A Wednesday Reset: 6.8.22

Whatever happened to that last Daily Note?

Here’s where I got to last Friday, starting on the third post in a planned series of Daily Notes:

At that point, another Jodorowsky item popped up—and changed my whole approach to the story.

So I decided to think about the whole topic overnight and take a fresh look the next morning. Obviously, that thinking process has gone on for several days now, so I’ve decided to just write something, and get this off my list of things to fret over.

But before explaining further, I want to welcome new readers. Please take the guided tour!

Also . . . this seems like time for a very high-level overview. I think there’s a continuum of Tarot-related topics that could be talked about—and Exploration Project has followed a fairly classic Bell curve. On the left end of the curve, there’s a small number stories that explore darker regions, and on the right end, a few stories that are just playful/frivolous.

In the middle—lots of stories that fall somewhere between painfully serious and blissfully not-serious.

As it turns out, it’s hard to place the Jodorowsky story on that continuum, because there are several different aspects. But it’s definitely not just something that lands in the vague middle.

So let me set some context: If you haven’t read the story where Tarot expertise meets sexual exploitation, now would be the time. Although it’s factually about one person’s behavior, it’s also about broader issues like boundaries and motives.

The Jodorowsky case is not that intense—but it relates to some ideas that have become widely accepted in relation to “experimental” and “creative” uses of Tarot. More about that, but first, here’s an excerpt from a story I wrote last year about the treatment of Tarot in the mainstream media:

For example: A Tarot story recently popped up on my NBC news feed, in the “Think” section. It was headlined “Tarot cards don’t predict the future. But reading them might help you figure yours out.”

Nicely written by “Jenni Miller, pop culture connoisseur,” it turns out to be partly an account of her 2017 interview with “the famous Chilean-French surrealist director Alejandro Jodorowsky” — who is also a well-known Tarot enthusiast.

If that sounds interesting (actually, it is!), read Miller’s piece and then go back to 2011 for a Tarot-focused profile of Jodorowsky in the New York Times.

Spoiler alert: Jodo had amassed a huge collection of Tarot decks, but was told by Surrealist icon Andre Breton that the only worthwhile Tarot was the Marseilles. So Jodo disposed of his collection and started over.

In fact, Jodorowsky collaborated with Phillipe Camoin (who has ancestral connections with Nicholas Conver, creator of a classic Marseilles-style Tarot in 1760) to create a “rebuilt” version of the Marseilles deck.

Now back to the two “very different sources” that called Jodorowsky to my attention last week . . .

Carrington and Jodorowsky

The first source came up because I wanted to provide additional information on the beautiful Tarot paintings created by surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. I wrote about them briefly last year:

I was delighted to see this story about painter Leonora Carrington’s 1955 Tarot pop up in a recent issue of the mostly literary Paris Review. The short essay offers a helpful introduction to Carrington and her work, along with some thoughtful remarks on the nature of Tarot. Please read it, and follow up with a longer account (more pictures!) in Art & Object

The paintings were reproduced as a limited edition book, featuring an introduction by Carrington’s son. The book itself was sold out long ago, but you can read his introduction here.

I didn’t find out until later that Fulgur Press had reproduced the paintings as a deck, which was packaged with a short essay by Rachel Pollack. The deck is also sold out—so I have no qualms about telling you someone has uploaded all 22 images to Scribd, and you can see them here. Samples:

While working on some notes about Carrington, I went back to the Paris Review story that originally captured my attention—and I found that it begins this way:

“With a mysterious smile on her lips,” writes the Chilean film director Alejandro Jodorowsky, “the painter whispered to me, ‘What you just dictated to me is the secret. As each Arcana is a mirror and not a truth in itself, become what you see in it. That tarot is a chameleon.’ ”

This comes from Jodorowsky’s The Book of Tarot; the painter in question is Leonora Carrington, the British-born, Mexico City–based surrealist famed in life and death as much for her strange, entrancing writings as for her visual art.

The tarot is a chameleon, yes, but as Carrington’s vision of it shows, so, too, is it a chance for both the imposition and the abandonment of narrative; in Carrington’s hands, as with her fiction, there is an embrace of the illogical, the fictive, the dream.

By now you’ll have noticed that the word “surrealist” is used to characterize both Jodorowsky and Carrington—and that it connects up with “the illogical, the fictive, the dream.” By these terms, I think they mean something like anti-rational, or opposed to the limitations of ordinary consciousness.

The concept of surrealism is often taken further, though, to connect with shock value (intended to disrupt the common understanding of reality) and transgressive behavior (the intentional violation of norms). We see those concepts captured perfectly in the 1929 silent classic Un Chien Andalou, with its famous opening scene of a razor slitting an eyeball.

Director Luis Bunuel went on to become an acclaimed filmmaker, and of course the flamboyant painter Salvador Dali eventually created his own Tarot. (Which I love, by the way.) And that’s where we’ll come back to Jodorowsky.

But first—the other source that made me stop to think about Jodorowsky. Last week I wrote about artist E. A. Marshall’s thesis Worlds Inside Worlds Inside Drawings, and I later remembered that it quotes several passages from Jodorowsky’s book The Way of Tarot.

I had not given much thought to that book, which takes an approach to Tarot that diverges from my own. But noticing these two different references, I decided to take a closer look at both the book and its author—which led me to a certain controversy that has swirled around Jodorowsky for decades.

Briefly: He suggested that during the filming in 1969 of his best-known film, El Topo, the scene in which he (playing the title character) commits a sexual assault was not simulated. I’ll let you look up the controversy if you want to know more. At various times since his original statement, Jodorowsky has repeated the claim, denied the claim, and most recently—after protests led New York’s Museo del Barrio to cancel a planned retrospective of his work in 2019—has insisted the whole thing was a publicity stunt, from the beginning.

The actress in question never made any public statements. But she also never made another movie. So we are left to draw our own conclusions about what happened.

We also have to draw our own conclusions about how Tarot became associated with surrealism, and vice versa. About the extent to which Tarot was originally transgressive—and whether it still is. And about how someone with Jodorowsky’s particular kind of imagination developed such an intense affinity for the Tarot . . . .

I’m still thinking about those questions! But if they interest you, I’d suggest watching the several trailers available on YouTube for El Topo and for Jodorowsky’s next film, The Holy Mountain. Fair warning: violent, bizarre, grotesque imagery.

Then flip through The Way of Tarot, if you never have. There’s a generous preview on Google Books.

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I’ll leave off right there, and promise to follow up soon with something on the frivolous end of the Bell curve. Thanks for reading! C