tarocchi

Ah friends, I've got myself in too deep on an impossible project to suggest new ways of living. My spirits are all over the place. What can communicate a gut feeling beyond words, in spite of words? I've been reading Artaud - I recommend 'No More Masterpieces' from The Theatre and Its Double. It's worth seeking out. Here's one new means of living. It's not as insincere as suggests.

It began as an aristocratic card game in 15^th century Europe, but by the 18^th century playing cards became a means of divining the future. Tarot cards will not change your life but they can give an outline or form for the path it may take, or the paths to avoid.

Although I don’t personally believe in the future, there could be a truth in them cards. The tarot I mean. They’ve got a lot of nerve, trying to reduce the limitlessness of life, its sheer randomness and chances, into the symbolic alphabet of a pack of playing cards. The cards are claiming that a life is game, where fortunes are made and lost. It all seems rather melodramatic, and I must make some sense of it before I swoon.

It is a way of imposing shoddy symbolic meanings on random and banal events, feelings and fears in our laughably uneventful lives. It can never be true as such, as nothing has a meaning except the one we foster on it, true to ourselves and no one else. Yet it ennobles these things, shoves Meaningfulness up the arsehole of existence, and is it not expedient for our own happiness and self-grounding to believe in strange spiritual forces behind our lives, under them? I’m in that phase of life where you can believe in any thing - nonsense, magic, whatever. Nothing serious, just curious. Nothing more or less than a choice. Nothing like that cruel moment where you need to believe in something, anything, where your survival depends on it. No. Just a game some people play when they have little else.

Truth in cards: take it if you need it, don’t give it here, don’t throw it away. I read them cards once and they told me I was a right pretentious bugger.