7.22.2024 + 2
Some reasons why I'm running even later than usual . . .
Hello everyone—and a special welcome to new readers! Over the past month, more folks than usual have found their way to EP, so I decided to write a post on some fundamentals of what’s here, and why. Plus notes on a new EP feature, a couple of surprises, and updates on the 4D course.
But that post is not this post!
Look for that one on Sunday, with luck. In the meantime, I wanted to explain why the EP post I started on 7/22 didn’t reach your Inbox.
First: The Constance Connection. I’ve been trying to complete this year’s sprint for my “passion project”—which sounds odd, I think. But basically, I’ve been working on a narrative nonfiction book for five (yes, really) years. Last year and this one, I set goals of accomplishing something significant by the birthdate of my protagonist, who was born on July 24, in 1920. I’d fallen far behind on this—due in part to my current gig as a bot-whisperer—but was determined to reach a new point in the project by today, 7/24.
And I made it! In the sense that I have all of the current draft nicely organized in Scrivener, with a lot of really good revision done on Part One (the neediest of six). So it’s getting closer to the book I’ve been imagining for so long.
Second: The Didion Connection. I’m right on the brink of self-publishing my very first ebook: a short collection of essays on Joan Didion and her iconic novel, Play It As It Lays. I’m planning a series of these collections, designed to reanimate some work I did several years ago. But more relevant to EP—I’ve also been using the Didion project as an opportunity to learn the book-making process. Which I’ll soon use to publish a new Tarot ebook.
More to come on that! For now, though, you won’t be surprised to learn that I Googled Tarot + Joan Didion, and came up with an unexpected discovery. Yet another synchronicity, in which I find a story I would NEVER have come across otherwise. It’s located in this publication:
The Michigan Quarterly Review, founded in 1962, is an interdisciplinary and international literary journal, combining distinctive voices in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as works in translation. The flagship literary journal of the University of Michigan, our magazine embraces creative urgency and cultural relevance, aiming to challenge conventions and address long-overdue conversations.
I’m not sure exactly how this essay fits into their mission—but it’s definitely a fascinating find for EP!
The essay is so engaging that I would love to tell you the whole story of it, which is about (generally speaking) a time when the writer is dealing with the end of a relationship while trying to finish her thesis, and getting ready to move back to Greece. Right away, the Tarot takes up an important place in the story—as expressed in this passage:
If I were a trickster and a rebel I would carry the Ten of Swords around with me for when people extended that tedious formality, How are you? Then I would pull it from my sleeve like a rabbit from a hat and stupefy them and say, This is how I am.
I can’t tell you how much I like those sentences.
I like this vignette quite a bit too:
“Swords represent air,” she said. “Corresponding to our thoughts. Our mental space. How they affect our daily life. As you climb up the suit of swords, the more intense that card becomes, the more out of balance that element is in your life.”
“So I’ve maxed out,” I said.
A conservative smile. Not being too definitive was the mark of a good tarot reader, I thought, and an astrologist and a meteorologist. “The Ten of Swords can be paralyzing,” she said.
The Tarot becomes a kind of unifying theme as the writer continues what I have to call (cliche unavoidable) a “healing journey.” Along the way, she is wildly surprised to find out her father has a strange bit of history with Tarot, and ponders this question: “What has ever drawn any woman to the occult?”
I think I’ll write more sometime about her answer to that question. But for now, I’ll leave you to read the essay for yourself.
Third: The Mysterious Newspapers Connection. You’ve probably forgotten by now that I was counting down a list of reasons why my 7/22 EP didn’t make it to your Inbox. But here’s the last of them.
At the time of starting that post, I had set out to unravel a new mystery. Some of you may remember how the boxes disappeared from my driveway after the AI Tarot reading—in which case it will be meaningful if I say there’s a driveway connection here as well. But this mystery goes back for more than a decade, to when I “inherited” a sheaf of very large newspaper pages that someone, at some time, had pasted onto sheets of flimsy poster board. They are quite tattered now—in some places almost disintegrated.
I have been stubbornly saving them all this time, with the vague idea that someday I would figure out what they mean. There are lots of ads, some comic strips, some local news stories, a long article on household sanitation. From different papers, at different times.
It would take a lot of time—and a magnifying glass—to investigate these pages properly, so I never did. Until (never mind how) they blew into the driveway last week. After picking them up from scattered places, I looked more closely at the biggest one.
It’s also the oldest one: two pages from a New York newspaper, The Weekly Sun, published on February 11, 1880.
My original intention was to throw out this 2/11 mystery in the 7/22 EP post, just as another “random” thing. But then I suddenly figured out the relevance. And I promise, you’ll never guess what it is.
A cliff-hanger, obviously! The mystery will take more time to unravel and explain, so all I can tell you for now is . . .
More soon, C
Dear C., thank you as always, Ed