12/2/2022
Signs, part one . . .
I’d planned out a short series of Daily Notes for the final week of November—the last time this year I could begin dates with the wonderful number 11. My plan was to start off with a closer look at the Duchamp-Tarot connection, and some notes on the Magician (inspired by Howard Stern’s interview with Bruce Springsteen).
But everything I wrote seemed wrong somehow. Actually, this has been going on a lot lately! So I decided to take a couple of steps back and think about what was creating this phenomenon. Something astrological? Something unconscious? Something about my writing space? Too many projects going on at once?
I often forget that most dilemmas are actually solved by some movement of the universe, not by a dogged process of reasoning. And while I was trying to analyze my situation—I got a series of signals.
As long-time readers of EP will know, I’m convinced the world is always giving us signs. It’s just that we don’t usually notice or understand them. I rarely notice signs in real time, but sometimes will recognize them later. And it’s often the case that signs are interconnected, so they only make sense when the whole pattern is revealed.
That’s what happened here. It took me from November 23 (my last post) until yesterday to figure this out—but the payoff is an insight worth sharing.
Since the process was as important as the outcome, I decided to offer an account of the whole experience. Plus, I never really understand something til I’ve tried to write about it. So I set out to explain this sequence of events.
However . . . it turned into a ten-minute read, and I wasn’t near the end yet. So I’ve divided it into two parts. To be honest, this part is sort of a down payment—or maybe a sidebar, since it came along in the process of writing the rest. I’m not sure exactly how/if it will be connected, but in the meantime, it adds some color to the end of the week!
To begin with, a deck I came across by serendipity, as usual. I found it in a short article about Tarot cards in one of the Metropolitan Museum’s newsletters.
The article starts off with the Dali deck (of course), but goes on to highlight Suzanne Treister’s Hexen 2.0. There’s a longish introduction here on EP to Treister’s extraordinary work. Worth a read!
The Met story also talks about Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden (of course), and includes a photo of this pop-up “Nana,” from the catalog of a German exhibition.
There’s more about Niki in this recent EP post—but fair warning, it’s a little on the dark side.
Beyond the usual suspects, the Met story includes a deck I didn’t know about: The Ghetto Tarot, by Belgian photographer Alice Smeets. Here’s a description:
Shooting a witchcraft workshop in England gave Belgian photographer Alice Smeets the idea for a new approach to photographing Haiti, a country she has documented since 2007. “I was slightly disillusioned about my documentary work and hoping my pictures would contribute to change,” she explains. So she teamed up with Haitian artists from the group Atis Rezistans (resistant artists) to create the Ghetto Tarot, a modern interpretation of the 1910 Rider-Waite tarot deck, to show Port-au-Prince in a different light. “For them, ghetto means community, family, union,” Smeets says. “So when Haitians say ghetto, they say it very proudly.”
That’s from a well-illustrated account in The Guardian, which shows a selection of Ghetto cards next to their Smith-Waite inspirations . . . .
I’m fascinated by this project, not only because it illustrates again the creative energy that emanates from the Tarot, but also because it’s a reminder that the reach of Tarot is global—and timeless.
Smeets’ work has reminded me of a much older photographic deck—Giani Siri’s The New York Tarot. The only images I’ve seen online are really poor quality, so next week I’ll get out my copy and try to offer a better view.
Meantime, there’s one other item from the Met story. Author Maria Schur (Senior Departmental Technician at the Thomas J. Watson Library) explains her interest in the cards with a personal note:
In this era of uncertainty, I’ve been turning again and again to the age-old practice of reading tarot cards. Although the mere mention of the tarot may elicit eye rolls in some, gazing at the cards and their iconic, archetypal images, gave me great clarity in an uneasy time, if not a clear sign of future developments. Falling in love with those images led me to wonder what sort of tarot-related materials Watson holds in its stacks. The results were much more diverse, and sometimes radical, than my tarot deck could have told me.
Schur wrote another story I really enjoyed:
Full of things I didn’t know and pictures I’d never seen! Highly recommended.
I’ll be sending “Signs, part two” on Sunday. See you then. C