TAROT BY DANTE

TAROT BY DANTE

I drew a card, thinking to play it against her image as a key or mood, a tool to work the field that would make the field fertile. Thyrsus.

Queen of Swords. The Queen with no breasts, her face a face of rock, worn out of the mountainside by rain and freeze and saxifrage. Friction. The worn-out face that seems. Is seen, we think, emerging. Growing younger. Queen of us seers and not what we think we see. Queen not in time but deep time. Her hand does not give or take, but resigns. So it is, she says. Such is the stuff of this kingdom. Stuff of the king you must kill. All Queens require it. Her other hand holds the long-sword. It is long enough. One bird flies over-head. Her cape is light blue and decorated with clouds. The horizon in her garment stretches around her. You wonder if that bird is on there too, and where it’s heading.

King of Cups. Sits on a granite throne cut all of one piece. He rests the toes of his right foot a little over the edge of the base, centimeters from the jumpy sea. Or it appears jumpy. He looks just and resigned waiting to see if you can walk up to him. There is no judge but the judge in the middle of the sea. You may have to walk to him. To close your eyes. Or it may be that you are already him, nowhere as he is, but closer to you, to the Queen than your own body, the way only Being can be, knowing each other through walls and petite morts. You are already him. She is already she. Just destroy this image.

The intellect appears to itself wishing destruction. But it is not destruction as a desire of the western intellect (the bondage of Abraham) to eradicate itself per se rather a destruction to face the mind outward into Being, into we know not what: the Other, the child [the “third Being-Duty”– one of those third things]. The mind reimagining itself. Pose the image of Dante’s travel, or the contemplative travel of Ficino against the vilified sexuality of the church, fucking through holes in our nightgowns, hating all matter. 

That is, to move always beyond the furthest imaginings, fugue-like, to the real that stays real because we don’t know it yet; and looking back see the catches of previous stations as they stretch away behind us: those stations of metaphorical relations, where we are posed against ourselves, halted, locust-shells, reifying without motion, without life, dead scholars, and advancing only, if at all, by grace. By grace: by an imagining that motivates mind into its impossible outward leap. Into her lap. That first Devonian toad, catching its breath on the other side of the sky.