Friday Fun

“What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told. — And now I have told you all that had prepared it.” Andr

So I guess I’m making this into a habit: every Friday, a little break from the grind, a little recreational writing, a little not-quite-so-earnest fun. This here’s a revision of something I did for a surrealist/avant-garde writing course I greatly enjoyed co-teaching in the Spring. Despite my revisionary efforts, it’s still got its goofs and clich

In his strange and gorgeous novel Amnesiascope, Steve Erickson proposes an American Tarot: in place of the Magician and the Fool, Death and the Lovers, Erickson offers “the Snakecharmer and the Boatman and the Moll and the Slave, the Witch and the Bounty Hunter and the Black Lieutenant and the Salem Mistress. . . the Blind Hitchhiker and the Ripped-Dress Debutante.” Erickson’s writing is habitually brilliant, but this idea — practically a throwaway, an aside in the novel’s hallucinatory and frightening beauty — is an idea I can’t let go. Had I the inventive skill and the time and the artistic ability, I’d create an entire deck, Major and Minor Arcana, of the American Tarot: The Pop Singer, The Gangster, The Salesman, The Skyscraper, The Student, Hollywood, The Welfare Mother, The Miner, The Senate Commission, The Minister, The Corner Store, The Late-Night DJ — what are our other icons? For the power of the Tarot lies in its archetypal echoes, the way these figures represent constellations of cultural, political, economic identities, activities, phenomena: they seem powerfully unique, but they stand for entire classes, arrays, matrices of possibility. The Black Lieutenant carries a hundred thousand narratives of oppression and ascent, structural hegemony and individual agency, romance and loss; so, too, do all the other Arcana all compress their own multiplicities of narratives. The Arcana seem to me to be something like classes, in that they embody the stories people tell about themselves. The stories we tell about ourselves.

We see reflections of them embodied everywhere. We see the Arcana perverted, in their stunted carnival form, in the masks of Wealth Bondage: Candidia Cruikshanks as The Chariot; Dr. Chadwallah, The Hermit; Chastity Powers, The Star; Dick Minim, The Hanged Man. We see other stories, as well.

We see the way they’re drawn and dealt, seventh shuffle and seventh cut, diamonds and hearts, spades, the club, the way they fall, the quadrifold crux, nexus, birth, school, work, death, the wings to either side, fortune, soaring to the possible wax-burn and smoke-trail plummet, Icarine, but to soar and hit it, the gold-paved street, the crystal halls and mahogany offices, the frosted glass through which to gaze, the sunny skies and shaded glades, fragmented, splintered like a stained-glass window, smashed save for the larger lies, super-sized, in the elliptical detail and the alternative history, the myth of celebrity and the lies of the scandal sheet made true.
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