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Tarotic Journal: Oct 12, 2023

I've spent the week sick-ish in bed. There was a point where I started feeling like I could go back to work and sort of do my job, but was still worried about transmission. It's been a lonely week. I'm nervous about going back to work, and the reading from the 9th expressed this. I'm nervous about how i'm going to live up to the craftsmanship of the spider. This reading is sort of narrowly about that, and I suppose with respect to the burdened buck as well.

Deck: Surrealist Tarot (luigi di giammarino)

Spread:

   ______
  |  VI  |
  |Swords|
   ------
 ____   ____
| VI | |  V |
|Cups| |Cups|
 ----   ----

VI Cups: Nostalgia, looking back, the once-unfamiliar

A shape floats in the sky, somewhere between a rock formation and a pine forest. A piano hovers above it, two waterfalls pouring from its inner body down the landscape. The natural shape tapers in the corner to a white, pinching shape, perhaps the tip of a pen, dipping into a cup as if it were an inkwell. Below it, a shape like a sleeping giant's head is in profile, and the "inkwell" rises from its mouth like a tongue. Another cup is on its forehead, and both cups have a melting clock flopped over the side. Indentations mark the head-shape like fossils in a rockface. In the foreground, four more cups sit on red earth like birdbaths. On one are seated two female figures who, when viewed from afar, seem to form a single aged face.

Wow maybe it was a mistake to use this deck for this lol. I think that's the most complex one I drew, though.

I think of my students with this one. The phrase of "the once-unfamiliar" just came to me as I was scanning Waite's interpretation, and i'm struck by it. The process of grading is, for the grader, sort of a retracing of one's steps. I learned this once; now I'm going to try to "re-learn" it with you (Freire's word). In some ways, that's the problem of curriculum design generally: wrestling with the theory of mind you assign to your students, informed by research, your memories of school, your own knowledge, and the personal history you have with your students.

On the card, I see a kind of cosmic ordering: the desert below, greenery above, and music at the summit. The green shape is a mind, a soul, or a liver. It shares its water with the earth-giant, but only by drops. Is this generosity, or withholding? Is this the only place they can truly meet?

How will I speak _with_ my students? How will I alchemize our inequality into something conducive to their growth?

V Cups: Non-total loss, inheritance and passing-on-to

In a desert, a plant growing between the rocks grows five leaves which transform into men as the viewer's eye rises. They are identical, perhaps the same man at different times or in different aspects. Three of them are hunched over as if sleeping upright, while the other two are drinking from cups; one holds a champagne bottle. On the ground, three empty cups, giving us the reason for the three men's lethargy. The two still drinking have their eyes closed, unhappy, like they are trying to forget themselves. Above each of their heads is a thinly slivered crescent moon, making five in total.

This hit me hard when I pulled it. To me, this card shows blockage, being uncannily stuck in habit. The moon does not change its phase. The fact that the men are all leaves of the same plant speaks to a common untreated cause.

I see in this my executive dysfunction, my own pernicious habit of self-forgetting, though alcohol isn't my particular way of doing this. I am the inheritor of the habits I have made for myself as well as the course that has been set for me by my social situation, my genetics, etc.

How will this character wake up and do what is necessary? What will unstick the moon? This doesn't seem like a strong possibility. Freedom is hardly an option for a man who doesn't realize he's rooted to the ground. Maybe that is the first step: understanding the roots. Growing legs is another matter...

6 of Swords: Journey, ferrying others, expedients

An insectoid ferryman rows a boatthrough the sky with an oar whose paddle is a painter's pallet. His passenger is a golden person, perhaps a woman, facing away and holding their hands together in front of them. They are rowing to an ancient floating brick building with a black doorway, out of which pours a waterfall. Pointed pine trees grow from the brick somehow, and rotted wooden shafts cross them as if the trees were ship-masts. Another shaft points outward, a kind of "prow", like the structure is a half-finished boat going the same direction the rower is. Just as pointed as the pines, six huge feathers dangle below the "ship" building. Around the smaller boat are some floating walls and wooden shapes, one of which is piercing the boat through, but which does not seem to impede its progress.

Ah, so this is how it's done: I ferry my students TO the waterfall. Sounds much simpler than the ambiguous drip-feeding ink-welling situation.

The golden figure in the boat reminds me of a soap sculpture, or those smooth pre-hellenic Etruscan figures. They could be anyone. They're the same color as the rolling golden clouds in the background. They are undifferentiated, sexless. I wonder if this figure is standing in for any student, or whether it's some particular somewhat-human principal. I, then, am the bug-person. I made a comment while I was high on shrooms that Jazz music taught me I was autistic, since it made me want to skitter around like a bug. Is it time to Engage My Autism? Only sort of joking.

It's curious how the ferrybug is not at all concerned about the structure piercing through the boat. Like by ignoring the fact that your task is impossible and doing it anyway, it might just get done.

Is the structure they're sailing to moving away from them? Will they ever arrive? Much like the four of swords from the draw on the 9th, there's a feeling of suspension in time here. It's like the cards are telling me that the future is outside their scope; they'll tell me the situation, but not its outcome. That's good to hear, because I wouldn't believe it if they told me about the outcome.

One thing I think this draw has highlighted is that this work is for the benefit of others, and that that can and should be a source of motivation for me. I saw the self-absorbed sorrow in V cups and felt pity for a character I strongly identified with; to counteract this, it seems I need to engage with an other and recognize my obligations. The "other" is curiously unformed and conceptual, both as the earth-giant and the soap-sculpture. I think this speaks to the oddness of relating to 150 students as a mass and as individuals simultaneously. The abstracted variable of the student, the algebraic "x", lives in a different sphere than flesh-and-blood students... shall I get platonic with it and contemplate the form?

I'm not sure if I'll use this deck again for this just because I think the art wants to work on a very pre-verbal register, and explicating it in this way is incredibly time-consuming and maybe even a little bit disenchanting. I will say that I came to much more concrete interpretations of the images by the time I was done writing about them, but even then I feel like they're so busy that I could spend so many more tedious pages trying to derive a "complete" allegorical interpretation. I might read with these, especially with other people, since I like the kind of rorschach-test quality they have, just not for the journal.