Isabel Cooper's Blog, page 8

So wands, wands, yeah

First of all, I’m not so much drunk right now as I am on Klonopin, post-plane-flight, and am feeling pretty mellow about everything.

That’s not inappropriate. Despite Wands being all about energy and passion and fire, the three and four are some of the most mellow cards going.

The Three is a figure holding onto one tree-wand while flanked by two more, gazing out across a lake-bestudded distance. Like the Two, there’s a lot of gazing here, and at first it looks like it could be broody, but the Three is about real growth in things of fire, as well as about starting new endeavors and putting plans into action. Three Person could be thinking about what these plans will cost or where they’ll go, but “where the hell is the taxi” is a more likely internal monologue than “nobody understands me.”

(“Nobody understands me,” isn’t a very Wands thing in general. More a Swords-or-Cups reversed deal, and almost entirely a waste of tine.)

This card means action backed by passion, but well-thought-out action for all that. This project may have started on impulse, but the person doing it isn’t, or shouldn’t, approach it half-assed. An entire ass is generally required, for Wands stuff, and this is no exception.

The Four brings in another person for the first time this suit.  A couple are dancing between four poles, which are garlanded with flowers, and sometimes covered with a canopy to make the marriage symbolism even more blatant. There generally aren’t other people around, but some cards throw in a bunny or two because, hey, bunnies!

Stasis in things of fire is what we have here, and interestingly, this is the only card for which stasis is generally a good thing–it’s discontentment in Cups, miserliness in Pentacles, and rest that might be death in Swords. For Wands, because the whole suit is really the most active of the four, stasis is actually a balancing moment–a stable burn, if you will. There’s still plenty of passion and fire, but you can roast marshmallows here without burning your eyebrows off.

Likewise, the book-type meanings are all success and harmony, celebration and peace. This isn’t a time of rest, but it’s a time when stability and energy unite in the best possible way. You don’t always have to be pursuing that far-off goal, or exhausting yourself with the things you’re passionate about. Take some time to enjoy a dance once in a while. Everything else will be here when you’re done, and you’ll be better off for it.

 

 

How I Suspend Disbelief Part 1: Age Differences

A recent post on Twitter involving Yet Another Annoying Reddit Dude raised some discussion about age differences in relationships, with the usual people saying that no really it’s not creepy for forty-year-olds to try and date people right out of high school and the rest of us weighing in that NOPE.

Like, for a relationship, half your age plus seven is a pretty damn decent rule. (One night stands? As long as everyone is legal and there’s no other sketchy dynamic, have at it.) Absent a power imbalance, when you go outside that range, it’s not necessarily that one partner is taking advantage of the other, but they’re generally at really different life stages. If A has been in the working world for a while and B has just stopped living full-time with their parents (or…still is) there’s a lot of difference there, it often says Some Things about A when they’re involved with B, and while those things can vary, none of them are generally great.

And yeah, there are exceptions. (And by the way: this, and future discussions about timing/age of both parties/etc are not where I want to hear about how you or your friend or your mom totally had a May-December relationship and it worked out GREAT okay STOP JUDGING, like, congratulations, in the best case scenario you beat Vegas odds, but the other 90% still applies and justifies some quiet side-eye and Car Talk*.) Those exceptions are generally where both parties have known each other for a long time–platonically but not for the love of God in a parent-child-ish way, ew–before anything happens, where the younger person takes the initiative, and where the younger person is used to more independence/responsibility than is generally the case.

Preferentially hitting on, or repeatedly “just ending up with” people way younger than you are might not necessarily be predatory as such, but it’s often fairly pathetic. Like–PLEASE STOP READING NOW IF YOU ARE IN ANY WAY MY MOTHER–my senior year in high school, I had a fling with a guy who was 25, and whose previous girlfriend was also 18. I didn’t, and don’t, think that I was in any way exploited or taken advantage of: I had a good time and it was a fun way to spend Senior Spring. I also don’t, and didn’t even then, feel like the guy in question and “a stable and functional dude with a great life ahead of him” had any Venn diagram overlap AT ALL.

So. I said this, I believe all of it…and I also write novels in which one side of a pairing is often hundreds of years older than the other. Am I a big old hypocrite? Possibly.  How do I justify it? Like so:

Independence.  In general, I try to give each character in a romantic pairing their own goals, their own life, and the ability to live that life without assistance from the other person, because otherwise…ew, frankly. There are exceptions to some extent, but I try to make them temporary and situational–Joan from No Proper Lady and the hero in my upcoming book are both Fish Out of Temporal Water, each in different ways, and Joan is on a semi-suicide mission, but they either have existing missions or pick them up, they had lives beforehand, and they develop resources and connections other than their romantic partner.

This is doubly important when one partner is way older or more powerful, which wasn’t the case in either of those stories. I’d have a hard time doing Fish Out of Water where the partner was also a functionally-immortal being: there are one or two future books where I’m considering it, and in those I’m being very careful to give the non-immortal, non-knowing-the-world partner distinct goals and ties of their own, as well as making sure they can still affect the world in ways that the immortal protagonist can’t. And that leads into my second point.
Pertinent contributions. I develop romantic parings using a scaled-down version of the D&D party balance model: each character should have skills that the other one lacks. Depending on the situation, there can be a certain amount of overlap, but everyone should have Their Thing that they know about or can do really well. Unlike D&D, this doesn’t have to be combat-relevant–Mina from Legend of the Highland Dragon kicked ass through pertinent library-organizing and talking to the right people–but it does need to be practical and come into play in both the story and the characters’ lives.

Again, when you’re writing one character as improbably younger than the other, this is even more crucial–and for the love of God, “heals his cynical soul with her childlike innocence and trust” does not count, and also just never do that, and also barf.
Everyone is a fucking grown-up. Yeah, I heart Buffy and Labyrinth too, but high-school romance mostly doesn’t work in general (I will write another post on this, but meanwhile see above re: Not Wanting to Hear It, people for whom it worked out against all odds and reason), and when one character is explicitly underage, or painted as even more innocent than their normal age group…NOPE. (Depending on the first two points and also how the immortal is portrayed, it’s, again, not necessarily predatory but not a recipe for a functional relationship or a believable HEA, for me.)

This also applies less technically. I’m not a huge fan of naive characters as a whole–though I’m better with unworldly men, for Reasons–but if one partner is hundreds of years old and the other is not only twenty but acts like they fell off the turnip truck yesterday? Ew, no. The younger person doesn’t have to be jaded and experienced at every possible thing, but they have to have a decent idea of how their world and the people in it work, and how to operate there. (One of the things I tried to do with both Mina and Sophia is use the places they lacked privilege–not being rich in either case, being Jewish in the Middle Ages in Sophia’s–to make them more aware of how the world works, for a lot of people, than Stephen or Cathal.) Knowing a particular way reality functions that the other person doesn’t is a big one here–it goes along with “pertinent skills,” even if it doesn’t advance the plot per se.

All of these things are important even if both people are the exact same age, in my view–I don’t want to fuck a clinging vine or an emotional support dog, and I’d like to think most of my readers wouldn’t view those as viable romantic partners either–but way more so when there’s a massive discrepancy of experience and knowledge.

That said, I don’t think human/inhuman lifespan mismatches have nearly the issues that large human/human discrepancies do. Obviously, the former makes me money, so I feel better about it, but the other reason is the same one dictating that the rule is half your age plus seven, not a specific number of years: to put it nerdily, after a certain threshold, experience stops stacking. The difference between 16 and 26 is staggering for just about everyone in most modern cultures. Between 26 and 36, well, there are some general differences, but it depends much more on life choices than anything else: I have friends and family who were much more settled in a number of aspects at 26 than I am now or anticipate being in the future. And yeah, people generally tone down the melodrama as they age and learn how to roll with the emotional punches better, but…not always, I have some stories, yowza.

Once you’ve been living on your own, supporting yourself in some way, and making your own decisions, you’re an adult. And once you’ve been doing that for a few years, the difference between Adult A and Adult B diminishes, whether that difference is two years, twenty, or two hundred. If everyone’s a goddamn grownup, cool. And if everyone is not a grownup, functionally and emotionally as well as legally and biologically, this is not a pairing that should be going on anyhow.

*I am a judgmental bitch, but absent abuse and so forth, I also don’t think people are justified in butting in. “So…she’s…nineteen, huh?” is why God made brunch with mutual friends.

Okay okay okay WANDS

YEAH.

In Tarot-Based Naming Alerts, Ace of Wands is a beer. That seems more like a Cups or Pentacles thing, but I am not the beerthority. I have spent five minutes of my life that I won’t get back looking for either of those beers on Google, to no avail, and I don’t understand the world any more.

The cherry Manischevitz might have a little to do with that.

In most decks, except the ones that involve just wands or dragons or literary scenes, this is the final iteration of Disembodied Cloud Hand, our loyal companion on this journey.  Other numeric cards may come and go, but you, Disembodied Cloud Hand, remain, except when you’re replaced by a fox for some reason.

The wand DCH offers is reasonably dicklike in shape, and has smaller branches and leaves coming out of it in a way that dicks hopefully do not, like, see a medical professional if this card resembles any part of your anatomy. Since the wand clearly has no root system, either it was cut after it branched, there’s weird magic shit happening (clearly the intended meaning) or, I don’t know, hydroponics? That thing orchids do? I’ve had onions sprout while not attached to things, but I guess those are roots? I don’t really agriculture. When there’s a background, it’s generally hills and a castle.

The Wikipedia entry on this card says that “Tarot establishes this much sought after connection between ‘self’ and ‘other’ akin to the famous ‘I-Thou’ relation in Martin Buber’s metaphysics,” which is a thing we know now.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you can probably guess the simplified meaning: new beginnings in fire, like relationships or creative endeavors, and all the other meanings go along pretty well. The Ace of Wands is about inspiration, creativity, new relationship energy, growth and boldness and saying fuck it, I’m gonna sell everything and move to California to start the Bee Gees cover band that the world needs.

Sometimes, this is great. Sometimes, it means you end up living in Fresno with a roommate who doesn’t let you keep eggs in the fridge because they have vibrations of sterility. You should probably give it some thought.

The Two of Wands features a person looking off into the distance between two other sprouting wands, though these are less phallic and also are in the ground, in obedience to some kind of logic. (They’re growing from castle walls, which the person is standing on, but maybe there are offscreen planters.) The person may be holding onto the left wand and is generally holding a globe in their right hand. In the distance are…distancey things, mountains and trees and either an ocean or a big lake.

The Two is the “yeah, you legit could go places,” to the Ace’s “I have DREAMS, MAAAAAN!”. It’s about potential for real growth in creative stuff and/or relationships: this person is clearly looking off into the unexplored yonderness, but they also have a globe, which indicates some damn idea where they’re going. This is the card where you actually sit down and plan some shit, like, do you need a passport? Maybe you should talk about relationship models with the Hottest Person ever? What is your performance art actually going to be about, and do you have a source for the ducks?

It’s not, like, Entirely Sensible Planning, in the sense of Pentacles–we’re still in Wands, so what’s being contemplated is a step or five outside the normal routine–but it’s taking the inspiration of the Ace and seeing what you can actually do with it once you leave your own head. Maybe you should go to California, but, you know, sign up with a temp agency and screen your roommates first.

 

 

 

Drunk Occult History

So we’ve been making fun of Scientology in the tabletop I play, as you do, and so the discussion turns, as it does, to L. Ron Hubbard: Piece of Work. At this point, of course, I say something about “yeah, and that was after he was in the weird sex cult with like Heinlein and Parsons and Crowley,” and then I have to explain what I remember about the, I am not even kidding with this name, Babalon Working.

Then I looked it up. Turns out Heinlein wasn’t part of it. Heinlein was only tangentially connected to the weird sex magic, and that’s probably not the strangest sentence this blog will contain.

First of all, it should be noted that reading about the California occult scene is the occult equivalent of listening to someone with a really incestuous group of college friends talk about their schooldays. You didn’t know Anne slept with Bob? Oh, fucking everyone slept with Bob, or wanted to sleep with Bob, or was convinced that their SO was sleeping or wanted to sleep with Bob, yeah, it was a whole thing. Same deal, except substitute “did weird magic shit with” for “slept with,” except and sometimes also slept with, AS YOU WILL DISCOVER.

So okay. Aleister Crowley wrote a novel called Moonchild, because of course it fucking was, which appears to involve the standard pregnancy-and-child plot in fantasy: it’s super mystical and rival groups are fighting over it, like every plot-significant baby from Jesus to Damian. This one has the soul of “an ethereal being,” and something something black and white magicians rival lodges blah blah knocking up some chick and then magical rituals. Mkay.

Now it’s the forties, and a rocket scientist named Jack Parsons is leading a magical lodge  in Pasadena based on Crowley’s teachings, despite the fact that nobody in goddamn Pasadena should be believing in magic. He meets this dude called L. Ron Hubbard,  describes him as “the most Thelemic person I have ever met,” and “in direct touch with some higher intelligence,” and is Totes Okay Really with LRH bonking his girlfriend who’s now “just friends” with Parsons, which…I am not monogamous, I will never be monogamous, and I would jump in a goddamn volcano before I was okay with fucking L. Ron Hubbard banging my SO, especially if she chose him exclusively, and also how the hell did that happen? Parsons in the 1940s looked kind of like Errol Flynn, and Hubbard looked like the bastard child of Rick Moranis and a liver fluke. Was LSD involved?

But not only did this happen, Parsons and Hubbard read Moonchild, decided that was a Great Idea, and embarked on this two-week project to summon an incarnation of the divine feminine–or a really hot chick–which legit involved at least Parsons jerking off (there was some seriously Smurfy text about his “magical wand” and divine energy) while Hubbard looked for portents. Sources vary about whether Hubbard was also contributing in a more physical sense, and if summoning the incarnation of the divine feminine involved being anywhere in the tri-state area when Hubbard, um, operated his thetan, I would take my chances with the singles bars.

(Wikipedia, BTW, describes the ritual as “he masturbated onto magical tablets, accompanied by Sergei Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto,” which is goddamn hilarious, especially because I assume the concerto had an occult purpose and wasn’t just Music to Wank Occultly By, but I do not know, and that would be a cracktacular playlist.)

So okay. That…happens. At some point soon after, this chick named Marjorie Cameron shows up. Hubbard and Parsons decide she’s the “elemental” they summoned. She and Parsons hook up, Hubbard and Parsons continue their quest to incarnate Babalon moonchild thing–which Crowley hears about and describes as “idiotic,” and this is a guy who wrote poems about girl-on-dog action–without telling Cameron, because that’s ethical as hell. Not that Cameron would get pregnant: the ritual would cause a magical child to be born to a totally different woman somewhere in the world.

AS YOU DO.

(There is the vague possibility that Hubbard also was part of the sex, or at least watched,  as Wiki says he “continued to participate as the amanuensis” and now *I* will never have sex again. Uuuugh.)

During, or after, or adjacent to this whole…situation–Hubbard and Parsons’s ex got Parsons to invest in a bunch of yachts, which they then sailed away with, because what this story needs is goddamn YACHT FRAUD.

Parsons accidentally/maybe not accidentally blew himself up some years later. His “elemental” wife, who’d been skeptical, then went full-on conspiracy theory, decided she was too the incarnation of blah de bloo, changed her name to “Cameron” or maybe “Hilarion” and founded her own cult, The Children. Is anything good called The Children? No. No, it is not. These particular Children were adults, THANK GOD, who did sex magic to produce Moonchildren plural who would worship Horus. Cameron, on getting knocked up, actually referred to the fetus as “The Wormwood Star,” because at that point you might just as fucking well.

L. Ron Hubbard…”continued research on another planet” in 1984. And was L. Ron Hubbard.

In conclusion: however out there you might think a given subculture is now, it doesn’t even come close to the fucking 1940s in California, and it’s only a pity we didn’t have fandom_wank at the time.

Video and Question

It’s been A Week, as far as the day job goes, and my brain is fried. So here’s a video link:

 

Wands, and PHRASING

Hello I have jet lag and post-flight-tranquilizers in my system and I CAN SEE THROUGH TIIIIIIME is what I’m saying. What better occasion to talk about wands, the last Tarot suit? Not specific cards yet, because q.v. seeing through time.

So first of all, the symbolism is not accidental, by which I mean feel free to insert your own dick jokes here, by which I mean “insert your own” dick jokes here, which is absolutely what she said. I am not a giant fan of the gender binary, and there are certainly versions of wands that are only phallic in the “eh, longer than it’s wide” sense, but you get a lot of A Wizard’s Staff Has a Knob on the End in most decks, for this suit.

There’s a whole fire versus air occult slapfight about this and Swords, but I don’t have the background. I learned wands as Fire, and to me that makes a fair amount of sense.  Most wands are portrayed as wood (right?), which contains the potential for fire, whereas swords are metal, which is a thing a fire acts on (although you could make an argument for flint and steel). Fire is also willpower, which makes sense for wands in the non-dick sense: you can do a lot of things with them, from beating people senseless to poking sheep into place to supporting your weight and others, but most of that takes a certain amount of effort and focus. (And is also true in the sense of penis metaphor, yes.) Swords, like intellect and power, often can be very effective without a lot of will, but that can be more dangerous.

Fire also means relationships, which is an odd distinction: a personal connection that’s deeper or longer-lasting than the basic Earth sex/money stuff of Pentacles, but not the goddamn hippie songfest that’s the most stereotypical interpersonal deal with Cups. If I have to define relationships–which is not a thing I ever thought I’d do in my life again, so thanks, Tarot–in this context, I’d say they’re human interactions that contain the potential to invest or receive a significant amount of willpower–ongoing interactions with people that move energy around. That can and usually does overlap with any of the other suits.

We’ve also got creative energy here, which, like relationships, is interesting because it overlaps with another Cups domain–in this case, art. The difference is a little easier to define here: Cups provide the inspiration, whether for a whole project or a bit of it one, while Wands are the force that carries it through and gets it done. (In theory, Pentacles can provide the logistical elements, and Swords the planning and abstract ideas, with Wands the unifying force of the project.)

Fire is one of my favorite elements, and it’s an interesting one, because its basic nature is to change the fuck out of everything. Sometimes that’s gently, in a sunlight-and-seeds kind of way, or at least tempered, like when you bake a cake, and other times it’s like, nope, goodbye to your eyebrows buddy, hope you enjoyed ’em. If you feel strongly enough about a person that they change your life or you theirs, even if only in one particular way, that’s a relationship–Fire and Wands. If an artistic inspiration actually gets you to sit down and sculpt or paint or write or whatever, to make something that wasn’t there before, likewise. Despite the opposite element, there *is* a lot of overlap with Cups, but the difference is, as I see it, that Fire/passion is feeling that makes matters different. Cups *can* be a force for change, especially in cards like the Six or Eight, but Wands pretty much always are–and there’s the difference between “feelings” and “passion.”

As the suits go, wands are probably around pentacles for classically-positive associations. There isn’t the Shit This Is Mostly Bad News quality of Swords, but neither is there the Almost Always Happy Times feel Cups. A lot of the cards really have a very neutral or undefined feel: here’s a situation, and how it’s going to play out, or how it should, is uncertain.

It’s, ah, all in the way you use it, you might say.

 

 

 

Why Originality Is Bullshit

This is sort of an expansion on my earlier essay re: Why Tolstoy Is Bullshit, and has sort of become part of an ongoing series, although it won’t be particularly regular. Despite the number of ideas that annoy me on a regular basis, only a few of them inspire essays.

And first off, just to forestall defensiveness: it’s not bullshit to enjoy novelty or experimentation in; your media, to like twists that you didn’t see coming, or to note when an artist or a work pulls all of that off well. Different experiences can be great, and “nobody’s done this before,” shouldn’t stop you from what you want to do, artistically speaking. (Just don’t depend on it for a living, but, at least in the US, I’d say you shouldn’t voluntarily depend on art for a living these days until you’ve actually started making a living from art, and have at least six months of expenses or an equivalent safety net, but that’s a different issue.)

The thing that is bullshit–which sounds like the title of a really gross 1930s pulp/1950s B-movie monster–is looking at a trope, an idea, or a plot and sniffily dismissing it because it’s been previously done a number of times that is more than some arbitrarily-determined acceptability threshold. Genre fiction gets this a lot: not because there’s anything wrong with the concepts used themselves (although sometimes there is) but because, yawn, they’ve been done, they’re so last year. Likewise, people (typically college creative writing students of the more tedious sort) will sometimes start work as an attempt to Do Something That Hasn’t Been Done Before, rather than with a character or a plot or even the notion that they haven’t seen this thing done before and would find it interesting to try.

And this is insufferable bullshit, for a number of linked reasons:

Either nothing has been completely done or everything has.  Humans have been around for millions of years, we’ve been telling stories for most if not all of that time, and most of them have covered similar themes: sex, death, and religion, with minor detours into property loss and amusing incidents with livestock. SF gets at tech concepts that haven’t per se been done before, but a lot of the issues in stories boil down to What Is Reality? and What Makes Someone A Person? and similar, which, yeah, have been around for a while. Which means…
It’s the details, fundamentally, that distinguish stories. Some details are larger than others–a happy versus an unhappy ending and a hero versus an antihero are pretty huge, but even a couple years’ difference in the characters’ ages (all those high school AU fanfics), setting the story in a small town versus a big city, or writing in a different style or from a different point of view can make a major difference. You see this with movie adaptations a lot: the BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries and the 2005 film both draw from exactly the same book, but the resulting films are different enough to inspire fairly strong partisanship on Twitter.

Also, before we started writing shit down, this was how stories worked. Homer used type scenes full of set phrases all the time. Most myths and fairy tales were expansions or variants on a few central themes, told and retold to listeners until “Cinderella” encompasses both the Disney version and a Greek variant that starts with weaving-associated cannibalism. Half of Arthurian legend is minor variants of “but what if these guys fought giants and sorcerers while making the worst romantic decisions ever?” The difference was about how well different plot elements worked, which was a function of the storyteller’s skill at knowing their audience for pacing and references, and of being able to adapt and illustrate.
Which means: the same plot and plot elements, handled by different authors, are going to result in different stories. This isn’t to say that plagarism is okay, or that an author should rip off an entire distinct story structure, particularly without crediting the person who came up with it, and trust their style to cover for that. (“At least switch whether the main character’s a vampire or not,” is a good guideline there, evidence suggests.)  But, okay, an illustrative story:

My old job had a Trivial Pursuit night once, and one of the clues was “this author wrote a series of books featuring a World War II nurse who goes back to 1700s Scotland,” or similar. For me, this was obviously Diana Gabaldon, but since I was not on the answering team, I got to hear their guesses, which were:

C.S. Lewis

Stephen King

Tom Clancy

Kurt Vonnegut

Obviously, this was hilarious, but I also remember thinking that all four of these books would be very different from each other, and from the original, and I would kind of love to read somewhere between one and three of them. (I myself am not into Clancy and often find Vonnegut too depressing. Lewis…depends on whether we’re talking Perelandra Lewis or Last Battle Lewis.)

Even more so, fanfic: I’ve read a fair amount in my life, and I could still probably distinguish one good “Jareth and Sarah get together because of magical shenanigans that happen when she’s in her twenties/thirties,” or “Buffy and Spike in the aftermath of him getting tortured by Glory,” or “Darcy/Lizzy wedding night,” story from another, and I still want them all around, because each one is different enough to be valuable.
Additionally? Tropes, or familiar beats, or elements/dialogue that call back to others are assets for some people. I deliberately engineered the plot of the novel I’m writing so that it could include a Formal Event Becomes a Demon Fight scene, because those are great and I’ve always wanted to write one; it did not become an Everyone Here Is Surprisingly Well-Armed And/Or Good At Improvised Weapon Use scene, so I am damned well going to write one of those in another book, because I like what those do and I like that they remind me of other scenes.

When I read a scene and I can see Oh, Shit, It’s The Bluebeard Thing, when an act of self-sacrifice on a bridge to take an enemy with you reminds me of Gandalf and the Balrog, or the main character is the Grandma Who Does Not Take Shit From You, Zombie Lord, I love it. For me, those moments are–to make a seasonally-appropriate reference–Easter eggs: not only do they make me feel clever for seeing them, but they provide a sense of connection to a greater whole, a resonance with what came before and will come again.

And again: if you like experimenting on a broad scale, or engaging with works that to, have at it! Just…using that as an objective measure of quality to which all should aspire makes no sense from either a historic or an artistic perspective.  When talking about a similar trope with food, someone–I can’t remember who, which is sad–pointed out that there’s a reason we don’t generally see mustard-flavored ice cream in the grocery store.

Speaking of things that have been done before, next week I’m going to start on Wands!

 

Izzy and Sugar Explain The Tarot

I’m not drunk, because I’m working, but I have had a scone with jam and clotted cream and a hot chocolate with crushed Cadbury eggs in it, so I wouldn’t call my state of mind normal, as such, albeit for me a semi-constant sugar high is pretty standard.

And if any cards go with sobriety, the Swords royalty are them. (You really want to be drunk for the Nine and Ten, likewise for the Devil and Tower, each in their own ways, and Temperance isn’t about being sober, despite the name–it’s about being just the right amount of drunk, the right amount of the time.) The King and Queen, at their best, are both about clear thinking, the wise use of power, and the ability to step back and see what the fuck is actually going on. Much as I enjoy a drink or three, none of that goes with booze.

The Queen of Swords is a (generally) dark-haired woman in fancy, flowy robes, often some variety of blue and white. She’s holding a sword, point up, and classically enthroned, though some cards have her standing dramatically on the edge of a cliff. There are nearly always clouds in the background, and usually a river and a tree and some mountains as well. This is really the Most Nineties Fantasy Cover of Tarot cards, except for the ones that are blatantly Elizabeth I.

This one was also a TV series title, of course, and has at least a few namesake novels.

The Swords royalty are really the most classically royal, as is unsurprising in a suit dealing with power. This is a person who’s got good judgment, as a general rule–not so much insight, but a lot of knowledge and the smarts to apply it well–and they make it without bias and with an awareness of the Spider Man-style responsibility they’ve got.  The Queen is careful, but they’re also decisive: they’ll weigh all the information available, but then make a decision rather than dithering.

In the way of Swords, this can come off as harsh, and, indeed, the Queen of Swords doesn’t have a lot of time or energy for the softer considerations of life. Ideally she’s not unsympathetic, but the sob story only goes so far–“well, that’s too bad, but….” is a phrase that she might apply a lot. The negative potential gets at all the Scheming Woman archetypes in fiction, from Lady MacBeth to Miranda Priestly to Lloth: goals matter, the situation matters, and nobody who stands in their way does.

Many interpretations say that the figure is someone who’s known sorrow, which makes sense: when you make a decision and stick to it, especially when you have the power to do that, you often piss people off, or sacrifice some part of your life. That’s sad, but that’s not the end of the world–indeed, “sadness is not the end of the world” is a pretty good Swords summary.

The King of Swords:

In appearance and posture, he resembles the Queen a lot: throned or sometimes standing, holding a sword, dressed in blue and white. There are generally more mountains and fewer clouds in the background.

Speaking of biased interpretations, this card has never been my favorite: there were a lot of readings for me where it was associated with my at-the-time boyfriend and Surly Friend Guy and other Men Who Knew What was Best For People.  The failing of king-type people in general is that of extending responsibility too far, and the intellect of Swords can combine with that to produce a really obnoxious form of moral certainty slash authoritarianism: the sort who got deeply annoyed when other people didn’t run their lives by his principles, and would constantly try to argue them into doing so.

(The King of Pentacles, gone wrong, is classic Overprotective Dad: nobody is taking care of themselves well enough, and nobody has good enough health insurance, and why haven’t you gotten someone to check out that noise in your car OMG YOU’RE GONNA DIE. King of Cups can be either The World Must Understand My Art guy, Dark Messiah, or Super-Incel Stage 5 Whiner/Clinger. King of Wands, we’ll get to.)

That said, this card has as much potential for good as any other, and a good King of Swords is great to have around as a manager, a commander, a head of state, or even a friend. As you might guess, if you’ve been following this blog,  this is a person who’s good with knowledge, power, and freedom–and at his best, they use the first to balance the second two.  They’re strong and commanding, but they’re also honest and fair, and they have the self-knowledge to know the limits of their authority.

“When all philosophies shall fail,

This word alone shall fit;

That a sage feels too small for life,

And a fool too large for it.”

–King Alfred, by way of G.K. Chesterton, and I think apt.

And that’s Swords! Next time: Wands, but before that, Resonance, or Why Originality Is Bullshit

English Majoring It Up

CW: Violence, child death, pet death.

Spoilers: Pet Semetary

Gotten into a surprising number of conversations about Pet Semetary of late, or maybe an unsurprising number given the recent new movie. One awesome Twitter comment stuck with me: namely, that the story is about how everyone dies because dudes don’t listen to advice.  (Yeah, yeah, #notalldudes, whatever.)

And yeah. I posted this on FB and was like yeah, I’ve read the book, I know there’s supposed to be an eldritch horror with mental influence, but frankly in this day and age I think that guy could just sit back with a beer. Except…okay, maybe the story is “everyone dies because dudes won’t listen to advice except from a creepy corruption figure who tells them to give in to their worst impulses,” which makes the Wendigo in the story, like, Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro, and I’m cool with this analogy.

Then I went to buy milk and a sweater, which involves a lot of walking, which is generally when my brain comes up with Dubious Ideas. And so: Totally Unintentional (obviously, a lot of these assholes weren’t even born when the book came out) Pet Semetary As Analogy For Incels/MRAs/Those Dudes That Whine About Girl Ghostbusters.

So okay. One of the basic concepts of the book is that sometimes shit happens and it’s often unpleasant and not necessarily fair, but our job as people is to accept it, do what we can, and get on with our lives. Going forward is painful, but the best option. Trying to bring things back ends with zombie children.

Now, obviously, not getting laid by the people you want or having girls in your video games or whatnot is not a problem compared to having your kid or your pet get run over. But I’m going to be charitable–mostly for the sake of a literary metaphor, not because these assholes in any way deserve it–and say that, okay, it does hurt when you legitimately do everything right and the person you’re into doesn’t return the feelings, and the patriarchy is bad for men too, and when you’re used to privilege equality feels like loss and so on. So there’s some pain.

The route that doesn’t end in badness, the Victor Pascow/Mostly Jud Crandall route, is acceptance. Yes, whatever’s going on hurts, but there’s nobody to blame for it, and you can’t change the situation by force. At best, you can maybe keep it from happening again, but often it’s just a case of sitting with the pain and then moving forward.

Unless you listen to Peterson/Shapiro/the monster beyond the deadfall. What they tell you is that you can totally keep or make things the way you want them to be, that you don’t have to let go and move on, and that you’re right to cling to what was, or what you thought was, or what you wanted to be.

This is where the metaphor shifts.

Because it’s yourself you bury if you listen to those people. You’re sticking your mind in the Dubious Resurrection Pit, because you can’t let go of your old self enough to take in new information like “I’m sad right now, but it will pass, and nobody owes me a relationship,” or “some of the things I liked did leave a lot of people out, at best.”

Most people who do that, thank God, get the animal resurrection model. They’re not pleasant to be around, they’re surly, and many of them smell weird, but basically they’re harmless. Some go all Timmy Bateman with the verbal or emotional abuse. And, as we know from the news, no small number end up full Gage.

Don’t listen to the fucker in the woods. It does not end well.

And that, folks, is what I’m still paying off student loans for.

Next week,  I finish Swords!

Belated Swords

Sorry for skipping last week: time is hard and unforgiving, not unlike swords. (Have you ever heard of a +3 Sword of Forgiveness? A Vorpal Blade of Letting Shit Go? Didn’t think so.)

Having gotten through the only-possibly-mitigated suck of the ten, we’re on to the court cards!

The Page of Swords

Okay so. The Tarot has the whole go-to-the-end-and-restart thing happening a lot, and if the tens are completion, the pages are the restart. Another way to look at it is that the tens are the most intense a particular element and its association in the world can be with people, and the pages are the beginning of internalizing that element.

If you assume that there’s a coherent thematic thing happening here, that’s why the Ten is made of woe and stabbing and the Page is actually doing pretty okay. They’re a young fair-haired person in a tunic, holding a sword and running around on some hills, like how The Sound of Music should have opened. There are some clouds in the background, but the sky’s mostly blue.

In number-and-element terms, this is a young woman who’s good with things of air (knowledge, power, freedom), or someone who’s good with air stuff in an initial, learning kind of way, without authority.  Ideally, this can be the result of going through the Ten of Swords: the more-or-less “okay” condition after that card is some version of “fuck it.” If the Ten was positive for you, this is you taking the power and knowledge you reached for in a moment of desperation and figuring out how to make it a reasonable part of your life. If it was negative, the Ten-to-Page transition means realizing that there’s life beyond the worst thing ever, that you actually aren’t as lost as you think, and that everyone whose good opinion you fretted over losing can go to hell.

The more complicated version is about new ideas and vision and THE FUTUUUUUURE, which may or may not be so bright as to require tinted glasses, and hopefully not in an eighties-cold-war sense. The Ten is disaster, but so is the Tower, and in both senses there’s often the context that it’s a disaster that needed to happen: burning the forest to clear out the undergrowth. In that case, this would be the Minor Arcana version of the Star: fresh vision, insights, hope.

It’s also about vigilance, grace, and a little secrecy, because you might be hopeful, but you’re not naive, especially if you consider this in the context of the Ten. Hope is great, rebirth is great, but what happened still happened, and you’re wiser about the ways people can dick you over. So it goes.

Knight of Swords

This guy’s racing along on a white horse, with clouds blowing in the background. He’s got a sword, a shield, and armor, his hair’s blowing back, and it’s all extreeeemely dramatic! He Knows Things! He’s going to Do Something About This! Does it matter what this is? Ideally.

This is a card about courage, recklessness, and good intentions, the best of pavingstones. This is about a person with an ideal about knowledge, or freedom, or power, who’s determined to make it happen–often regardless of the cost to them, and sometimes regardless of the cost to others.

One of the dangers of Swords, and of power and intellect, is believing that you know exactly the way things should be and that you have the right-slash-duty to correct them when they’re not. Being a Knight, there’s a certain militancy about the “correctness” here: this person might work at a soup kitchen, but they’re more likely to run for office or protest cuts to healthcare.

If you’re actually right and you can be effective, this is great: go save the whales, get a damn minimum-wage bill passed, punch a Nazi in the face!

A lot of people are not these things. At best, in these cases, they end up ardent but flailing activists, quickly burned out and convinced that nobody can do anything because they couldn’t manage the equivalent of running barefoot up a vertical wall, or scholars so obsessed with a particular theory that they can’t handle alternative points of view. (Religion is an easy target here, but I dated a geneticist for a while, and holy God do people get vicious about mouse DNA.) At worst…well, we’ve got a whole lot of history for “at worst.”

This isn’t necessarily a bad card to draw, or even to be, but it’s one that calls for caution. The more I see of Swords, the more I think that their negative associations come from the tendency of people who Really Like Abstract Theories to see those theories rather than the way things actually are, and to take personally any differences between the ideal and the real.

When the world outside your head doesn’t match the world inside it, it’s very rarely your job to make that happen, and it’s never your job alone. Forget that at some degree of peril.