The End of the World

The end of the night is a little like the end of the world sometimes, when you wake up from your dream or your nightmare, when you wake up from the daze of love and find you were in love with a ghost, when you realize that you've been working for eight hours straight in the dim shadows of the early dawn. It's over. Ready or not. Lately, I’ve been pulling a lot of late nights and all-nights, working on my paintings and writing, deep in the wonderful trance that artwork and writing generate, and nothing else exists for a while. Next to my art table, I’ve got a few prints of Mondrian’s trees, and I like to look up at them sometimes, while I work.

If you’re thinking “Trees? Wasn’t Mondrian that guy who exclusively painted rectangles in primary colors?” then you’re in for a treat: Mondrian’s early work was startlingly different from his later obsession with rectangles. If you follow the early work (the trees in particular) chronologically, you can see how he got into geometry. He is clearly preoccupied by the way the trees divide and fracture the sky behind them. The spaces between the branches become more and more dominant until they swallow up everything else.

In the end, Mondrian throws out everything but the math and the primary colors: elementary particles of the world of the artist.

Ten years ago, I painted the last of the major arcana cards, The World. At the time, I was mad about abstract mathematics (not that I’m not still, I simply have learned to be less heavy-handed about it). I was just

beginning the process of designing and painting my tarot cards, and I was still having trouble figuring out a method. My head was always a confusing tumult of images and ideas, and I usually didn’t know how they would fit together until I put it all down on paper. I would sometimes go through four or five unsatisfactory card paintings until I got it right (energetically tearing up an unacceptable card, catharsis suffusing me with each shred of paper that fell to the floor). I was in the process of teaching myself how to use watercolors. I had never done a large-scale art project before. So, there was a great deal of trial and error, but by the time I had gotten to the World card, I had refined my process to a gracefully attenuated point.

As much as I was inclined towards the final card of the tarot’s major arcana, I found (and still find) the World a challenging card to interpret. After all, it is a word that is meant to encompass everything. Where are we even supposed to begin? Going through the knucklehead prehistory of our current understanding of the universe is of little assistance. Both the Rider-Waite and Thoth images of the World are symbolic representations of the human experience (which, actually, is what all the science we have on the subject amounts to as well), so I decided to begin with us—specifically, with the foundations of identity: our place within our environment. As the Fool is a blank card, depicting an entire lack of experience or identity (and the Angel is the Fool’s transformation from an empty vessel into a divine being), the World must be about the acquisition of a self, and of a relationship with the universe outside the self.

The first version of the World was made of math: two trees composed of infinity signs (and whose shadows reveal them to be the Trees of Life and Knowledge), with a child in the space between them (demarcated as human and therefore finite by the “1” inscribed on her hand), orbited by a cluster of zeroes or planetary bodies. This is one story of the original bitten apple: how our species acquired almost godlike powers of understanding and control over our environment (though, as anyone can see, without any of godlike powers of foresight which comes along with the dubious ability to live indefinitely).

Which brings us (somehow, but you’ll see, just you wait) to a tiny little jewel of a poem by ee cummings, from his book “95 Poems”.

wild(at our first) beasts uttered human words —our second coming made stones sing like birds— but o the starhushed silence which our third’s

Within the jumbled flavors of human evolution, religion, sound, and sex, the poem has always seemed to be about the arc of creation and destruction. Language, technology, and a strange cosmological quiescence at the end: the human body, the human race, the planet, and the whole universe will ultimately destroy itself, much in the same fashion in which, in the beginning, it created itself.

I did not have a clear notion of this when I painted my first version of the World (beasts uttered human words) back in 2004, but the velvety black shadows of the trees and the fury of the child between them seem to me to

portend the last two versions, which I painted only in recent months (each painted all at once, in two

isolated all-night electrical storms of artistic energy).

The second World (stones sing like birds) has several of the same elements: the trees and the orbital band of

planets. The human child has vanished, and in its place is a black snake (or is it a serpentine hold in the fabric of the universe, through which the great eye of some god or monster shines?) The moth of the swords

suit (the same moth first introduced in the clothing of the pregnant, masked figure in Death) hovers above the trees, whose roots and branch tips intermingle in a

continuous ring. In the third World (but o the starhushed

silence), the trees are replaced by golden serpents (a duplicate version of the

Ouroboros world

serpent, eating its own tail, a representation of a primordial and eternal unity). The death

moth has vanished, and no central figure exists between the trees and their orbiting

planetary belt.

What began as a human child and transformed into a black serpent with a human eye has ended in simple darkness, as though it is an open portal into some other world, brand-new and unknown.

As though the world had already ended and nothing was left but a cloud of postexplosive, poststellar material gathering itself along the last remaining vectors of gravitational and electromagnetic forces. As though nothing was left but the mathematical principles behind the grand set of the physical laws of the universe.

The World card, last of the major arcana, is really the end of the world. Only upon the conclusion of the bigger story do we discover its meaning.

This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

The Kickstarter to fund its publication is currently live! Pre-order a deck or the artwork here.

Ada and the Queen of Swords

"'What on earth is an artist?' 'An underground observatory,' said Van promptly."

-Vladimir Nabakov, Ada

A long time ago, when I was an undergrad, upon swimming for the first time in a vast sea of literature of my own choosing, I was just awakening from the deep, trance-like existence you get into when you find a really, really good book and can't stop reading and re-reading it, the kind of book you wish would never end at all. At that time, my Book-to-End-All-Books was the immortal Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I had read, at that point, Ellison's book about ten times straight through, and I still don't know how many times I read that beginning and ending (it still gives me the shivers just thinking about it, Ellison's character in his illuminated cave, writing from a place outside the world, lonely but powerful, ending with his terrifying line, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?") I was winding down, in a frenzy of African American history books, jazz music, and poetry, looking desperately for another work of fiction, when a friend, from whom I was slowly and painfully learning how to be cool, told me about Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.

I read it, was impressed with the language but mildly bored and a little sickened by the story, and began casting about to read more of Nabakov's brilliant, self-conscious and bravely egotistical writing. Then I found his Ada or Ardour: A Family Chronicle, a love-story complicated by incest. The characters were spoiled, brilliant, and ridiculously self-important, even for main characters. Like Van Veen, the book's number-one narrator, I fell in love with Ada. Not that she was particularly likeable or even admirable—her brilliance never consolidated into anything more substantial than a string of sad love affairs, though she tried hard to be an actress. One might have watched with interest from afar, but I hardly think that either of them would be tolerable in real life. It is not necessary to like that which you love.

But she was so real. Her self-importance merely reflected my own, buried under yards of empathy and self-doubt. She was a tragic figure, living in a world that did not see her and could not accept what she had to give. Neither Ada, nor her brother-paramour, Van (nor, I suspect, even the great and all-seeing author himself) seemed to have any idea why this should be so, and the book's plot tossed among the flotsam of a deteriorating world, its characters saddened to find themselves lost anonymously in a landscape over which they had expected to someday rule.

Says Van (always a foil for Ada, always her more legible spokesperson, always her other self): “Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”  Ada herself dwells in that gap, belonging no place and every place, and without any metric by which to judge her shape, her size, or her place in the world.

So it is not surprising to me that when I painted my Queen of Swords, it was Ada. In tarot, queens, kings, princes, and princesses ("pages" in some decks) are sixteen distinct personalities, and may represent real people, communities, ourselves, or that "dream of ourselves" with which we do daily battle.

The Queen of Swords is at once cold and tender. She is cold because she knows herself to be the brilliant, insightful, and capable person she is, and is in so many respects immune to need and desire, because she already has everything. She is tender because she has never known an existence without her riches, and therefore has no name for the blind, yearning, half-formed girl inside of her. In many ways, her only desire is for herself. Looked at another way, her desire to share her glut of blessings with the world (a desire which has not yet taken the shape of interest in the lives of other people, only a feeling of emptiness where this interest ought to be) makes her irrepressably sad. She looks down at the world, feeling powerful and yet alone, permeated by all the knowledge and experience of the whole world and yet weak with the hunger for human experience and fellowship.

Like Nabakov's Ada, the Queen is proud but bewildered; self-worth is not confidence. She thinks well of herself and her abilities (as well as her ability to give), but she finds no one who recognizes her in the world outside. Her dream of herself does not match how others see her, and she withdraws, confused and hurt, far beneath her skin and into her internal landscape, where no one can ever find her.

This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

Synaesthesia

For my upcoming Kickstarter, I have been collaborating with several musicians. Meredith Yayanos (who completed an exciting Kickstarter of her own, "The Parlour Trick")  is one of these, which is in many ways a dream come true; she has been a small hero of mine for years now.

I don't call Mer "Small Hero" because she is short (though she is every inch as short as it becomes a tree elf beauty, dressed magnificently like a silk road-era fabric shop bazaar, to be), but because she is a hero of mine who happens to be on a human scale. Many of my other heroes, William Blake, Malcolm X, Tilda Swinton, David Lynch, Sissy Hankshaw, Alice Walker, Isabelle Eberhardt, and Sonmi-451 (from the book, not the movie), to name a new, are either fictional, dead, or so famous that I can't imagine how we would ever get to know one another. My Small Heroes are friends, or friends or friends, who make beautiful art, or change the world, and who are knowable to me.

It's a wonderful thing to have Small Heroes (not everybody does), and it's even more wonderful when we can make art together. Mer is a co-founder of the beautiful Coilhouse project, lives in New Zealand with her beautiful partner and plays exquisite music on the theremin (an extremely metaphorical instrument). She is also friends with some of the most wonderfully creative people in the world, has worked with some big-time heroes, and has performed her music on stage to breathless audiences.

When I went to the postapocalyptic wastelands of San Bernadino in 2011 to help run the interactive metal sculpture Syzygryd at Beyond Wonderland, Mer did me the favor of finding me beautiful as I was sitting in a pappazan chair on the set, gnawing my fingernails in an uproar of bashful awkwardness and slowly acquiring a sparkling patina of rain drizzle and fly ash. I showed her my tarot cards a few months later, and two years later (that is to say, last week), she sent me a piece of her music that she made just especially for me.

Mer's idea was that I'd give her a tarot reading with my own cards, and then she'd write some music about it. The reading I gave her touched on Vladimir Nabakov's odd, inspiring, real-and-unreal, lovable-and-unlovable character Ada Veen, and a few weeks later, Mer wrote some music and titled it "Radiant Void," from the passage:

"You are breaking her heart," said Ada.

“Ada girl, adored girl," cried Van, "I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.”

I have always been a synaesthetic. When I hear sounds, I have visions beginning with simple colors, which usually expand into detailed apparitions of fantastic spaces and dream-like scenes, like the one I have described below. I have listened to Mer's "Radiant Void" many times now, as I have always listened to my favorite music, reliving its vision again and again, and sometimes seeing new details I had not noticed before, until the song becomes its own little world. Now, at last (alas) for the synaesthesia part; here's what I saw when I heard her music, 28% radiance, 72% void, and 10% kind-of-maybe weeping with surprise and happiness into my keyboard:

There is a sense of vast space, derived from the sounds of an impossibly huge waterfall echoing across the black, moonless, unseen landscape of a huge canyon or 4-dimensional space-time enclosure. This dark universe (and the sense one gets is that there is nothing to see yet, that the singularity has not yet popped, not yet projected light and energy and identity into the willing nothingness), begins to tremble with a faintly cacophonous jumble of distant oceans and volcanic eruptions, thermonuclear explosions and silent supernovae and stone-metal mountains shaken out of the new earth.

The sound, of course, of the beginning of the world.

Visible things (rather than the many things one has already begun to perceive in the dark, as a sleepwalker perceives her path between the bedpost and yesterday's boots and the gaping doorframe) begin to show themselves. They are all thin, filagreed and golden (in fact, they are dragons, but we will talk more about dragons later, when we talk about the suit of Sticks in my tarot deck). In the beginning there are only the outlines of ghosts and of the reflected glints of light upon the face of the deep. But afterwards, out of the darkness, comes the dull metallic sheen of a large ship (both space-ship and sea-ship), and then, suddenly, I can see inside. I see glass-enclosed, golden-lit interiors with great views into the engulfing sea-sky, which has suddenly become alive with tiny stars and planets, which are really phosphorescent algae and the luminescent skeletons of diatoms and tiny fish, which are all upon closer examination only the tiny points of light emitted from distant galaxies. I can see further, into empty corridors covered by leaded class archways, leading into impossibly vast gardens and orchards, the fruit heavy and ripe, songbirds and insects blending their songs with the whirring internal machinations of the ship. There are signs among the trees. They are impossible to read, but I know that they are pieces of words and phrases, and I find  messages of loss and hope and generosity, tremulously hand-painted on rough wooden chunks of driftwood and sea glass and salvage.

I pass by palace-like libraries, and museums of biological specimens displayed in amber-colored glass. I pass vaults of monstrous machinery, with clicking cicadas seemingly standing guard over the slow movements of the gears and pneumatic systems, and over the tiny sun suspended in a chamber at the center, throwing off light and radiation. a descending staircase of interlocking glass surfaces leads me to the base of the ship, where there is a stone-and-glass room shaped like a boomerang. The sharp external surfaces of the stone trail their edges in a knifelike silhouette across the light of passing galaxies. Inside, the room is smooth, and black sand, running along the mortared seams of the stone and glass, shivers in regular pulses, keeping the heartbeat of the ship's mechanical systems.

At this point, as I watch the shuddering black sand, the world around me begins to shake violently, as the sounds of glass (and dragon calls, just wait) and insect hum and birdsong fall off into silence, and nothing is left but the hushing sound of the vast space-ocean of the outer darkness, while one by one the fish-stars sputter and die. In the darkness, which smells of cold stone and damp earth, in the dimming gold of the failing lights shining through dark water, is the faint outline of, for the first time, another person, dancing like a flickering shadow in the blackness. The shadow turns to face me, and where its face belongs is the thin golden crescent of a new moon or a solar eclipse, and then the world winks out like an extinguished flame.

The "Radiant Void" EP by Meredith Yayanos will be available exclusively throughmy upcoming Kickstarter campaign for the Cheimonette Tarot.

This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

The Dizziness of Freedom: Fortitude and The Devil

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss . . . Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” -Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

The Cheimonette Tarot has several unique connections between the cards, and I wanted to expand on one of them, the Fortitude (Strength) card, and The Devil, embodying opposite and contradictory concepts of freedom and captivity.

Free will is a funny concept, wherein we are told (at least, by the Judeo-Christian bible) to think of that which we take for granted as a special dispensation from god, conferred on human beings alone. Otherwise, those who believe in a deterministic universe may argue that, in the inexorable course of time, the world is constrained to have only one sequence of events, only one outcome, only one choice. Within this miasma of divine boredom (god sits on his couch, having ruined the movie for himself, watching the story play out without any hope of astonishment), free will gets lost in the shuffle, crushed under the bulk of an all-powerful fate.

In Fortitude, a blindfolded woman is frozen in the moment just before she leaps off the back of a speeding, headless, horse. Is she in danger? The scene would suggest not. Sprouting from her back are four insect wings, poised to go into action at any moment. In fact, the woman seems to be about to fly, rather than to fall. There are in fact three blindfolded characters in the Cheimonette Tarot (and none of them are the blindfolded Fool of the Rider-Waite Smith tarot deck): the Priest, the Ace of Swords, and Fortitude. Each of these cards represents a different act of courage, and the latter two symbolize a genuine leap of faith. True strength is not about confidence, but is an act of imagination. After all, the strong must accept that they are in danger. When we travel as far as the legs of human experience: wisdom, reason, and animal instinct (the headless horse), can possibly carry us, we may take an imaginative leap, and thereafter decide for ourselves the course of our lives.

If fate denies free will, this leap is nothing more than another foreordained act of human limitation, but if fate accepts free will as a cohabitant and a sister, then machinations of a deterministic universe affect our freedom not one whit. What have the affairs of the gods to do with our mortal choices? Our mortality make us artists, generating beauty, wonder, and nonsense within the monotony of omniscience.

In the Devil, we find the head of the galloping horse in Fortitude. Although Fortitude's horse, despite having no head, has a seeing eye where its head would be, the animal's mind and mouth and face are missing. In the Devil, the horse's head expresses pain and fear, seemingly unable to move its limbless body even without the superfluity of the chains, held by unwinged, birdlike creatures. There are no people in the Devil, although the angel, itself headless as it merges in terror back into itself, spreads its wings as a sign of its power to escape. The Devil horse portrays human suffering. The nameless birdthings (the identity of which is as mysterious to the author as it is to you, reader) have no expression, either of satisfaction or dismay or confusion. The expressions of their faces remain illegible. A scene to make the angels hide: the disenfranchisement of the soul from its birthright of freedom and fortitude.

Anxiety is a natural reaction to danger. The abyss, as everyone knows, can be frightening and disorienting in its hugeness. There is nothing really left to do, then, besides tie on a blindfold and jump, and fly, or else stay in your shackled little world forever.

 This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.

The Numinous

"I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck." -Aleister Crowley

At some murky time in my own distant past, I saw a few Tarot cards. There were women with horns, and smiling faces with blank Greek statue eyes and insect wings. I could not imagine what the cards were meant to illustrate, but I wanted them so much that they continued to appear in my dreams over the years. I therefore had no trouble recognizing them, when my first boyfriend was teaching me how to read Tarot cards and I happened upon the Thoth tarot deck.

Beautifully painted by Lady Frieda Harris, apparently following exacting instructions from Mr. Crowley (who wrote a characteristically grandiose book about the tarot called "The Book of Thoth"), the Thoth tarot is enchanting. It is brimming with the images derived from an overwhelmingly rich experience of spiritual symbology, with a strongly Egyptian bent. Mr. Crowley himself was an odd man. Photos show him looking like a grim version of Christopher Lloyd. In the priestly raiment of the Order of the Golden Dawn (a prestigious occult society to which the poet Yeats belonged), he looked flamboyantly like a bouncer at the Luxor in Las Vegas. A feckless libertine, Mr. Crowley enjoyed a great deal of sex with both men and women, and was an enthusiastic user of recreational drugs. After dropping out of Cambridge, he wrote prolifically about his spiritual escapades while travelling widely across the globe. Having survived a fall off a cliff in China, a volcano eruption in Mexico, and bankruptcy over a lawsuit in England, Mr. Crowley, alone in the wake of a tragic family life, died of complications from heroin use.

The Thoth cards, despite their freaky beauty and the care with which they were imagined and executed, didn't quite satisfy me. Mr. Crowley seemed excessively devoted to an intricate synthesis of the world's spiritual and occult traditions (he unwisely named his first daughter Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith). Some of the cards were crowded tight with Mr. Crowley's elaborate language of occult traditions, and I amused myself trying to imagine poor Lady Harris rolling her eyes as he demanded she add more planetary glyphs and symbolic animals to an already full card. Often I felt annoyed by the deck's demanding pushiness; the cards were intended to mean something very particular indeed, and it felt as though my own creative imagination and ideas were uninvited guests.

Mostly, Mr. Crowley never seemed to experience a moment of self-doubt or bewildered wonder. I got the sense, from his Book of Thoth, that he understood every word that he was saying. Frankly, I found that strange. For someone fascinated with as much esoteric magicky spiritualism as Mr. Crowley, he seemed terribly concerned with sounding as though he knew what he was talking about. If there are any general rules of mysticism, they are that there are aspects of the world that are incomprehensible to the human mind, that these aspects give profound meaning to human existence, and that human beings are able to experience the incomprehensible. Ultimately, Mr. Crowley did not seem to have that experience (despite having heard a disembodied voice which he believed to be an Egyptian god). He had reasons for everything.

As much as I love the Thoth deck, and will always love it, I wanted the freedom to interpret the images according to my world and my internal mythology, rather than according to the impassable mountain ranges of the many traditions of human history. Tarot cards, to me, have always been a modular way of telling stories about the mysteries of the world. I like that the cards themselves should remain mysterious and interpretable in a variety of ways. I was dissatisfied with the man behind the Thoth tarot, and I believe that this is what inspired me to make my own deck of Tarot cards.

 This post is part of a series about my deck, the Cheimonette Tarot.