otherness of this “no since” becomes vocalized, it begins to sound “no sense,” or the Fool’s “nuisance.” The collection of sounds in a “a no, a no since” seems to metamorphose into material excess- infantile babbling or the musical cadence of a lover’s moans. Stein here seems to be playing with a reversal of the axis of a pre-symbolic beginning– “a no since when.” The carnival tricks of the fool concretize the past in the body by means of this “ex-creation.”

Debasing something to the lower body is central to the fools trickery in the “ex-creation” pun, a word which disintegrates the words “create” and “excrete” from their normal lexicon. To create something new through destruction is to ex-create, but it is also to excrete, to reformulate food into something fertile for the soil. The resemblance of excrement to the creativity of the carnival can be found again the question about the “since when,” the very first bit of matter. Degrading the idealism of the vertically ‘high’ face and mind to the bowels, belly and reproductive organs is not to eradicate it as the extreme limit or horizon. Pushing the good, the pure, or the divine to its lowest parts of the body dutifully preserves its potential to be materially felt and regenerated. The Fool’s excreatory wordplay uses language for “high” means- thinking and philosophizing, but also for the immediate bodily gratification in saying something that feels good in the mouth, by tearing words from their contexts and subjecting them to digestive change.

Excreation, if understood in its double sense, involves a sacrifice, an act that debases and dissolves for the sake of resurrection. Where mystics find holiness in taste of Christ’s body, the punning brilliance of the carnival fool - so fantastically preserved in the language play of Tender Buttons - seems to excreate innocence, or excrete a new kind of rapture. To create and then ex-create preserves the taut and witty reversals of a riddling, punning Fool and the surprise and sensuousness of his carnival outlook on the world. The excreation of time in the carnival is itself a pun, one which crosses the vertical opposition of holy and fleshly with the horizontal affiliation of the purely spiritual with the immutably carnal, where “to the pure, all things are pure.” In this crossing, we find that “in emptying ourselves, we expose ourselves to the pressures of the surrounding universe.”[ix]

[1] The “material bodily principle” of the figure of the fool extends beyond the Western scope of the carnival. Even primitive myths about the figure of the trickster or clown reveal something indestructible about his bodily excessiveness. The American anthropologist Paul Radin published an in depth study of the myth of the trickster, considering the Winnebago story cycles in which the character ‘Trickster’ goes through a series of misadventures. In the early cycles, Trickster attempts to butcher a slain buffalo and his left and right hand begin fighting one another over the possession of the carcass. Before it is over, Trickster has injured himself. Or another in which he goes to sleep after appointing his anus to guard some roasting meat. When a group of foxes approaches, the anus attempts to drive them off by flatulating, but to no avail. When Trickster awakens, he is so angry with his anus that he burns it with a brand from the fire. Then, as he walks along, he sees delicious pieces of cooked fat on the trail, which he eats. He discovers, much to his surprise, that these pieces of meat are fragments of his own burned intestines. In the next, Trickster wakes up to find a flag flying above him, but he soon discovers that the "flag" is his blanket and the pole is his phallus. He reels his penis in, carries it in a box, and attempts to have sex with a princess he encounters. No one can dislodge his enormous penis from her until an old wise woman tells them it is Trickster trying to have sex. There is another in which Trickster attempts to impersonate a woman until his fake vagina falls out and another in which he eats so many laxatives that he creates a mound of excrement into which he falls. He is so covered with excrement that he cannot see, so trees tell him where he can find water to clean himself. In these story cycles we re-discover the fundamental pattern of the Trickster: material excess, laughter, contradiction and above all the ability to disturb signs. The semiotic function of the Fool occurs where comedy is inverted, meaning collapses in its own excrement, and the borders of inside/outside are no longer sacrosanct.

[2] Julia Kristeva, a feminist theorist who drew heavily from the work of Bakhtin, claimed that laughter came from a crisis of the body with the symbolic matrix of signification. In Revolutions in Poetic Language, she refers to the site of this crisis as laughter. What concerns Kristeva is the logocentric bias which has taken hold on Western thought, compelling us to reduce psychic processes to linguistic ones and to posit the “Word” at the beginning of meaning. Kristeva opposes this tradition with the ‘extra-linguistic’ semiotic, and tries articulates a place of beginning before the Word, an originary phase dominated by the negative space of the mother's body, a “rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position.” Kristeva articulates this space of negativity and bodily drive as the semiotic chora drawing from Plato's Timaeus. Similar to stories of the Fool, the chora’s “nonexpressive totality” is by its nature almost impossible to articulate. It is the material origin from which the subject is both produced and threatened with annihilation. It is intersection of sense and non-sense, both spatially as the originary interior of the mother’s body, and temporally, as the beginning before the Beginning. So the chora is contradictorily both moment and receptacle, though “as rupture and articulations (rhythm), [it] precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality” In this sense the chora is not simply the redemption of forgotten past (whose status, Kristeva warns us, is that of a theoretical fiction), but is the force of its movement in the body that perpetually and repetitively destabilizes the subject and frustrates any effort to impose the Word as the origin of being. Of course, the Fool’s laughter erupts also from a heightened awareness of logos and rationality, not just its non-signifying intersections in the body. Nevertheless, the palpability of puns in poetic are related to this chora in the sense that they are reproductive or fertile. (Kristeva, 26-30)

[i] Ibid, 20

[ii] Ibid, 19

[iii] Ibid, 10

[iv] Ibid, 26

[v] Bakhtin, 21

[vi] Stein, 14

[vii] Ibid, 11

[viii] Stein, 38

[ix] Weil, 144

The Fool's Cross (III)

2008-04-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

III

“We are fools for Christ’s sake.”

In the lowness of the base, we find the heights of heaven reflected; in their reciprocity there is a kind of ex-creation. The fool’s sensitivity to the carnivalesque springs from the theological tradition that his puns and jokes seems to subvert. The figure of the fool in the tarot deck thus, becomes a holy fool. How can we make sense of this relation?

Every card in the Tarot deck is repeated and inverted by another card. For the card of the fool, this is card twelve The Hanged Man- a card which pictures a Christlike figure hanging off of a wooden cross by his feet. His head, which dangles close to the ground, is enveloped by a radiant halo. Where the Fool represents laughter and possibility, the Hanged Man is a card of suspension and paradox, a figure that seems to be at a moment of absolute surrender and penitence. The bawdiness and excretory joking that we have encountered in the fool has undecidedly developed as a figure contradictorily transfused with holiness, and one who suffers for our own folly and holds it up to us as if in a mirror.

It might help to reiterate that carnival, as a distorted form of liturgy or public worship, is that form where rigid tyrannical hierarchies are distorted, reflected, and overthrown- albeit only temporarily. The figure of the fool stands in for that last bit of carnival that cannot be destroyed, the irreducible remainder who carries the carnival spirit, and suffers these reveling pressures of the finite world for us, even when its time has ended. The fool possesses, like in cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny and Wiley Coyote, a quality of resilience that means that even when he is beaten it does not seem to injure him. It is a resilience of the spirit that might complement the physical litheness often associated with the jester. He never seems particularly perturbed by an anvil descending on his head, never stopping to consider the cruelty of his punishment or beg for mercy: Like the comic characters in cartoons who may be cut to shreds, smashed flat, riddled with holes, or stretched into a thin line, yet which suddenly spring back into their original form, the Fool always, wretchedly, seems to persist.

If the carnival occurs as a crisis in cosmological time, then the fool is the savior of this possibility, the possibility of the beginning of the end, the opening in history where light pours in. Though the grotesque body of the fool has often been thought of in terms of darkness, night, and shadow, Bakhtin reminds us that in the pure folk sense of carnival, the feasting and excreting body is associated with lightness, dawn, and luminescence.[1] The holy fool then becomes a Christ-like figure, an icon who lowers and empties himself for the highest ends, one whose humiliation becomes humility and whose jokes and puns are translated into proverb, whose bodily pangs of hunger and desire are testaments to the irreducible pressure of grace. After having discussed the foolishness of carnival and its relation to poetic language and the body, we will turn finally, through the theosophical writing of Simone Weil and figure of Surplice in ee Cummings’ novel The Enormous Room, towards this figure of the Holy Fool, the Grotesque Christ.

“Purity is the power to contemplate defilement,” writes Weil, a philosopher known for her mystic relationship to the affliction of reality and its relation to God’s distance.[i] Though her asceticism may seem to be the farthest degree away from the sensuous excessiveness of Bakhtin’s carnival fool, both seem to share an attention to the extreme limits of the being human in the world- the self-canceling and emptying at work in carnival laughter and the naked, vegetative egoism that is for Weil, the utmost sanctification of one’s vertical distance from the heights of grace. Each mode of reading the world is “work in which the body is a part.”[ii] Both are bound to earthliness and the humility of the flesh, by the gravity of matter, by the patient acceptance of contradiction, incompatibility of truth. In the card of the Hanged Man, where the fool is himself turned upside down, is an image of awakened attention to the impotency at the heart of reality’s struggle with itself, the cross is a way to give space to incomprehensibility.

Cummings’ novel The Enormous Room is a semi-autobiographical account on time spent in French prison camps during the first war, which describes the prison as world turned upside down where dirty and degraded men are joyous and holy. At the margins of this reversed utopia a heartbreakingly pathetic Christ figure whose repulsiveness and piety seem to bridge the expulsive lowness of the body (Bakhtin) and the descent of divinity in (Weil). Surplice is described as disgusting, filthy animal covered in excrement- but he is also a transient beast, untouchable in his venerability: “Take this animal. You hear him, you are afraid of him, you smell and you see him and you know him- but you do not touch him.” He is childlike in his naiveté and oblivious to dirt, as if he were a three year old still picking up anything he finds on the floor or paddling about in feces.

And now take him in dawn’s soft squareness, gently stooping to pick chewed cigarettes from the spitty floor…watch him scratching his back (exactly like a bear) on the wall…speaking to no one, sunning his soul

Poor Surplice is a fool without a carnival, transplanted into the concrete walls of imprisonment. His sole usefulness exists in volunteering to carry buckets of excrement to the sewer every day. He is the one who is always silent, forgotten, ignored in the background, responding with wide-eyed astonishment whenever anyone speaks to him. He carries around a childish toy, a harmonica, as one last relic of the festiveness Surplice internalizes. And despite his lowliness, his “unobstreperous affinity for excrement, ” Surplice is also a figure of divine innocence: “religious with a terrible and exceedingly beautiful and absurd intensity.” Surplice is exalted to saintliness; both befouled and blessed, he resembles the absolute baseness of spiritual affliction, the figure of Christ as the lowest common denominator of the flesh.

Christ on the cross is for Weil the most humble, human, low part of his mission: “the sweat of his blood…the sense of being abandoned by God.”[iii] I argue that the self-emptying of God on the cross, which we will explore in further detail, is not far from the excretory ex-creation of the fool in carnival. Weil refers to the carnal attraction of the material world and its lateral forces as gravity. Gravity draws us away from holiness, it preserves the distance between God and the created world- the truth of God for her is experienced as absolute alterity. Grace is the only force that opposes this gravity, a nourishment that comes from the opposite direction, from the heights of heaven. In short, Weil calls for a kind of self-emptying, like Stein’s excreation- “May God grant me to become nothing.” Creation was for God, not a means of establishing his power, but a means of distancing himself, emptying his love into the matter of the world so that humanity could be.[2] God thus establishes his presence and his absence simultaneously, creating a metaphysical pun whereby God annihilated his closeness to creation so that we could be- where I am, He is not. The incarnation of Christ doubles this divine distancing- for Weil, the Cross is the very substance of the world. God has poured himself into the suffering of the crucifixion so that the mystery of His love can only be found in moments of crisis and contradiction- the “cruciform nature of the world.” The cross is essence of ex-creation, or de-creation as Weil refers to it.

Decreation is a matter of turning the world upside down and apprehending the absolute goodness that can come from this reversal. For Simone Weil, the first person pronoun I is an index of our ontological distance from our creator. Where we find ourselves reduced to mere creatures by the gravity of matter, de-creation is the process by which this distance between the beast and the deity is crossed. Just as Christ eliminated himself on the cross and we eliminate what materially fills us in the act of excretion, de-creation involves an elimination of the I, where the limits of the self are ecstatically breached and excrement, the irreducible remainder of our creature-hood is released from the body. If we are to continue to understand excrement as the remainder and undoing of creating/eating, it is also what makes our bodies immortal in the fertility of the earth.

If this is so, then Christ as the material sacrifice of God is also like a piece of excrement, the excreation of God is the contradiction of a love that is materialized only through the humiliation of his son. In this sense, assertion of ones baseness and gravity becomes a revival of its reciprocal relationship to grace.[3] According to the Christian tradition, out of his love, God emptied himself on the cross. He effaced himself for the sake of human freedom. He gave us the world in exchange for his company.

Bakhtin points out that carnival laughter “asserts and denies, buries and revives,” just as the crucifixion was both an assertion of divine love and the denial of God’s power, both the burial of a deity and the death of sin, an eschatological promise of revival and resurrection. The carnival laughter is the spontaneity of laughter at the entire world, and thus is directed even at the one who laughs- it is a self canceling laughter, a joyousness where one laughs at the distance between the poles of the self and of faith: the rational ego drops from the body like a piece of ripe fruit.

Why would Simone Weil say that Grace is a descending movement, when we also know that gravity is the cause of excreation/ excretion’s descent? Because God’s erasure of himself on earth was a descending movement. To efface one’s self if “to come down by a movement in which gravity plays no part.”[iv] Love is cast downward. The fool in his divine folly seems to de-create reason, instead of destroying or annihilating the boundaries and demarcations of order in the external world, he lets them pass through his body and descend into the lowly and un-created, the purely unformed and excretory place of pure paradox.

The fool figure seemed to appeal to Weil, regardless of whether she was consciously aware of his theological significance in the context with which we are working. Two weeks before Simone Weil died in a sanatorium in 1943, she wrote a letter to her parents after having seen a production of King Lear, wondering about the “unbearably tragic” quality of foolishness with which she felt her own paradoxical methods of telling the truth were kindred:

There is a class of people in the world who fall into the lowest degree of humiliation…who are deprived not only of all social consideration but also, in everybody’s opinion of the specific human dignity, reason itself- and these are the people who, in fact, are able to tell the truth. All the others lie…Because no one [in King Lear] is aware that [the fool’s] sayings deserve the slightest attention…since they are fools- their expression of the truth is not listened to. Everybody is unaware that what they say is true. And not satirically or humorously but simply the truth. Pure unadulterated truth- luminous, profound and essential. [v]

The fool’s degradation, similar to Christ being laughed at on the cross and forsaken by God, is evidently a necessary condition of knowing the truth and speaking it, but also of not being heard. The paradox of speaking the truth and not being heard is at the heart of the cross; Weil abides by a kind of logic where every truth contains a lie, and to speak the very paradox at the heart of the world is humiliating. Every pun and paradox demands that one must suffer to speak it.

Surplice, in The Enormous Room, is a heartbreaking character because he embodies not only the filthy excess of the body and the kaleidoscopic madness of pun and paradox but also absurdity of loneliness. The fool is a forlorn mark of the laughing madness of solitude, one who must carry around the unbearable secret of the sacred essence of profanity. He preserves the eternal and private carnival because it is his duty.

Inasmuch as Surplice, being unspeakably lonely, enjoyed any and all insults for the simple reason that they constituted or at least implied a recognition of his existence…His duty was to amuse; amusement is indeed, peculiarly essential to suffering; in proportion as we are able to be amused we are able to suffer; I, Surplice, am a very necessary creature after all. [vi]

To bear the weight of telling the truth even when no one listens is enormous- because the fool must suffer in his divine innocence for the sake of all other’s amusement. Because he must allow his “luminous and essential” truth to become the butt of everyone’s jokes, degradation comes to be seen as the supreme act of selfless love. In this passage, we find that Surplice’s suffering is part of necessity, the need to feel the truth of our common humanity and materiality and neediness. The fool incarnates this truth through self sacrifice and love. But since that whole truth- that only suffering can fully open us to this amusement and joy- since that whole truth is the reverse of wisdom in the world, it becomes true by definition for Simone Weil that only fools can ever speak it fully.

What Simone Weil calls decreation, which according to her is similar to digestive sense in which Stein calls for a lowering of language, could perhaps be thought of at these two forces of humiliation and amusement turning toward each other, intersecting with each other, the self relinquishing its monopoly of the life instinct, ceasing to absorb only the positive energy of laughter, but also orienting it across that deathly, negative, apocalyptic instinct of the carnival. There is room here to read Weil in terms of the linguistic and social materialism of Stein and Bakhtin. Decreation involves turning the world on its head, a “reversal of the positive and negative,” where the fool empties his subject hood so that he can become the fulcrum of humiliation and love.

May that which is high in us go downward so that which is low can go upward. For we are wrong side upward. We are born thus. To reestablish order is to undo the creature in us.

Reversal of the objective and objective.

Similarly, reversal of the positive and negative.[vii]

The materialization of the divine within the body de-neutralizes the punning contradictions of truth and language- and then renews them. Like the seed that must be buried to sprout forth, like the clearest and cleanest of truths that is found only in the throbbing bloody guts of the world; words must flop in the mud before they can come to life.

To de-create as the fool does, through love of language or of thought, is to make innocent what is offensive, erotic, or vulgar. We must accept the topsy-turvy movement of the carnival within us- this involves giving ourselves back to holiness, to the universe, to the very matter that forms us and our words. As has been mentioned, Weil’s God is not ever-present but entirely absent; in creating us he decreated himself and withdrew at an infinite distance.[4] Like Surplice, the sensitive body feels his love in the luxurious surplus of life, but cannot know his truth: “And now take Surplice, whom I see and hear and smell and touch and even taste, and whom I do not know.”[viii] The wisdom of the fool is the naked truth at fulcrum of the cross; the object that is so paradoxical that the mind cannot touch it; it can only wait to be penetrated by it.

Thus decreation, excretion and excreation are all a matter of holding up the bestial and vegetative creature-ness of human existence as marks of God’s absence and his love.

In her paradoxical language, Weil makes this clear when she says that “there is every degree of distance between the creature and God…Matter, plants, animals. Here evil is so complete that it destroys itself; there is no longer and evil: mirror of divine innocence.”[ix] To reverse the distance involves bringing God back to the lowly baseness from which he withdrew in order to pour his love into it. “We are at the point where love is just possible…the love which unites is in proportion to the distance.”[x]

The finite solidity of the world which the carnival is submerged in is precisely the desert of God’s absence, where the distance between the sacred and profane is preserved as laughter, as the compulsive bodily excess of creature-hood. Enervated by the discontinuous texture of the external world passing through the body, the fool turns the world upside down, inverting it point by point as if it were a mirror, reflecting the presence of a divine unity through the folly of its absence. In the moment of subtracting oneself through laughter and making oneself vulnerable only to that which is surrounding us, the Fool attains the empty place where, seized by impersonal powers, we are lifted up to place where we make thought exist through us. In the creation of the world, humanity was lifted up. Why? Because “The point of leverage is the cross. There can be no other. It has to be at the intersection of this world and that which is not the world. The cross is this intersection.”[xi]

We began with the fool as a testament to the weightedness of the carnival spirit. Now, the Fool, whose element is air, is also a body at the mercy of the immaterial.[5] He is given over to the diaphanous texture of light and grace, caught in a wafting surge of weightlessness. The subtle filminess of his body corresponds to every particle’s secret wish for softness. The distance between the heights of the good and the lowness of laughter creates enough room in the universe for all matter to dissolve and escape the spirit of gravity. Strung out on the cross, he incarnates a loving tolerance for the absence of God and a patience in suffering the recklessness of contradiction: “the care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong. There care with which there is a terrific sacrifice and plenty of breathing.”[xii] Like the deck which is always shuffled anew, the Fool empties and fills himself eternally. He is the laughing exuberance of empty space.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1965.

The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. 1 Cor. 4-10. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Butler, Bill. The Dictionary of the Tarot. New York: Schocken Books, 1987.

Cummings, E E. "Surplice." The Enormous Room. New York: Modern Library, 1922. 254-268.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage Books, 1934. 105.

“Feast of Fools.” Thurston, Herbert. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Nihil Obstat, September 1, 1909. Remy Lafort, Censor. Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York

Kristeva, Julia. Revolutions in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

Milton, John. "Paradise Lost." John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merrit Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003. 173-454.

Pollack, Rachel. Tarot: Complete Illustrated Guide. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Element, 2002.

Radin, Paul. The Trickster: a Study in American Indian Mythology. 4th ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1972.

"Reglement." Federation De Francais De Tarot. Federation De Francais De Tarot. 15 Feb. 2008 .

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Mineola: Dover Books, 1993. 16.

Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1914

Weil, Simone; Miles, Siân. "Introduction." Simone Weil: an Anthology. New York: Grove P, 1986. 1-49.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Lincoln: Bison Books, 1947.

[1] Another topological inversion of high/low in the carnival of the fool complicates the relationship of lowness to grace and grotesque to holiness. John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a Christian epic poem about Creation and the temptation of Eve makes clear the vertical poles of Christian theology. The vertical dimension of Milton’s cosmos is not only physical, but is also a scale of the good, of moral worth. The higher a body is in the Miltonian hierarchy, the closer he is to God, both in substance (i.e. the ethereal airy spirit of angels) and proximity. Light is also proportionate to height and to goodness. Hell is completely darkened by inky shadows; the world is moderately lit by the secondary light referred by the sun and moon. Heaven is intensely radiant, and God is light itself. The rank of the substance of bodies is analogous too: The fallen angels have degenerated into shapes gross and bulky. Man’s spirit is lighter. Angels are made of some subtle airy substance. The Son of God is presumably the purest of all beings. Goodness is the same thing as ascendancy, also as radiance, and also as subtlety or delicacy. Evil is spatial lowness, shadiness, bulkiness. It is clear that the rarity of substance, position, and luminosity are precisely ordered according to a vertical scale of rightness, or truth. (After the consumption of the mysterious fruit, what Adam and Eve lose is the orientation of their spatial senses, respectively: on one hand, an immediately vertical attachment to God, and on the other, an immediately lateral attachment to home.) Because the carnival is so related to light, it represents the inversion of these traditional vertical attachments, aligning the lowness and lumpishness of carnival with the height of the good.

[2] In book 7 of Paradise Lost, Adam appeals for Raphael to explain Genesis to him- in this sense he is calling forth his own origin or beginning, perhaps to extend his Reason beyond the Garden, where the distance between his being and God’s was not yet so great. But at the same time, there is something interesting going on with the work of separation and division- in the sense that thru out the entire poem, there is a repetition of various divisions and separations. An obvious example of course, is Satan’s separation and repeated fall.

God’s creation of the earth is one of dissociation and division, where he separates the various essences that comprise Chaos:

“Again, God said, let there be Firmament

Amid the Waters, and let it divide

The Waters from the Waters: and God made

The Firmament, expanse of liquid, pure,

Transparent, Elemental Air, diffus’d

In circuit to the uttermost convex

Of this great Round: partition firm and sure,

The waters underneath from those above,

Dividing… (VII, 261-9)

And later:

“Be gathered now ye waters under Heav’n

Into one place, and let dry land appear.” (283-4)

He continues to multiply the world with various discrete geographical elements, vegetation and animals by extracting division among them. The creation of man is the highest distillation of his efforts- God literally creates vertical space between Adam and the animals by designing him upright. Creation here, at a base level, is primarily the act of setting apart elements like earth and air and drawing distances among them. The pattern of the division of matter here rhymes somewhat with the topographical estrangement of heaven and hell.

[3] Even in creating the universe as a mark of love, Milton’s God seems to have anticipated his distance from humanity as a precondition for salvation. His is a universe in which falling creates form and hierarchy: Satan falling from the gates of heaven, the solidities of the chaotic swarm falling into place, Adam falling to his knees, the Fall from Paradise, and of course the Fallen state from which we must interpret this poem. This seems especially interesting given the fact that God’s will is to create space between things- Heaven and Earth, Firmament and Air, Man and Beast- here are interstices in which various falls are facilitated.

God’s work in Paradise Lost is that of deliberate differentiation- his will enacts itself through attraction and repulsion. As soon as he creates Adam, he proceeds to multiply the distance between them. Adam’s consciousness begins with sensing the space surrounding him, feels a deep loving connection with a creator. He turns to nature, thinking it might be God, and calls out to it, receiving no reply. God doesn’t demand obedience or praise from Adam, it wells up in him as the first sensation. In a few moments, he comes to experience a self and the movement granted by his bounded form in the place surrounding- “Here had new begun my wand’ring” (VII 300-1). God presents himself as a shape, but not so that Adam can bind himself to Him, only to tell him to go even further: “thy mansion wants thee” (296). With strange detachment, God pronounces his “stern interdiction” (VII 332) and demands that Adam perform his own brand of creating difference by naming all the creature of the earth. Sensing his solitary singularity and the vacuity surrounding him in this lonely though plentiful place, he calls out for a companion: “I found not what methought I wanted still” (355). By conferring Adam free will and by creating therefore the requested Eve, God proliferates the dividing expanses further by showing generosity enough to confer upon Adam another object of desire to obey, one who is not Him. Adding the proverbial insult to injury, even the creation of Eve carves out distance and vacuity in Adam’s own interiority, for what else could replace the missing rib but space?

[4] After the fall, death becomes the numb guardian of time, and the laws of the vertical (light=height=purity=good) are transposed by the attractions of the horizontal (nostalgia, home, death, desire). Humankind is drawn closer to baseness than to ethereality; in our fallen wickedness we are prone to horizontal attractions, not vertical ones. Eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil conferred not rational knowledge of evil, but experiential knowledge of evil: “they came to know good only through evil.” Resigned to death, Adam and Eve are more obedient to the stubborn solidity of matter than God’s divine distances of space. Simone Weil pronounced that “evil is the shadow of the good,” an incompatible though inescapable corollary. Being fallen, we can only ascertain good and evil in terms of their contradiction on earth. We are blind to the higher good that usurps the moral/material inconsistency of the world and unifies it on God’s level- this unity is not accessible by way of human experience. Milton’s expressive combination of weight and lightness, mass and fluidity, shade and radiance creates a structural interposition of shadows and light. The use of a vivid chiaroscuro as the setting for the poem carries a material/moral message: we read shadows here as signs of the moral failure of light in the steadiness of matter.

[5] For the Case deck, he is the breath of the beasts in the fields; for the Crowley 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, for the 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. (Butler,113).

[i] Weil, 176

[ii] Weil, 200

[iii] Weil, 100

[iv] Weil, 48

[v] Quoted in Anthology, 3

[vi] Cummings, 262

[vii] Weil, 81

[viii] Cummings, 255

[ix] Weil, 130

[x] Weil, 130

[xi] Weil, 146

[xii] Stein, 52

Preface

2008-03-18T14:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Zero

2008-03-05T11:58:00.000-08:00

In the Tarot the card of the Fool is given over to 0, the numerical symbol for nothing; his errant liberty thus escapes the consecutive march of the Trumps. Our word for zero is derived ultimately from the Arab sifr, which means cipher.[i] In this light, 0 is a puzzle, a nonentity. How can the Fool’s individuality be identified as nothing? Zero has two simultaneous but incompatible tasks: it must act like a numeral when used a placeholder, but it also, in it denotation, negate the numeral and signify nothing. Mathematical logic, at least today, demands a zero, even if zero is where logic breaks down [1] In other words, how can the Fool, as zero, possibly inhabit the schizophrenic position of marking meaning and marking the void? It is the nothing that implies that what it names is something, is one. The Fool, like zero, is at once distinct and obscure- his only guarantee is a lack of sense. He is oblique, a number twisted out of vacuity, a lively zero, a signifier that cannot fully signify.

The logical coherence of the Fool’s zero hangs on a precarious balance, just as the Fool is poised at the threshold of a solid ground underfoot and the bare abyss ahead. Is the idea behind zero the absence of a number or a number for such an absence? The former keeps it estranged from the rest of the numbers, merely part of the landscape in which they move; the latter puts it on par with them. Another way to ask the question is whether the fool is a member of the Major Arcanum, or is he the surrounding wilderness threatens constantly their disappearance? The word sifir is translated from the Sanskrit sunya meaning “desert, empty place, naught.”[ii] The semantic paradox is even apparent in topology of the Tarot - the Fool is both the exterior desert, the extensive and empty landscape in which the numeric Trump cards assert their presence and the singular enclosure of an empty interior.

The most basic depiction of absence is a hole, the encircling of something that contains nothing, a circumference enclosing emptiness within, creating and inside and an outside. Hence the almost intuitive recognition of a closed loop O as a sign for zero. Like a pictogram it seems to hover across, if not bridge, the divide between the letter and the image. Yet we know that the zero has not always been written as an O. Babylonian tablets show us that around 400 BC that the Babylonians used two wedge symbols “ to bracket a place for zero, thereby establishing a difference between say, 101 and 11. [iii] We can see from this that the early use of zero to denote an empty place is not really the use of zero as a number at all, merely the use of some type of punctuation mark so that the numbers could communicate a correct interpretation. Zero was also often marked as a cross in early Mayan mathematics, a curious testament to zero’s chiasmic or cruciform activities.[iv] There is other evidence that a dot had been used in earlier Indian manuscripts to denote an empty place in positional notation. The symbol became quite prevalent throughout the east.[2] Some ancient Indian mathematical documents sometimes also used a dot to denote an unknown, similarly we might use x in an algebraic equation.[v]

The mysterious metamorphosis of zero from a dot to a cross to a circle has much to tell about the complexity of the Fool. A dot or point, as a solid mark, functions as a symbol of fullness; it contains no empty spaces. But geometrically, the point is precariously present, visible but also a horizon of invisibility. Though it can perhaps be thought of as the mark of presence, of bare existence, its slightness in form recalls that the point is always, inevitably on the verge of disappearance. Somewhere in its travels westward, the symbol of zero underwent a crucial change to an oval, literally and figuratively embodying the emptiness that it embodies. My point is the replacement of a symbol (.) suggestive of a fullness just at the brink of fading into emptiness for the emblematic oblong (0) that circumscribes an absence is a testament to the epistemological paradox of the Fool’s very essence. The suggestive numerical genealogy of zero is a potent marker of its, and the Fool’s in-between-ness- bound neither to fullness nor emptiness, they are possibly, impossibly both.

Zero is not the same as nothing. Without substance itself, it nevertheless carries the power to make things happen in the subtlest and most brazen ways. It’s worth mentioning that it was only long after the symbolic logic of all the other numerals was “found,” did mathematicians fully realize the logical paradoxes inherent in such a peculiar numeral.[vi] At the chiasmus of the Cartesian plane, the zero becomes a fulcrum around which all numbers begin to turn.[3] So at one moment, the zero is punctualized into a very precise term, and all the other numerals it supposedly generates make use of it, call upon it, to act as a fellow number. But, residing at the crucial intersection of number lines and planes, it is also the zero which does the “calling,” acting as the necessary plane that creates the possibilities of all the other numbers. It should help to mention that mathematics refer to the point of intersection in a Cartesian grid, where the axes meet, as the origin normally labeled O. [4] The shape of the zero- an egg- is a rebus, representing not just an absence but a beginning as well. So while the history of zero shows that it could only be grasped as a concept after the other numerals, but after it is found, zero comes before all the other numbers. The Fool shares this aporia. The zero makes complete the number system, but it also as nothingness must reside as the originary basis of logic, a swansong which is elusively though permanently there. Always, zero is hiding in the interstices.

In the Tarot tradition, the Fool represents wandering, figured as frozen in a pose right before action. When the tarot cards are played like a game, the fool trumps all other cards because as a no-thing he upsets the established numbered order and ranks of the Tarot cards.[vii] Without the Fool, the tarot forms a closed system and a conclusive set of narratives. As zero, the fool opens up the system and grants the deck its infinity of potential interpretations. As for the fool’s symbolic importance in the tarot tradition, he represents ultimate potentiality and paradox.[viii] Like the circularity of zero, he expresses nothing and contains everything. In this sense, the generative capabilities of a nothing presupposes annihilation or cancellation- the logic of zero makes clear that if something can be, it necessarily must also be capable of not being. The figure of the Fool, the o-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.[5]I n this sense, the fool finds empathy with the argument of creation ex nihilo because his zero generates all the numbers in the mathematical universe.[6] For him, the absence of a number is the very plane that makes possible a set of possibilities.

The number zero specifically enacts the same double edged contradiction around which the Tarot turns. Zero is the blind spot of meaning and sense. Mathematically, geometrically, etymologically, it seems to say that nothing is the substratum of unity. The circularity and precision of the 0-operations makes a clearing in the sober opacity of the rest of the numerals and Trumps. The Fool leaves but a light mark on the world, a mere dot in space. But as he is himself a contradiction, a puncture into the void and a point marked on the universe. He thereby plunges the rest of his comrades into confusion, because it is impossible to grasp his doubleness as something really distinct. In his suspended changeability, the Fool is potentially capable of both creation and annihilation. [7] Appearing as if he might simply throw himself into groundless chasm before him, something suspends the Fool in mid-leap. Alone in a world of numerous more vivid and richer presences, the Fool is like no one else. We can imagine the silence of the abyss calling out all around him. What he summons in his pose is an offering, a giving over of possibility to airy nothing. If he were to call out to the void, he might say something like, “The world, alas, is real. I, alas, am Zero,” a Borgesian cry, one of composed neutrality, a resignation of the eternal contradiction of his very being, or non being.[8]

As a zero, the Fool makes space for us to consider the operations of such a cipher when it comes to reading the text of the Tarot. There are several tales that can be read in the nil. One is a history of a mark, a testament to the iconographical particularities by which a sign comes to concretize its own contrariness. Another is a story of reason and the metamorphosis of a sign, where zero is first an absence, then a symbolic unit, a crux, an origin, and finally a threshold; eventually it is zero, not reason, around which the other signs move. One more might be the zero of authorship, the space of silence from which the cards speak. Also there is the zero of reading itself, the blind spot where a text outfoxes itself and upturns as yet another object of knowledge. The zero point of a text is a non-position, a state of stalled hesitation, where there is nothing available to subsume contradiction or tame incoherence, only a potential for further paradox and ambiguity. The zero, as a vacuum, inverts things.

Finally, there is the desire couched in reading and the pleasures that the zero affords.[9] Since desire is always a desire for a ‘something else,’ a something else which is continuously shifting, reading around the zero entails that the reader undergo a ceaseless and cyclic re-writing of desire. Linguistically speaking, the lack of sense that desire continuously defers and substitutes with other selves, other stories, other signifiers. The effect that zero has on reading is a metonymic one: each sign refers to another history of signs in a perpetual deferment and dallying of meaning. The means of delaying sense in a reading- repetition, digression, deferral - are the invisible marks of the Fool, hints of zero’s persistent mischief. This is why the act of reading and the pleasures of the Fool’s zero never mean to wholly satisfy.

Where I once desired the text, I become the site of the text’s desire.[10] The hesitations that come from this ambiguous position also involve a kind of yielding to seduction, one where we let the text survey us, frighten us, tease our desire, tempt us. The Fool who might fling himself into the abyss at any moment is also the reader yielding to the temptation of a brief intertextual, intersubjective fling. As we inhabit the textual nexus of the tarot, we can never entirely surrender to nor have authority over the pangs of zero that crop up. Reading the zero disturbs, in the most wanton of ways, my sense of readerly decency, suggestively disrobing any fantasies that this encounter could be unstained.

The crossing of desire with meaning and sense is inevitably results in a transgression, the point zero who is contrariness incarnate. The thrill of the Fool’s disobedience comes from his intimate knowledge of junctures- he preserve the plane of possibilities from which everything changes. The chiasmus of this crossing denotes loss, as I’ve shown. But what the Fool offers us is ecstatic loss: a thrill at a lapse in self, a way to relent thought to the void in being, the empty circle at the center of our hunger. This private zero is teeming with life. It is our interior Fool who, standing on the brink of a precipice, can only see pure prospective in the abyss, the unrealized universe that lies dormant in nothingness. Here, on the seductive brink of oblivion, the immediate possibilities within the boundlessness tremble with anticipation.

Works

Agamben, Giorgio. "Bartleby, or on Contingency." Potentialities. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. 243- 271.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Ferrar, Straus and Girous, 1973.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “A New Refutation of Time.” Other Inscriptions. Austin:University of Texas Press, 1964

"Cipher." Oxford English Dictionary. .

Melville, Herman. "Bartleby, the Scrivener." Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym and Francis Murphy. New York: W W Norton and Company, 1985. 2200-2230.

Menninger, Karl. Number Words and Number Symbols. New York: Dover Publications, 1969.

Nichols, Sallie. Jung and Tarot. 1st ed. York Beach: Samuel Weiser, Inc, 1980.

Pollack, Rachel. Complete Illustrated Guide to the Tarot. London: Element Books, 1999.

Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah. New York: New American Library, 1975.

"Zero" Oxford English Dictionary. .

Notes

[1] The path of scientific thought led to the discovery of "0" only after the invention of the most abstract type of number system, which is called "positional" because the value of a character depends on its position. Our modern way of counting is positional (Menninger, 372). The figure "5" has a different value in 102 and in 1020, determined by its position. The Romans, Greeks, Hebrews (and Aztecs and pre-Islamic Arabs and a great many others) used an "additive" system, which is fundamentally a transcription of counting (305-6). As far as historians know, the positional concept emerged in only four places: c.2000 B.C.E., in Babylon; around the start of the Common Era, in China; between the 4th and 9th centuries C.E. among the Mayan astronomer-priests; and in India (37, 396-98). Positional systems have certain features in common. One is that each base number is denoted by a discrete symbol, purely conventional and not a graphic representation of the number itself (i.e., not "four slashes" for "four," as the Greeks and Romans had). Another feature of positional number systems is that they lack special symbols for numbers which are orders of magnitude of the base number. This was necessary in additive systems, for simplicity of notation and record-keeping, but is incompatible with a positional system. (372) Most importantly, in a positional system, mathematicians had to find a way to indicate the absence of "tens" and "hundreds." It became necessary to have a "zero," a character that signifies "empty." (401) The next step was to realize that that "symbol for nothing" is not just a place-holder, but an actual number: that "empty" and "nothing" are one (422). The null number is as real as "1" and "10" - that's when the door blows open and numbers become complicated. Without that, there's no modern mathematics, no algebra, no modern science.

[2] The common practice of using ellipses (…) to denote missing pieces of a text or verse originated in the Indian use of the dot. (Menninger, 403)

In mathematics, the Cartesian coordinate system is used to determine each the position and relations of a unique point in a plane through two numbers, usually called the x-coordinate or abscissa and the y-coordinate. To define the coordinates, two perpendicular lines (the x-axis, and the y-axis), are specified, as well as the unit length, which is marked off on the two axes. The zero point of the cross is the point where the x and y axes intersect- its coordinates are (0,0). Cartesian coordinate systems are also used in space (where three axes are used). There, the zero point would be (0,0,0).

[4] The graph of Cartesian coordinates. Zero is marked as o for origin

[5] The idea of the potentiality of mere existence, or bare life, was a major thread in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, an Italian intellectual who writes about aesthetics and political philosophy in the 21^st century. 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. Bartleby lived so stolidly in the abyss of impotentiality/ potentiality without ever willing to leave it. He refuses to let his capabilities become actualized or concretized into a world of subjects and objects. So in terms of creation and the copyist fool who possesses such capability and withholds all willingness, “Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives; and at the same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure absolute potentiality” (253). To be willing is not the same being able, and it is in this disjunction that pure potentiality lies. For Agamben, Bartleby is simultaneous figured as the void of nothingness and the universe of potentiality, in a state of suspension. In this sense, Bartleby the scrivener has become the blank sheet on which he would prefer not to write, paradoxically suspended between what he is capable of actualizing, and that which he prefer to preserve as potentiality.

[6] Early Cabalistic mystics coined the term Ein-Sof (Infinity) to describe the unknowable-ness of the Divine Creator. The first step 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” (Scholem, 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.” 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. (Melville, 2200-30)

[7] The operations of zero as numeral are bizarre to say the least. If it is nothing, then it should be nothing, or at the very least merely a place-holding punctuation mark. But sometimes it is nothing and other times it is something: 1+0=1 and 1-0=1, so here the zero is nothing, it is not expressed, and when it is placed in front of a number, it does not change it: 01=1. But write a zero after a number, and suddenly it has a real function, multiplying the number times ten: 20=10x2. So now it is something- something incomprehensible but powerful, especially if a few “nothings” can raise a number to an immeasurably vast magnitude. And of course, multiplication with zero is utterly perilous- 999,999,999x0=0, and the zero reduces every factor it touches to nothing again, destroying even the largest of numerals. It has no value in itself, but has the power to radically transform all the other digits.

[8] The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges argued in a 1944 essay called “A New Refutation of Time” that the negations of idealism, which declare that objects in the world are ideas which only exist in the mind of God or people who see them, may also apply to time. Just as George Berkeley denies that there is an object existing independently of our perception of it, and David Hume denies that there is a subject apart from a mere recollection of sensations, Borges tries to demonstrate that there is no time. He proceeds with the idealist assumption that each of us can reduced to a collection of sensations, then a single repeated perception—either in one life or in the experience of two different lives—suffices to prove that time is a fallacy, since this repetition will destroy its linear sequence. In the spirit of the fool, Borges concludes his refutation with a cancellation, another refutation, a paradox: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Borges.” (171-187)

[9] In The Pleasure of the Text, the French semiotician Roland Barthes distinguishes between two kinds of textual delight. One he refers to as a text of pleasure; this kind of text simply fulfills the reader’s wishes and expectation. This is a text that merely comforts. Contrary to this kind of textual satisfaction, the text of bliss disrupts these desires for contentment, fulfillment, or meaning:

Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to crisis his relation with language…he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks it’s loss (which is his bliss). (14)

The text of the Tarot is precisely of this sort. There is a “seam” to every text- where the edge of culture meets the edge of transgression. Its emphasis on loss undermines our faith in the cogito which authors itself and in the integrity of signs and their meanings; it forces us to recognize that, instead of a tool which we use, language speaks us. For Barthes, a text of bliss is a text that undoes the reader, unravels the assumed consistency or narrative coherence of human life. Whereas a text of pleasure "milks" us, a text of bliss weans us and, therefore, repeats that original moment of loss by which we find ourselves and our desire. Similarly, this kind of text that undoes its reader is not only relational to the potential transformations and distortions that that readers might perform, but is also relational to all the other texts that engulf and surround it.

[10] One of the devices displayed in The Pleasure of the Text is Barthes' use of shifting personal pronouns to riddle the speaker's status as both a univocal and unified "author" and a multiply located, libidinally dynamic, and linguistically ambiguous “reader.” To Barthes, this subject is dissenting and duplicitous, conventional and iconoclastic. This subject emerges and re-creates his/herself in the seam of the Tarot text- he/she is both the subject that the text addresses and the very corresponding “subtext” which itself addresses the cards and is “read” by them. Barthes is clear that text of bliss always imposes this duplicity as cut, by which:

Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge , and another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours), which is never anything but the site of its loss…Neither culture nor the destruction of culture is erotic; it is the seam between them , the fault, the flaw that becomes so. (6-7)

The zero is this cut, “which is never anything but the site of its loss.” Obedience to and transgression of the logic of signification are both necessary practices within the text of bliss. It is this threshold, this border, this zero this cut, this absence-as-presence that is erotic for Barthes; it demarcates the desires that have drawn individuals into this space. After all, what is the point of desire without the threat of the forbidden?

[i] Menninger, 400

[ii] "Cipher." Oxford English Dictionary.

[iii] Menninger, 171

[iv] Ibid., 404

[v] Ibid, 40

[vi] Ibid, 401

[vii] Pollock, 43

[viii] Nichols, 42.

The Perversion of Hands

2008-02-22T15:21:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-20T21:34:00.000-08:00

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.

[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

2008-02-19T22:38:00.000-08:00

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.