The Poetry of Cards

 

When I was a child I used to gaze at face cards in a standard deck and wonder what mysterious people these could be. Later I found out that they are (or at least were at one time understood to be) figures from classical or biblical history such as David, Caesar or Judith. This, I suppose, I might have happily not known for it seems to add little to the implacable, solemn gazes of the King of Spades or the Queen of Hearts. Readers of The Wasteland, though, know of that other, even more mysterious set of images that is the tarot pack. Eliot used these, he tells us, only for their broadest symbolic import and denied any precise knowledge of their use or significance. The images, however, seem to work anyway for we shiver, poetically speaking, when we fail to find the hanged man in the deck of Madame Sosostris. The hanged man, the crucified god of death and renewal, is hidden in the symbolism of the deck and hidden from us by the fraudulent modern Sybil who reads our cards. This brings me to an odd experience of mine which was observing the actual use of the cards by an intelligent practitioner. The result, for one of the participants (not myself), was utterly uncanny. The reader told a detailed, highly specified story by juxtaposing the tarot images and forming a narrative based on their traditional associations. This story corresponded point by point with the situation of the person the cards were reacting to. This is of some interest to me for Tarot cards are nothing but cards and a system of conjunction and opposition deployed serially and positionally. The process of reading is combinatory for each symbol changes its valence in relation to another symbol depending on how it is placed spatially in relation to it.

There is no assumed ontology or metaphysic and no assumed spiritual or supernatural agency required to read the tarot deck (or so I was told!). The cards are simply cards for all intents and purposes. Tarot reading is a practice without an ontology which is as much as to say that it is  chain of semi-randomized signifiers that congeal of their own, before one’s very eyes, into narrative significance. There are various ways of thinking about this the most obvious of which is that it is all down to the reader who lays out the cards although she (always she!) is constrained by an interpretive tradition which limits how she can adapt the meaning of the cards to what she senses of the subject. One could also think of it as being all about the cards. The cards, one might say, are open ended symbols so contrived as to reflect enough basic human concerns as to be adaptable to any subject. If this is so then the wonder is not that the reader hits but that she should ever miss! This won’t quite do, though, for the symbols never were contrived in the sense required. Before it became a tool of divination the Tarot pack was nothing but a standard playing deck. Nor, in the reading I saw, did the reader spin a generic tale of money, love or family such as might apply to almost any random person (which is what phone psychics do). Her narrative was highly specified and accurate. Interestingly, an attempt to read ME produced less definite results, which stands to reason if the cards are reacting to the subject for the first subject had much more pressing issues and concerns. They were not, however, uninteresting and the striking thing for me was that with very little instruction I could read the symbolism myself and form my own story with relative ease. The symbols are that direct, easy and intuitive with just enough specificity to render them uncanny.  This specificity seems to refute the assumption that the cards reflect the openness and simple universality of the symbols.  

If the tarot reading does not come down simply to the shrewdness of the reader or the open ended symbolism of the cards it would seem then that it comes down to the subject but what could this mean? I suppose it would mean the subject unconsciously influences the choice of the cards so that the randomness is only apparent. Of course we have no ontology that accounts for how the unconscious can pick cards from a hidden deck though Jung may have tried to indicate one. What is more the content of the reading does NOT have to be latent psychic material. It can be the most immediate surface content as in the instance I witnessed. Nor, I should add, are the cards necessarily predictive. They are analytic and an aid to reflection about problems in the present. They represent a kind of divination of the present though really what they do is remind the subject of what that subject already knows too well.  

If there were any kind of ontology or theory behind the tarot pack I suppose their success would be a confirmation of that theory or ontology however there seems to be none as I said above. There is no grand theory on the basis of which we can accept he cards NOR, just as importantly, is there any grand theory in the name of which we must reject them. There is no theory at all. Nothing is refuted or confirmed. It is simple practice that seems to work but is evidence for nothing beyond itself. I must, however, draw an analogy that seems to me striking and may also have been striking to Eliot. The tarot cards are very much like a poem if you can conceive of a poem as forming from the random deployment of a set of symbols or figures. I suppose it is like a surrealist poem or a found poem. We merge our own meanings with the meanings objective in the cards through the agency of the contingent as that frees us from the screen of conscious reflection with its duplicities and denials. This seems to me to be where the obviously gendered character of the tarot tradition comes into play. Women appropriate their own voice more easily through the authority of an external, indeed purely adventitious agent. The cards, speaking through a marriage of meaning and chance, are assumed not to lie though we do. Men may not feel the need for this kind of prompt so readily and perhaps women fully liberated to their own voices will not need tarot packs. I, however, suspect humans will always turn to this and other forms of divination as poets do to found poems or composers do to stochastic processes. There is poetry even in chance and that may be all we need to know of the matter.