The Notes Ahead

Toward a new strategy . . .

Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about Tarot | An Exploration Project. And I’ve made some decisions.

So—this week I’m going to:

• Fulfill some lingering promises

• Explain what’s next

More specifically, here are the promises I have in mind:

1. A compiled version of the “Rachel Notes”

2. More about Bobby Abate

3. Some comments on the Counterculture Tarot

4. Some comments on Arthur Corwin and the Tarot de Cooperstown

5. Two decks I’ve teased but never revealed

Look for those five items over the next few days. And news about EP soon.

But before I sign off tonight, there’s something I want to share.

In the last post I spoke of something “sad and sudden” that had happened in my world. I went on to write a little about Tarot and suddenness—which is a fairly easy set of connections, since he often-abrupt changes that can happen in life are fully noted through the Tower and Wheel of Fortune trumps.

On the other hand . . . I don’t think there’s a Major Arcana card specifically expressive of sadness.

In itself, Death is not sad or tragic. It all depends on the circumstances. And while there might be a bit of melancholy associated with the Moon, that’s still not what I would call a token of sadness.

Perhaps daily life in the Middle Ages was such an intertwinement of happy and sad that those states of mind would not be called out individually. And perhaps grief—which we now view in quite a psychological way—was then just a steady undercurrent of reality.

But whether or not those speculations have any validity, I suspect that Tarot speaks of sadness in indirect ways, through arrangements of a spread rather than specific cards.

In the process of thinking about this, I looked around for a “Tarot of Sadness,” and didn’t find such a deck. I did find something remarkable, though.

The Artists’ Grief Deck.

I would never have found this exceptional item if search engines were not keyed to look for “deck” as a secondary association for “Tarot.” And that particular serendipity is important to me right now—worth talking about in another post.

But for the moment, I want to focus on the Grief Deck itself. In 2020, the nonprofit Artists’ Literacy Institute asked artists for their responses to “a global crisis in communal grief.” The resulting collection contains original imagery and text-based prompts contributed by sixty artists, along with additional content from grief workers and caregivers.

There’s a physical product, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

But the deck is also available online, in a form that lets you hover over a card and flip from image to text.

The images reflect a wide variety of artistic approaches, and the texts range from brief poems to personal recollections to exercises in art therapy. I picked out a few examples to share . . . .

I think there’s no need for further comment—except to say I can imagine turning to these cards not only in times of sorrow, but in any moment when comfort, clarity, or creative inspiration would be welcome.

C