Being interested – in stuff

I don’t know why I’m studying French. I’ve only been to France twice in my life – well, to Paris. But they were mad-rush airport-and-hotel business-trips that could have been anywhere. It was hardly the Paris of Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”. The Provence of Ridley Scott’s “A Good Year” would have been better. I could have settled then into a rural backwater, a crusty ex-pat-gone-native, pigged out on red-wine and cheese.

I’ve been learning French since I was eleven, dropped it at twelve, then picked it up again in my forties. But I always found it difficult to make more than stilted Pidgin conversation with it. Still, it would have been good to sit at a French pavement café and order, in French, without the waiter saying to me, in perfect English: “it would be much easier, mate, if we both spoke English.”

But with one thing and another I never did make it to France for pleasure. And then this Covid thing has put the Kybosh on it for goodness knows how long. So there’s no point labouring the language learning, is there? Except I’ve discovered this language App on my phone. It’s called Duolingo and I’m addicted to it – been brushing up my French like Billy-O.

I don’t know what use I’ll put it to. And I admit it does seem rather a small life’s ambition to order un croque-monsieur without le serveur smirking. Or is that “une croque-monsieur“? The gender thing throws me. I mean like how in France a glass is masculine, yet a cup – not that much different in functional terms – is feminine. To a native English speaker this seems an unnecessary complication. Or are we missing something? Do languages with gendered nouns reveal something philosophically profound about that nation’s culture? I don’t know. Maybe I’m thinking too much about things. But then I like doing that, so no harm.

I mean: Esque il y a un raison ces choses est intéressant de moi? Well is there? A reason these things are interesting to me?

So, there I am sitting at my table and the waiter comes over and I order my stuff in French. But I do it with a strong Lancashire accent that sometimes confuses even Englishmen. Could it be he’s thinking it would be cool to be English, as much as I’m thinking it would be cool to be French? Because, you know, that’s it with us humans. We’re always exploring the possibilities. Always une touche de glamour sur l’inconnu. A certain glamour about the unknown.

Except of course, in times of chaos, fear has us shutting out the unknown. This can be anything beyond our normal boundaries – boundaries of state, of trust, or even just our day to day experience. Thus, we can be abused in certain parts of England for speaking Arabic, or having a black skin, or for wearing a face-mask.

Depuis quand sommes-nous devenus si peur de tout? When did we become so afraid of everything?

I could read some French poets perhaps. But then I’m barely familiar with the full range of the British. So there’s no mileage in that, beyond the satisfaction of discovery of course. Or I could read Proust’s seven volume tome, A la recherche du temps perdu, in French? That might take some time, especially considering I got no further than the first chapter in English. Yes, we thrive on challenge, but we should also pick our battles.

I suppose that’s it though: challenge. Chaos is what we face on a daily basis. It is our lot in life, but there are times when chaos wins out. It becomes a fire-breathing dragon, devouring the foundational structure of our societies. It burns away the certainties, devours our courage, and we seal ourselves off from fresh experience. We lose our fight against the dragon, and become much less than we can be.

It’s a small thing then, persevering with a foreign language one is unlikely to use. It’s just one of the many things that pique my interest, but each of them wins back a little order from the chaos. It lays a foundation to my affairs. And in seeking to make sense of things, anything that piques our interest, we slay the dragon, restore balance to our bit of the world, perhaps even improve things a little. And if enough of us do that,… well,…

Je pense que ç’est la raison nous dois la faisons.

I think that’s why we’ve got to do it. Just be interested,… in stuff.

It beats the hell out of chanting slogans, and leaving abusive comments on social media anyway.

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How do we know what’s true?

When you’re not writing for publication there’s a lot you don’t have to worry about, like mainly the expectations and the tastes of others, and the need to always be better than your last novel. Because you’re just bound to fail eventually, aren’t you? Plus, since it’s as likely my work will be forgotten a hundred years from now as that of any other non-A list author, it’s really not worth putting yourself through it, is it?

WordPress will have been bought out by then, transformed and subsumed into whatever passes for the Internet in 2120, and the self-conscious writings of millions of bloggers will have rotted into the sedimentary layers of obsolescence. Ditto Smashwords and that veritable sea of self-published novels that were all going to make their authors a mint, but never did.

By then historians will be researching the great pandemic of 2020 using as source material the archives of a fawning press, and the evasive, rose-tinted, self-aggrandising memoirs of politicians. Meanwhile, the truth is buried here, at least as people genuinely saw it, along with – and indistinguishable of course – from all the lies, and the spin and the barking madness.

So how do we know what’s true?

When you write as I do, you’re writing primarily for yourself. It is both a cathartic experience, and an exploration of how and why we think the way we do. Our opus is then a map of personal development, charting our footsteps through a world of ideas, in search of originality. It’s about reaching that stage when we can write something genuine from our experience of life, and believe in it. That doesn’t make it important of course, or even universally true. It is only the truth, as we see it, but “as we see it”, is the best any of us have to go on.

I hit my messianic years early, woke up from childhood as an angry young man to a world that seemed bent out of shape. I wanted to straighten it more into an image of my own liking. I think we all go through this phase. The rest of life is about coming to terms with the fact it doesn’t matter how much we shake our fist at it, the world is what it is. And what it is is a mish-mash of events that seem out of control. More than that, the world makes demands upon us that are inconvenient to say the least. We’d much sooner avoid all of that and just do whatever the hell we want.

Thereafter, sanity rests in attaining the mid-point between one’s sense of self-importance and all the inconvenient evidence to contrary. It’s about having the courage to take on the world as we find it, and find a place in it that’s the least uncomfortable for ourselves. There, in the gaps between sleeping and doing stuff we don’t want to do, and if we’re lucky, we’ll find sufficient serenity to know it doesn’t matter much either way. That is, except to say, every moment of adversity is a test of emotional resilience, that progress in life, and truth, is measured by how far you’ve left that angry young man behind.

There’s a lot we could be angry about right now. Indeed, that young man in me is in danger of getting lost in the red-mist again, so we have to maintain some perspective, scan the paragraphs for ire, and root them out, because the truth is never angry.

So we come to my work in progress, “Winter on the hill”, and the lesson that it’s dangerous to write in turbulent times, and with the expectation current affairs can be used as a passive backdrop against which our characters act out their dramas. Because these days current affairs can turn our lives on their heads. Thus, my characters suddenly find themselves scattered and social-distancing, their lives on hold and reduced to emailed dialogue, and no action. It’s inconvenient, but I have to work with it.

It’s odd how the story began with themes of fundamental freedoms, the right to roam, the rout of Leftist politics, being spied on by drones, and the dangers of authoritarianism by stealth. Then, suddenly here we are, confined to our homes, spied on by drones, policemen enquiring into our shopping habits and the necessity of our journeys. There’s also no exit strategy and the population is so terrified of dying from this bug, they don’t care. Subcutaneous RFID tagging from birth? Sure, bring it on, so long as it keeps us safe. You see the problem here? And maybe that’s where my story’s going, but I’m not sure I want to follow it because that’s a dark place. That’s a place so far from the truth it’s almost a figment of the imagination.

In the mean-time I tickle back and forth through the narrative to date, checking the characters are saying what they mean and what that means about the journey of my life. Am I looking like I’m on course for something? Am I still in the flow, or am I straining too hard in a direction that’s going to fetch me up on the rocks.

Of course, it doesn’t matter if I write or not, if I finish or not, if it means anything or not. The only one who needs to find out if there’s anything worth a damn in any of this, is me. In uncertain times, turbulent times, it highlights the fact you’ve really only yourself as a reliable reference point. So be true to yourself, and protect those around you as best you can. But watch out too for that angry young man and don’t let him catch up with you, because he’s a real trouble-maker and for all of his reforming zeal, he wouldn’t know the truth if he fell over it.

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Raw Deal

Tarot cards have an interesting history, most of it the invention of nineteenth century occultists, thus lending them the darker tones of diabolism, at least in popular culture – all of which makes them even more interesting of course. Still, today, the merest sight of the Tarot is enough to cause palpitations in the breast of any God fearing Christian, so deeply scarred is the ancestral memory, and that’s also interesting because the origin of the cards is quite innocent. Fake news, fake narrative has a lot to answer for.

Pictorially intriguing and often very beautiful, the earliest reliable records place the Tarot in Italy in the fifteenth century where it was simply a popular card game. Predating the printing press, each deck of cards was hand made, hand-painted, so each deck was an original, making them rare and powerful symbols of the status of their owners.

Unlike a modern deck of 52, the Tarot has 78 cards, split into the major (22 cards) and minor (56 cards) arcana – arcana meaning secrets. The minor arcana are split into four “suits” of 14 cards each which comprise the number (or pip) cards from ace to ten, and four royal cards of King, Queen, Knight and Page. The major arcana are also known as the “trumps”. This structure is roughly familiar and suggests somewhere along the line card games simply evolved away from using a full deck, requiring instead only the minor arcana, so the rest were ditched.

The early cards had no associations with occult practices. This was an invention of mostly Victorian mystics and ceremonial magicians who adopted them for their own purposes, and it’s easy to understand why when you look at the images of the major arcana. These can be interpreted in an allegorical or an archetypal sense, that to draw certain cards might have a deeper meaning for the individual, or be suggestive of a future fate. But occult writings on the subject go further, attempting a complete revisioning of history, tracing the origins of the Tarot to the mythical, alchemical and hermetic traditions of ancient Egypt. It’s an evocative thesis, and one that’s often picked up by uncritical scholarly writings, but there doesn’t seem to be any actual historical evidence to back it up, which means most of what you think you know is probably wrong.

Most of the earliest Tarot decks, restricted their pictorial artistry to the major arcana with the exception of the Sola Busca Deck, dated around 1500. This was prpbably use as the basis for a later popular deck, the so called Rider-Waite-Smith version, which came out around 1910. Brainchild of the occult writer A E Waite, it was created by the illustrator and mystic Pamela Coleman Smith, and is very much in the esoteric, mystical tradition. Indeed if you’re into alchemy, cartomancy, dark or light path magical traditions, you’ll most likely be familiar with this deck.

The anxiety caused by the Tarot arises from its use as a fortune telling device, also its association with occult magic, with occasional diabolism, and with controversial figures like Aleister Crowley, also an over-literal interpretation of the meaning of the Death card. I’m open minded about the paranormal in general but personally sceptical regarding anyone’s ability to foretell future events with any great accuracy, and suspect our futures are more probabilistic than fixed anyway. It would therefore be unnecessarily dangerous to assume a too literal interpretation of one’s future in the cards, especially if that future did not seem fortuitous, and we did not feel able to avoid it.

Where I have found cartomancy and other forms of divination useful is in understanding the complexities of the present moment. But I’m of the opinion this knowledge comes out of the personal unconscious. We already possess the information we need for understanding a particular situation, but it’s jumbled up and we just can’t get at it. But by judicious use of archetypal imagery, and thinking metaphorically, we invite projection from the unconscious and a corresponding “aha!” moment, a moment of insight.

In this way the Tarot might yield some practical wisdom on an issue we’re facing, a bit of lateral thinking, an angle we’ve not considered, but it’s not the cards themselves that wield the power, nor some omnipotent diabolic entity that’s called down upon their shuffling. You can believe that if you want, and many do, but it’s not necessary in order to read wisdom in the cards themselves. There is mystery enough in the phenomenon of unconscious projection without inventing devils and angels as facilitators.

Sadly, popular media hasn’t helped. All too often in film and fiction the death card is drawn and strikes fear into the heart of the receiver – or even strikes them dead on the spot. Interpreted metaphorically however, the death card can mean change and renewal, sweeping away the old to make way for the new, abandoning old ideas when they are no longer useful, all of which is quite different to being actually struck dead. There’s also the “Live and Let Die” James Bond outing in which the Tarot touting Jane Seymour draws “The Lovers” for a swivel eyed Roger Moore. The only likely outcome of that of course being their future coupling, and one that’s far from metaphorical.

I’d probably spend some time writing more on a common sense approach to the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, but that’s a big job, and it’s already been done here. I’m not sure what use or what answer the cards have for me, if any, nor if the question is one I’ve already posed, or has yet to crop up, but I’m glad at least to have blown the dust away and brought the cards out, if only from the shadows of my own mind.

They get a bit of a raw deal in popular culture, one that’s not entirely deserved.

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