cat

[the following is submitted as an entry in the "broomsticks challenge" offered by john michael greer on his "well of galabes" blog]

0.

It is a year to the day Cat disappeared. Or went away, or crossed over, or whatever the hell happened.

Her grandmother, the blind witch, said she had moved to another zone, to live with her mother. But she would not say what zone. And Cat had told me her mother was dead.

So I am writing this as a sort of invocation. Cat, if you are out there. I miss you. Talk to me, kid.

1.

I pulled the letters from the box. The usual dunning notices, but then also goddamnit. On motel stationery from somewhere out on the plains, addressed to me. I recognized the handwriting, and felt a rush of disgust and anger.

A voice behind me said, "he means well." I turned around.

Maybe twenty steps away, leaning against the endless wall of mailboxes, was a kid about my age. Torn jeans and a cropped sweatshirt, short dark hair tousled. A girl, maybe. She was looking at me, but somehow I wasn't sure it was she who had spoken.

"What?" I said. "Did you say something?"

She sloped off the wall and walked toward me. Just for a moment I had this weird impression she was remaining in place, pulling the floor toward her with each step.

"I didn't actually say anything," she answered. Meaning what?

I stood there, the letters in my hand, the mailbox hanging open, and stared at her.

"Sorry," she said. "My name is Cat," extending her left hand. I did not take it. "I live in the block. Staying with my grandmother, actually. I didn't mean to pry."

"So you did say something."

"It wasn't me, not the way you think. But apparently you heard." She hesitated. Then she said, "This older male, maybe your father. He means well."

The letter was from my father. But how would she know? And who was she to interfere? This was something I wanted to put behind me.

"Sam," she said. Only my father called me that.

"How do you know my name?"

Cat took a half step back, folded her arms, tilted her head, looked at me for several seconds before speaking.

"This has begun badly," she said finally. "I should explain myself, but maybe not here. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?"

An eleven or twelve year-old kid offering to buy another kid a cup of coffee. But hey, why not? I didn't want to deal with my mother just yet anyway.

2.

"I am not sure where to begin," Cat said.

We were sitting on flimsy chairs at a tiny, bright yellow table in a cafe on the minus three level. A couple dozen people shouting over the canned music and the coffee grinder. I was taking small sips from a watery americano. Cat had an espresso in what looked like a paper shot glass.

"I don't know your father, obviously, and I don't know the situation, apart from what you heard. Though in that moment," she said, "I did see someone writing at a desk in what looked like a motel room. A snowstorm outside the window."

"I gotta say, Cat, I am feeling invaded here," I said.

"I know," she said, "I mean, I'm sorry. Boba is always saying I have to learn to take it down a notch."

"Boba," I repeated. "Take what down?"

Cat knocked back the espresso in one gulp. She sat looking at the empty cup in her hand. It was quite awhile before she spoke again.

"I have access to an entity on what I guess you might call an inner plane," she said, finally. "I call it the guide. Boba, my grandmother, has been teaching me to communicate with it more clearly. It was the guide who said your father meant well. The fact you could hear it means you may also be a sensitive."

Whoa. "Okay, so," I stumbled, "I almost liked it better when I thought you were intruding." The americano had gone cold. "Is this 'guide' talking to you right now?"

"Not really in words at the moment," Cat said. "Just impressions, images. Like, you have some regrets about stuff that went down with your father just before he left, you were confused at the time, you are trying to forget it all, that kind of thing."

"Yeah. I don't know if I can take this, Cat," I said, staring at the table top.

"I cannot be certain," Cat said, putting her hand over mine, "but the guide may be reaching out to you through me, trying to say something to you about your father."

I did not withdraw my hand. Abruptly I began weeping.

3.

"You were gone awhile," my mother said, without turning from the video box. I closed the door and slipped off my shoes.

"Yeah, I ran into some new kid down in the post, and we got to talking."

No response. Chatter from the video box.

"Here's the mail," I said, setting the notices with the others, still unopened going back several weeks, on the table next to two empties. She glanced at the stack of envelopes and cracked open a third.

She turned up another card in her solitaire. The seven of hearts, which she placed on the nine of clubs. More chatter from the box.

I went to my closet and shut the door. I pulled the letter from my bag and tossed it aside.

He means well. The road to hell is paved.

4.

I had a stash of these letters from my father in a box under my cot, mostly unopened. After the first couple or three, I had stopped reading. Explaining himself. Why he had to leave. Not to blame my mother, of course, just the way things had turned out, and so on.

Freaking trip to lay on a ten year-old, thanks, dad.

Things were pretty rough around here in the months before he left. A lot more screaming than usual, wish you were dead kind of thing. I mostly hid out in my sleeping closet.

The day he left she put on a scene where she threatened to call the enforcers to say he was stealing stuff unless he gave her contact info. For awhile she was on the handset with him every day, two or three times a day, again with the screaming.

And then he, like, disappeared almost. Still sending money sometimes, but not taking calls, and apparently moving around in other zones and then it seems out onto the plains.

A lot of the screaming was about money, how he didn't make enough, how she spent too much, borrowing against future income he might not make, and so on and on.

She felt entitled to achieve a certain social status, he said, and his lack of commitment to that project gradually wore her down. How he put it in one of the early letters.

Her parents were second generation immigrants, but they had a five-room flat in an upscale block while we had just these two rooms here.

She could have been a midlevel technocrat, but she made a choice to micromanage my entrainment instead. It seemed like every day of her life she regretted that choice, though really the point was she made you feel it.

Neither of them seemed to think I was part of the equation.

5.

I did finally open the letter.

He said he was out on the plains, in a camp with three or four or five others -- and of course he had to mention one was a "younger female" --, sleeping in a rusted out shipping container, pumping ground water with a makeshift windmill, tapping electricity from a transmission line nearby.

"Before I finally left the zones," he said, "I was sometimes eating from discard bins. Out here I can grow some of my own food, and I have enough paying work I can buy what I cannot grow." Repairing farm machinery. So apparently there is some kind of money economy functioning outside the zones.

"This is an entirely different world out here, Sam," he said. "I wish you could see it." Sky. A sea of tall grass. Blue mountains on the horizon.

And then the more difficult part.

"You ought to be getting a red card soon. And I don't know how you feel about it. I remember I didn't think much of it when I got mine, what is it, not quite thirty years ago. But then," he said, "I did not yet understand what all it implied.

"When they found me 'no longer useful,' I had less trouble letting go than I thought I might. Though don't get me wrong, Sam. It is not easy trying to get by without credentials." Well, duh.

"But the larger truth of our situation is more visible from the outside, or it seems so to me." Larger truth, whatever. "Makes much of what I used to do seem pointless -- or worse, actively helping the oppressor. I am not better positioned to fight him out here, but I can for the most part withdraw from the relationship."

Like he withdrew from my mother. And from me.

6.

A few days later I was down in the post again. The dreaded red card lying in an otherwise empty box. The future suddenly loomed. My first thought was how would my mother react. Red was what she wanted, of course. But what did I want. I left the card in the box.

On a hunch I wandered down to the cafe. Cat was at the same table, reading, an espresso at her elbow. She looked up as I came in and nodded toward an empty chair. I bought an americano and joined her.

"I want to know more about this guide," I said.

"Boba said you would," she answered.

"Hey, Samantha," someone called out. It was that idiot Jeremy from third form. He ambled over to the table. Standing too close, as always, passing a stylus from one hand to the other, back and forth, back and forth.

"Hey, Samantha," again.

"Who's your friend?" he said, gesturing at Cat. She began tapping one finger on the table, insistently. Jeremy focused on the finger and then blinked. Somehow I knew.

"What are you talking about, Jeremy," I said.

"Hey, Samantha," he said yet again, "they're moving me up to track five after hiatus. I just got the red card today," he said.

"That's good, Jeremy," I said levelly, staring into the cup.

"Did you get your assignment yet?" he insisted. I did, Jeremy, but it is not something I care to share with you. "No, not yet," I said.

I don't know why I am so hard on Jeremy. What does he want from track five? Bunch of sycophants who want to work in midlevel administration, be near the real movers. But it's not in their interest to let you all the way in, Jeremy, to get you out of the blocks. More messages from my dad.

After he left, I said to Cat, "for real? How did you do that?"

"I just removed myself from his attention," Cat said, like anyone could do it. So I literally said, "can anyone do that?"

"It takes practice," she answered.

7.

To me it felt like a crush. Fueled by caffeine.

I did not want her to meet my mother, and Cat did not seem to mind that. We would sit in the cafe for hours and talk about -- well, everything.

Sometimes she would point out something in the canned music -- an inverted pedal point, a rising key change or the use of an artificial harmonic to create a sense of urgency -- and it was like I was hearing it for the first time. No longer merely annoying, but nakedly manipulative.

Or we would talk about something one or the other of us had read, dissecting the arguments or critiquing the writing style.

But eventually the conversation would always return to what you might call "the situation." The technocracy, the zones, the outland. The vast machinery into which we were all being fed.

The red card still lay in the mailbox.

8.

Only once did she tell me anything about herself.

"From almost as early as I can remember," she said, "from when I was maybe three years old until just a few months ago, my mother and I lived on a farm in zone seven. There were maybe twenty people living there. It was an experimental farm, only a few dozen hectares. The ploughs were drawn by oxen and draft horses. We did all the harrowing and scything by hand."

She was gazing into some middle distance, and it sounded like she was describing a dimly remembered dream.

"There was no hierarchy," she said. "We were all of us field hands, and we were all of us managers. We made decisions by consensus. Sometimes we had itinerant laborers coming in from the outland, and even they participated in those processes."

It was not at all clear to me where this kind of farm fit in with what little I thought I knew about the technocracy.

Cat went on at some length. Apparently someone somewhere in administration had expressed concern about the sustainability of existing methods of producing and distributing nutrients. The farm was one of several dozen, mostly at the outer edge of zone seven, where they were trying out other methods.

But it seemed to me there was more going on here than farming. Ordinary people were making decisions in small groups, taking charge of their lives.

9.

To be honest, a lot of what I remember now is just watching her face, her dark eyes, her small mouth, the the hollow of her throat, her slender fingers. I was in love, as the kids say.

10.

So of course eventually I had to come up with her to Boba's lair.

Stepping off the lift into yet another indefinitely long hallway with numberless doors. Diffuse white light and grey carpet tiles.

Cat keyed a door on the left, and I followed her into a darkened space, which of course was much like the space I shared with my mother. The same glass wall looking out through a permanent grey mist onto an endless array of blocks, one after another, receding into a vague distance.

How many floors in each, how many units, how many unhappy people behind how many glass walls.

Cat slipped off her shoes and placed them carefully on a woven straw mat just inside the door. I followed her example. We stood for a moment in silence. My eyes began to adjust to the low light.

The layout of the flat was of course familiar -- kitchen here, toilet there, doors to the sleeping closets --, but the common room seemed almost empty. No chairs, no couch, no video box. Just a few square cushions scattered about the bare floor, and a very low square table on a thin carpet near the center of the room.

Sitting crosslegged at the table, backlit by the glass wall, was an old woman with very long, white hair, straying loose over a grey kaftan. She was turning over cards, one by one, from an oversized deck and laying them out on the table in some kind of array. Not my mother's solitaire.

Gesturing to me to stay in the entryway, Cat slipped silently across the room and bent to kiss the woman's forehead. She murmured something, and the woman turned her face slowly toward me.

She reached out with her left hand and beckoned, gathering each of her long, slender fingers into her palm. I approached. The woman indicated a cushion, and I sat.

She turned up another card, and placed it among the others on the table. I saw they were all blank.

Cat had stepped away from the table. She said quietly, "Samantha, this is my grandmother. You have heard me call her Boba, but her name is --."

"Boba will do," the old woman said gently. She turned a sightless gaze toward me, her eyes milky white.

"Catherine tells me her guide spoke to you," said Boba. She made a very slight sweeping motion with the back of her left hand, and Cat moved away and sat near the glass wall, looking out into the mist.

"I am not certain what happened," I answered. "I thought I heard someone say something."

Boba sat for a long time giving me that blank stare. After what seemed like several minutes she reached into the folds of her kaftan and produced a small, grey metal disk. She placed it on the table between us. "Take this," she said.

I picked it up. The disk was about the size and heft of a dinar, unmarked, with a rough, dull finish. I let it lie in the palm of my left hand.

Boba turned over another card and sat as though studying it. "Tell me about your mother," she said, turning over yet another card.

Suddenly the disk felt cold and heavy in my hand. I felt confused, unable to speak. Finally I mumbled, "she is unhappy."

Again Boba sat silent and then turned another card.

Quietly she said, "do you feel this is being directed at you?" And again I had nothing to say. I felt as though there was some truth I could almost grasp, but it kept escaping me.

And then this happened.

11.

Boba gathered the cards and squared them into a deck. She invited me to place my hand on the deck. I let it rest there for awhile.

I looked up and was startled to see Boba looking at me with an alert, very frank expression -- I would almost say kindly, but certainly open and unguarded -- through fine, grey eyes.

I must have blinked. There again were the blind white eyes, but it seemed like the expression somehow remained. I withdrew my hand. She turned a card.

I saw the two of diamonds. Or was it the four. But no, the card was blank. And I thought, I should be doing something, but what. It was like my life had been on hold for quite awhile.

Boba turned another card and placed it next to the first.

It was the seven of spades. Or the ten. No, it was again blank.

And I thought, this is just a story I am telling myself. But I am also enacting the story. It is like I am locked into the story I am telling myself.

I am saying "I thought," but it was more like a voice in my head, not entirely my own.

She turned over another card and placed it alongside the other two.

The four of clubs. No, the four of hearts. No, again blank.

And I thought, this story is not serving me anymore. It is holding me back. I have withdrawn from my mother, withdrawn from myself.

But who is this "me" person, and how does she -- or is it he, or somehow both, or neither -- how does s/he go about enacting a different story?

Another card. The four of spades. The ten again. And then the king of clubs. Blanks, blanks.

I felt like I was struggling to wake from a dream. Boba went on turning blank cards, but it seemed somehow like a loop -- the same movement of the fingers, the same blank card, the deck undepleted. There was a loud humming in my ears. My eyes closed.

12.

Cat was helping me to my feet. Apparently the interview had ended. Boba was nowhere to be seen.

Cat walked with me to the lift. As we waited for the cage to arrive, we embraced. It felt like something was ending.

In fact it was the last time I saw her.

13.

The lift gate closed. I realized I was still holding the disk.

I stood there without touching any of the call buttons. Eventually the cage descended on its own. The gate opened on the minus three level.

I wandered into the cafe. It was like watching a video. The baristas enacting their roles, the customers enacting theirs. The canned music and the coffee grinder providing a soundtrack. And was I a participant or merely an observer, or was I somehow both?

Sitting alone at the table where Cat and I had spent so many hours was an older man, reading a small book and making notes in the margins. He glanced up briefly, and it seemed some kind of silent acknowledgment passed between us.

It was time for me to talk with my mother.

14.

When I stepped into the entryway I could hear my mother talking to someone. It did not sound like she was on the handset.

I waited for a moment to hear another voice, who she might be talking with. Instead my mother called, "Samantha," meaning, come in here.

It was Jeremy. There was only one reason he could have come here.

I felt a surge of anger rising, or maybe it was fear -- the same thing, really --, but I let it pass through me. Arising in the chest and sweeping up the back of my head. Actually pretty interesting to watch.

I felt weirdly calm. I slipped the disk into a pocket.

Jeremy was sitting at the other end of the couch from my mother, his hands active as always. He avoided my gaze. The video box was flickering but silent. The table was cleared of the usual debris. I did not sit.

"Jeremy was telling me," my mother began, "that the assignments have been out for a couple of weeks already."

I did not say anything. Waiting for the other shoe.

"Did you get a card," my mother persisted. Jeremy stood, saying "maybe I should leave."

"No, stay, Jeremy," I said, raising a hand. "I want you to hear this." He sat.

"Yes, I got a card." A look of what I would almost call hunger in Jeremy's eyes. "And yes, it was red." Turning to my mother. I could see she was almost desperately afraid of what was coming.

"And you want to know why I have not said anything," I said. "So here it is.

"I do not yet know what I want to do. Somehow track five does not feel right, at least not right now. I want to take some time to learn more about how the whole thing works before I commit to a particular path."

Something shifted. My mother's face relaxed. It was like she suddenly recognized some part of herself in me. Jeremy looked stunned.

"I think something may be changing," I said, "and I want to try to be a part of that."

I talked about the farms in zone seven, and their experiments in self-governance. "This feels important to me," I said. "I can always go back into formal entrainment later, but with maybe a better sense of direction."

My mother stood and came over to me. We embraced for quite a long time, both of us crying a little, but also laughing. Our estrangement of the past few years seemed to fall away.

15.

So I spent several months on a farm in zone seven. My mother actually came with me, and she ended up staying, even after I came back to the blocks. She is there still. I think she may have found a new life.

We did have quite a number of day laborers coming in from the outland, and some of these ended up joining the community. Some who had come from the blocks went over the border to help organize similar farms in the outland. It seemed the border itself was disappearing.

Just once I glimpsed someone I thought might have been my father, but maybe not.

Jeremy visited for a few days, on a field assignment he had arranged with his track five mentor.

When I got back to the blocks I found Jeremy had set me up with an internship with the group in midlevel administration that is managing the farm projects. Skip right over the track five entrainment, which might have taken two or three years.

I have not yet decided whether I want to take that path. But thanks, Jeremy, really. I may have misjudged you.

16.

As it happened, the flat they assigned me, with two other young women returning from the farms, was in the same block my mother and I had left.

Literally the minute I arrived, I stowed my gear in one of the sleeping closets and took the lift to the level where Cat's grandmother lived.

I hesitated to knock on the door, feeling suddenly apprehensive. I was standing there with my hand raised when the door opened.

An old woman with very long, white hair, straying loose over a grey kaftan. Not evidently blind. A dark grey cat skulking about her ankles. A straw mat just inside the door.

"Yes," she said. Apparently she did not remember me. In that moment, somehow I myself was not certain we had ever met.

I explained I was looking for a girl about my own age named Catherine, who I had thought was staying in this flat.

The old woman acknowledged she had a granddaughter with that name, who had visited some months ago, but had since returned to live with her mother and so on. This is where we came in.

17.

I took the lift down to the minus three level and wandered into the cafe.

Sitting alone at the table where Cat and I had spent so many hours was an older man, reading a small book and making notes in the margins. He glanced up briefly, and it seemed some kind of silent acknowledgment passed between us.

It was time for me to get on with my life.

fin

unexpected

I was sitting there in this cafe yesterday morning
having a bagel and coffee on my way in to work at the bike shop
a routine for me most mornings
usually involves the paper and a sudoku and some solitaire
and a tarot reading for myself

but on this day I had time only for the metro section and solitaire
no sudoku
did not even have my tarot deck with me
laying out the solitaire, calculation

this russian guy at a nearby table says something about reading his "future"
maybe he has seen me there with the tarot deck before
taken by surprise

I say, okay, let me finish this out
and everything falls into place in the calculation

so then we move to the empty table between us
and I shuffle seven times, to randomize the deck
hand the cards to him, tell him to mix them until he feels comfortable
he pulls seven cards without my asking him to
I take these and mix them once, start laying them out

five spades
this is about looking out for yourself, I say
something in your head

seven diamonds
a decision in the practical realm
you are waiting to see what happens

jack diamonds
a new project, connected with the seven

four clubs
a sense that you have already done something
a resting point

five diamonds
a sense of having been left out of something
together with the five spades, an idea of the way things "should" be

three spades
worrying something to death

ace pentacles
an opportunity

diamonds adding to thirteen, something you need to leave behind

something of an emphasis on seven
(the four and the three had been laid out of line with the other cards,
and there was the seven diamonds . . .)
the importance of making a decision

he said it seemed to make sense

the neat thing for me was
reading aloud without difficulty
probably because I had no opportunity to "prepare"

zb

reversals

the significance of a reversal is not necessarily obvious. sometimes, especially with courts, it may mean that the card applies to someone other than the querent. sometimes it may mean "not," or a low energy. sometimes it may be a means of emphasis, or it may connect with how the numbers are combining among several cards. the meaning of a spread is rarely obvious or overt.

zb shuffles in such a way as to maintain a completely random number of reversals in the deck.

zb

 

reading with the solitaire deck

C.,

Thought I would do a little tarot spread for you, to give you a small glimpse into how this has come to occupy a fairly large space in my daily awareness.

I used a deck of playing cards for this purpose, which means no "major arcana" cards, no "reversed" cards, no imagery, the "knight" (high intensity) sort of folded into the "page" (something just emerging) in the form of the jack, and of course a greater mathematical likelihood that there will be a fairly even distribution in a ten-card spread among the four "minor" suits (the majors being in effect a fifth suit) and actually a somewhat higher frequency of "court" (i.e., face) cards.

This is what came up (the enclosed diagram shows the physical arrangement of the cards in a "celtic cross"). Clubs are "wands" or "rods," diamonds are "pentacles" or "coins," hearts are "cups," and spades are "swords."

1. the central concern, ten wands, the sense of burden
2. a related or possibly competing concern, three pentacles, getting things done, "cooperation"
3. the focus, three cups, taking pleasure in a connection with another
4. an underlying or possibly receding influence, two swords, avoidance or denial
5. the immediate concern, six cups, sharing, innocence, nostalgia
6. an approaching influence, three swords, anguish
7. self-narrative, queen pentacles, the quality of resourcefulness
8. how others are affected, six pentacles, issues of having/not having, fairness
9. a hidden influence, ten cups, the idea of emotional fulfillment
10. "outcome," two wands, the moment of initiative

I usually also draw a "shadow" card from the bottom of the deck, which sort of says, this is what the reading is "about." In this case, the shadow was the king cups, a mature expression of the quality of compassion and understanding.

The major arcana can be implied by some of the numerical combinations. For example,

a. the run of threes across the middle of the spread might suggest (3) empress, sort of "the female principle" of abundance, sensuality, nurturing, and/or, albeit less directly, (12) hanged man (because one plus two is three), an interval or condition of suspension and surrender. [Note that three wands, engagement, moving forward, is absent here, though the two and ten wands do add to twelve.]

b. the pair of twos, swords (reason) and wands (will) might suggest (2) high priestess, an intuitive understanding, a period of non-action, and/or (11) justice, taking responsibility for decisions. [Actually, in reading for myself, (11) justice often refers to an outcome that is determined by forces external to myself.]

c. the pair of sixes, cups (proclivity) and pentacles (practicality) might suggest (6) lovers, making choices that affect others, i.e., ethical choices, and/or (15) devil, a propensity to self-destructive patterns.

d. the pair of tens might suggest (10) wheel of fortune, the turning point, gaining perspective, and/or (19) sun, enlightenment, clarity, and/or even (1) magician, focused awareness, effective action.

There is a very slight prevalence in this spread of cups and pentacles, water and earth, over wands and swords, air and fire. (Actually, I do not include "elemental dignities" in my reading, so let's just disregard that. What I meant to say was proclivity and practicality over will and reason. But again, slight.)

The "pips" on the cups add to nineteen, again suggesting (19) sun, (10) wheel, (1) magician, this time in connection with the cups cards. The pentacles (queen high, as self-perception) add to nine, suggesting (9) hermit, solitude, introspection. The wands add to twelve, again suggesting (12) hanged man and less obviously (3) empress, and the swords add to five, suggesting (5) hierophant, external norms, and less obviously (14) temperance, pretty much what it sounds like.

The shadow king cups of course connects to the cups in the spread, but also sits in contrast to the queen pentacles. I also tend to think of the shadow as a sort of commentary on the first two cards (which themselves purport to state the "subject" of the reading).

So putting all of that together:

A sense of burden connected with some kind of practical project involving the participation of others (sound familiar?). An issue relating to enjoyment of another's company, possibly rooted in the avoidance or denial of something. And here note how the three swords, anguish, sits across from the two, with the central cards between, while the six cups, sharing, innocence, nostalgia, is above, with the three, (absence of?) joy, below. All symmetrical and stuff. Anyway.

Self-perception or self-narrative is conveniently a court card, queen pentacles, resourcefulness, nurturing or supportive in a material context. How others are affected, having and not having, and so on.

The presence of ten cups, the idea of fulfillment, as a hidden or unexpected influence is interesting, especially in view of king cups as the shadow.

While this spread was done "for" you, and presumably you could build a narrative around it that applies to your present situation, it is of course also the case that I could readily build a narrative that applies to mine. We are talking about random arrangements of playing cards here, after all.

This kind of exercise is something I spend about half an hour on almost every day, usually with one or the other of my two tarot decks, with of course the majors and the knights and the reversals also at play. The process engages the pattern-making impulse in a big way, but it also provides a quiet space in which to ruminate.

zb

distance reading

so I laid out five cards in a row, without assigning positions.

oh, let me first mention that what I usually say about my own chances of winning the lottery is that my chances are only slightly smaller than if I actually played.

okay, so. then I decided, partly based on a general sense I was getting from seeing the cards laid out, that cards 1 and 2, to the left, would be background or underlying causes, card 3, in the middle, would be where you are right now, and cards 4 and 5, to the right, would be where you are or seem to be headed.

anyway, what I got was:

5 pentacles, reversed/knight swords, reversed/10 wands/9 swords and/ (20) judgment

which gave me a sort of initial impression: right now you are feeling burdened with more on your plate than you feel you can handle, in the background is a sense of rejection or failure that may be illusory or fading, and a sense that you are not, or have not been, applying your reason to the problem at hand. then nine swords, anxiety, and (20) judgment, a sense that everything will come to a head and there will be some kind of decisive moment.

then I laid out five more cards, as a sort of explanatory overlay, and got:

(16) tower/king wands, reversed/7 swords, reversed/ (7) chariot and/knight cups, reversed

which by themselves suggest a very significant discontinuity (overlaying the 5 pentacles sense of rejection or failure), a weakness or absence of the controlled exercise of will (overlaying the knight swords sense of not applying reason), the idea of subterfuge in some kind of nonobvious or unexpected context (overlaying the 10 wands sense of burden), a very strong suggestion of decisiveness (overlaying the 9 swords sense of anxiety), and some misdirected expression of strong emotionality (overlaying the (20) judgment sense of a decisive moment).

then I realized that ten cards could be laid out in a celtic cross, which is how I do usually read, though my positional meanings are somewhat idiosyncratic.

in this layout, we see knight swords reversed as a supporting influence on the perception of failure, the idea of burden as the focus, anxiety as an underlying cause, (20) judgment as the dominant conscious concern, (16) tower, discontinuity, as an impending influence -- contrast this with the pairing of this card in the initial spread to 5 pentacles, both as past influences.

king wands, reversed, the sense that your will is not being exercised in a contolled manner, becomes in this spread your self-perception, and 7 swords, subterfuge, some kind of external event. (7) chariot, decisiveness, becomes the hidden factor, and knight cups, reversed, misdirected emotionality, falls into the "outcome" position.

there are three swords, including knight reversed, spread across the middle of this layout, with the pips adding to net (2) priestess, suggesting an intuitive knowledge of the swords issues. the three majors add to 43, which reduces to (7) chariot, putting additional emphasis on that card, and also indirectly emphasizing the 7 swords, reversed, and also 7 equals 1 plus 6, (16) tower. two knights reversed, but the knight cups is not supported by any pip cards. king wands reversed connecting with 10 wands

and here I should say that I also looked at the "shadow" card, at the bottom of the deck, and it was 2 wands, reversed, saying something or other about the idea of initiative.

before I go further, let me suggest that you lay out these ten cards from one of your own decks in the two configurations I have just described, so that you can form your own impressions.

if I had to put a narrative to all of this, which maybe I should not, because your own impressions should prevail, I would say that you may have been blaming yourself for some failure in the practical or material sphere, and that you are existing in a state of paralysis because of some sense of impending disaster. 7 swords reversed, subterfuge, seems to me to be the idea of getting around all of this by winning the lottery. (7) chariot, decisiveness, is set up as a strong contrast to this idea.

the "outcome," knight cups reversed, and the shadow, 2 wands reversed, are for your own interpretation.

[after feedback]

in light of your reply, I am thinking that knight swords reversed in position 2 may have more to do with the sense of mental turmoil you are describing -- thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, all seeming to pile up on each other. then knight cups in the "outcome" might suggest emotional turmoil . . . or it might suggest emotional turmoil coming to an end, as a result of (7) chariot, decisiveness. it might even be that seven swords in position 8 (externals) talks about duplicity on his part, rather than self-deception on yours, but more likely both.

so then the shadow card, two wands reversed, initiative. the idea of the shadow is to put a card behind the reading that says, this is what the reading is about, or this is a perspective to see it from. in this case, the card is saying, look at this entire spread -- five pentacles, but why reversed? isn't this card upright a good enough description of the sense of failure?, well, two wands reversed says, you have to take responsibility for this, it's yours, now let's move forward.

zb

jerk

"don't get you nowhere, don't make you a man."
--John Lennon

Is forty-three too old to be pulling yourself off in the shower? Married twenty-one years. She is asleep just a few feet away. We literally haven't touched in three, maybe four years. There was a time when I used to keep track -- two months since we had had sex, and so on. Then one day I knew there was nothing to keep track of, because it wasn't a matter of when she might yield again. I would not ask. I no longer wanted her, or at least I no longer wanted to be dependent on her sexually. Years of bitter, brutal verbal attack against my supposed shortcomings had finally worn me down. I had decided, or rationalized, that she had broken the commitment of mutual respect, and I would not have her. If she ever initiated.

So here I am in the shower, hot water pouring down my neck, lathering it with soap, pulling at it, trying to work up an erection. When I was seventeen, if I simply closed my eyes and imagined the curve of a girl's breast, the upper reach of her thigh, the penis would immediately spring up, nodding, searching. If she were here in the shower with me now, it would probably be the same, though I have determined to refuse her if she ever asks. The male is helpless. But the penis is slow to respond to this mechanical, deliberate approach.

I have put a fair amount of study into this business over the years. Fingers wrapped loosely, tightly, fingers open, left hand, right hand, both, the hand turned around with the fingers away, sitting, standing, kneeling, crouching, on one knee, with one foot braced against the wall, fingers of the other hand stroking the pubic bone, the anus. Flexing the knees so the thighs remain loose and the tremble arrives more slowly. In the end, there is only the twitch and the spill and the shrinking. The semen washes down the shower drain.

When I used to put all of my energy into helping her reach orgasm, fingers and tongue, with my penis searching but not finding, I learned to take my pleasure in the intensity of being on the verge. Ejaculation was irrelevant. Often (if she did not fall asleep), she would insist on taking me inside after her orgasm had subsided and she could tolerate touch again, but the twitch and the spill were always an anticlimax (no pun intended) after an hour or two on the edge. Sometimes I would masturbate beforehand, telling myself that the delay not just in achieving a second erection but in building to a second ejaculation would enable me to include insertion (if she wanted it) in the work on her orgasm without running the risk of my coming too early. What would actually happen is that I would lose that intensity of focus that precedes ejaculation, and I was less able to concentrate on building her orgasm.

There is more to the male orgasm than ejaculation. There is delay, and building up, and holding back -- trying to resist the helpless tremble and spill -- and there is variety in stimulation that a vagina alone cannot offer. I suspect that very few males over the age of about seventeen (when petting often edges up to, but then pulls back from ejaculation), certainly very few married men, frequently experience an intense orgasm.

When it used to matter, I used to think that masturbation was an act of infidelity toward her. I have no difficulty living within very definite rules that I set for myself. I stopped smoking at her request more than fifteen years ago. Cold. Five years ago, when I got drunk at a party within a few days after losing my job, and our kids saw me throwing up and stumbling and basically acting like an idiot, I quit alcohol altogether. I had never been a frequent drinker, simply an abuser on the occasions -- once or twice a year -- that I did drink. In the same way, I have never entertained any serious thoughts about having sexual contact with another woman since we have been married. I have put the matter off limits and therefore it is not a problem.

But I have made no rules for myself concerning masturbation. It is not like when I was a teenager, jerking off two or three times a day. This is maybe once or twice a month (like sex used to be). And despite all the techniques I have worked on, it is usually jerk, spill, and shrink, sometimes while I am shaving with the other hand.

Actually, it *is* an act of infidelity. The time I spend masturbating (or thinking about masturbation) is time I have not spent anticipating her needs or the kids' needs or planning somehow to put more bread on the table. But then I think, I am not a very, very bad person. I step and fetch for her all the goddamn time. And still she shrieks at me if I put the wrong load in the washer or forget to start the frozen lasagna. Calls me horrible, horrible names. Accuses me of stealing her life from her, getting her pregnant on purpose (seventeen years ago) so she could not go to graduate school, keeping her from having enough money to have any of the things she wants. As if I had any of the things I want. What is there to be faithful to.

I am telling myself that what I need is a good hand job. The vagina is certainly better than my own hand, but it does not give enough attention to detail. The ridge below the glans, the scar tissue from the circumcision. And the mouth can be too intense, not that anyone is offering. What I need is someone else using her fingers on my penis. In my limited imagination someone much smaller than the woman sleeping nearby, a short, dark-haired woman of maybe twenty-five with very slight breasts, is pulling me off with slender, bony fingers, our mouths pressed together, my fingers playing in the wet hair and lips of her tight, fresh vagina. Not yet, not yet.

But the problem with doing it yourself is that there is no disconnect between the central nervous system that is driving the hand and the one that is responding through the penis. The penis already knows what the hand is doing. Delay and holding back are not the same when it is your own hand.

And the shower is running and you have finished shaving and it is time to just spill and get it over with.

just checking

I want you to imagine that someone is handing you a check. And this check represents compensation for, quote unquote, work you have done over the past two weeks. Work you might not particularly enjoy. Compensation for the eighty or ninety or a hundred hours that you might otherwise have spent . . . reading the great American novel, whatever that might be, or trying to write it -- or, if your taste runs in a different direction, reading about the systematic dismantling of the social welfare state, such as it has existed in rudimentary fragments in this country for sixty or so years, or organizing an effort to oppose this. Time you might otherwise have spent listening to music, or playing it, cultivating your friendships, preparing and eating organic, whole foods. Eating out your girlfriend.

And now I want you to imagine that before you even deposit this check in your bank account, you already know where every nickel of it is going, that the bills are already coming due, that you have already written some of the checks, that you are playing the float. Sure, a lot of it is lifestyle stuff -- the cable bill, the minimum payment on the credit card purchase of Ikea furniture -- but still, you are living, as they say, paycheck to paycheck. And losing ground.

Eighteen or twenty percent interest on the credit cards, the occasional late payment fee. Sometimes you play the float and lose, and end up paying the bank twenty-five dollars on a bounced check.

Or to take it a step further, imagine that the bills that are coming due are not what most of us usually think of as "lifestyle stuff," but rent, groceries, electricity and water bills, keeping the phone in the wall. Liability coverage -- not casualty, just liability -- on the car, because you can't quite give up the car just yet.

Or imagine that you have played the float one too many times and you can no longer maintain a checking account -- that you have to take the paycheck to your employer's bank and maybe pay a fee for turning it into cash. That you have to buy a cashier's check or a money order to pay the rent. That you have to pay the electricity bill by hand. The car is gone, and you are dependent on public transportation.

A lot of people live like this. Maybe some people in this room, certainly some people on the street just outside that window.

And now I want you to imagine that you have somehow gotten past this, that you have found work you actually enjoy doing that pays just enough to cover the rent and the groceries, the occasional bicycle repair, and that allows you time to read and write, to listen to music, to be with your friends.

Imagine there's no heaven.