I bet there are people who celebrate their birthdays at Denny's

Was up all night reading Isabel de Madariaga's Catherine the Great, and so after writing a short paper about it, sitting through lecture, and turning it in, I headed home for a brief nap.

I dreamed that I was watching some Romney campaign event with a few fellow distilled spirits. Romney was being introduced by Pawlenty. One of the spirits, who is from Minnesota, noted that Governor Pawlenty looked happy, at which point I said that I hoped it wasn't some death rattle euphoria where the tight smile and bright eyes masked frenzied synaptic explosions bursting like so many atomic fourth of July sparklers in that spam loving cerebrum of his at the culmination of which he'd drag a bunch of hookers to a Denny's in a wild Cagean mania and do lines of coke off some kid's birthday pancake.

At this point in the dream I had a sort of seizure, and woke up.

I do hope, incidentally, that that doesn't happen.

In which I get along splendidly with an Anglican

I was in some fancy restaurant, looking for a table where I could sit down and drink undisturbed. I found a largely empty room and made to sit down, only to find a handsome young man next to me, who was much confused by my attempting to sit next to him. He, I realized later in the dream, was Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, &c &c, but I for some reason didn't realize it at the time, and so he and I entered into a pleasant enough conversation about why it wasn't entirely suitable for me to sit at that particular table at that particular time. I consented, still not realizing who he was, and moved on to some other room.

Here my memory gets hazy, but eventually I find myself drinking socially with the Prince, apparently not terribly long before his wedding-- he had taken a liking to me because I was so thoroughly unpretentious during our first meeting, of course (my brain, unfortunately, does not always avoid stupid tropes in its dream fabrication). We got on very well and he was even flirtatious-- by this time I knew who he was, but was nevertheless more impressed with myself for capturing charming male attention than for capturing royal male attention. There was a point where he had to dismiss me, but asked me what I'd like to drink, as he was willing to order and pay for me before I left, and I remember wanting vodka but thinking it better to order champagne, and so I did.

The dream breaks up here a bit-- at some point, for some reason I was trying to pay for a haircut, I believe? At least the place where I was trying to pay looked an awful lot like a hair salon, but the man at the register kept telling me my card was rejected. I remember little after that.

This was a particularly bizarre dream because while I am something of a crypto-monarchist, the English monarchy has never much preoccupied me, much less Prince William-- if I had to pick favorites, it would certainly be Harry. And yet in the haze after waking I noted with the smallest tinge of regret that William was married.

Last night

I dreamed that I was reading an editorial written by Joel Osteen about the Rapture wherein he criticized Harold Camping and the Orthodox Church (except that he didn't refer to it that way, he just called them Macedonians and Serbians) by heavily referencing some obscure writings of Saint Gregory Nazianzen, saying that the Eastern Europeans routinely misread this one passage. I woke up planning to share the editorial with some friends because I was surprised that Mr Osteen had such a strong theological background, and then I was sad, because that editorial clearly does not exist.

I don't remember the point of theological controversy in the dream, but I'm taking this as an opportunity to read up on apokatastasis (even though upon reflection a pnematological dispute might make more sense, insofar as anything could in that dream universe-- especially since we remember the Second Ecumenical Council today). Truly fascinating stuff, I'll try to elaborate more later.

I'm more of a Sviatoslav girl

I was me, which isn't always the case in my dreams. I was also the age that I am now, but I had children-- two, I think both boys. One was I think supposed to be around six or so, and looked a lot like my youngest brother, and he may in fact not have been mine, but the infant was mine, a very young infant. Somehow, and I think his name was Nicholas (which is a name I would probably never give any of my sons), he got lost. I remember running screaming downstairs as soon as we realized he was lost and getting into an argument with an incredibly stereotypical 1940s American Irish drunkard, bloated red face and newsy cap and all, who was either the father, or the father's father (either way I think he was mad that I had a child at all)-- he was chasing me and wanted to beat me and I beat him away with a large tree branch while screaming, bellowing, "our children come first." I ran everywhere looking and eventually exhausted myself and passed out. In the dream I woke up sick to my stomach, but the first thing my mother did when she saw me was yell at me for not being dressed, as she wanted to go out to lunch. I was shocked that she could possibly expect that of me when my son was missing, but it turned out they'd found him while I passed out and not found it necessary to tell me. I remember wandering into my father's bedroom, where my son was asleep on the bed next to my father, and the relief and joy was so overpowering that I woke up, and in the strange moment between the end of the dream and opening my eyes I was actually determined to grab my cellphone and call one of my closest friends and tell her my son had been found, already picking which Russian diminutive of Nicholas I wanted to use, everything was okay, it felt so real.

Yes, my subconscious bred Tony Bourdain and Michael Tanner, deal with it

Last night, I had a dream that I was in some kind of 24 hour McDonald's, where a man I didn't know approached me and told me, unprompted, that my blog reminded him of a) the writings of some famous Catholic mystic zookeeper (completely invented by my brain) and b) First Things.

I told him that I was flattered (I was).

The (again, nonexistent) Catholic mystic zookeeper theologian looked kind of like the handsome version of the bastard child of Tony Bourdain and Michael Tanner.

Also: all Catholics have facial hair in my dreams, apparently.

This is what I get for drinking so much at last night's debate on R: Philosophy is Preparation for Death.

Lady Gaga meets the Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

With a good bit of Eddie Izzard's Mr Kite (Across the Universe) thrown in, and heaven knows what else. Whether you watch House or not, watch this:

I am very impressed. Hugh Laurie is, of course, a wonder. Really loving the fingerless gloves and gaudy rings, but then, I would.

Hermeneutics's just another word for nothing left to lose (tarot ramblings)

In response to my post about the tarot and dream interpretation, a friend writes:

"If a Catholic refuses to supply his friend with a gun for use in a murder, it's because murder is wrong, not because he's superstitious about guns. The Tarot is, worst-case scenario, a means to divination; it's prohibited, if at all, on that ground.

The Catechism is unequivocal in condemning 'all forms of divination', defined as 'recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead, or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future.' (2115) Clearly the Tarot, as you describe it, does not involve 'recourse to Satan or demons' or 'conjuring up the dead,' so the question becomes (isn't law great, by the way?) whether it's a 'practice' that is 'supposed to "unveil" the future.'

(We may take it as given that the future cannot be unveiled, so the word 'falsely' functions here only to remind the reader of that fact. The Catechism does not, I'm pretty sure, contemplate a 'truth defense' for any means of divination.)

Your claim, I think, is that 'unveiling the future' is NOT what Tarot does; rather, that it uses symbols deeply rooted in the natural human psyche to initiate a conversation about the 'querent's' (?) present, and perhaps past. I'm not taking a position on whether that claim takes the Tarot, properly practiced, out of the Catechism's condemnation; just trying to make sure I understand your claim."

The Catholic Catechism on "Divination and Magic" (emphases mine):

"2115 God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it. Improvidence, however, can constitute a lack of responsibility.

2116 All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.

2117 All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity."

Disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been, a Catholic. Proceed with caution.

I'll start by explaining my understanding and appropriation of tarot, with another disclaimer that I am not at all involved in any broader community of readers, that what follows is based solely on my experience and fairly limited reading and research, and is in no way necessarily representative of any dominant "tarot theory" (for better or for worse). 

SO: my friend is absolutely correct to say that, under my tarot theory at least, a reading is much more about understanding the past and present than about attempting to "unveil" the future. Granted, there is a very wide variety of spreads, and nearly all of them include at least one position whose card is supposed to indicate something about the future-- the tarot book I've always relied upon most heavily uses the phrase "probable outcome"; I tend to say "possible outcome" when doing readings myself. No self-respecting reader (if you can accept that such a person exists) will use language stronger than that.

It is important to understand what cards in these...'forward-looking' positions actually signify (or are supposed to signify). The tarot is misrepresented in a variety of ways in pop culture, but one of the lies about its "power" is that it is supposed to predict very specific actions and/or circumstances. It does no such thing, and no reader will tell you it does. Even if I'm doing a ten-card Celtic cross spread with an honestly chosen significator, the tenth position ('likely outcome') will never tell me that you're going to meet a tall handsome foreigner in a bookstore on the Sabbath-- just like the third position ('roots of the problem') will never tell me that your father drank too much because he was a closeted homosexual scarred by his experiences in the Second World War.

The cards have survived this long ('occult tarot' first appeared in the 18th century) precisely because they represent aspects of man and his relationships that transcend particular historical contexts.

To illustrate this I'll explain one of my favorite cards, the Two of Swords.

"Prague" version
(the deck I own and use)

Rider-Waite version
(traditional)

Each card in the tarot is composed of many different layers, and its significance for the querent emerges only when one both sees the layers for what they are, and the shapes and shades they combine to create.

The Two of Swords, for example, is in the minor arcana, which means it signifies less portentous things than a card in the major arcana (the cards with names). The minor arcana is constructed just like a typical deck of cards, with four suits that run from Ace to King. That this card is of low rank reinforces the smallness of the situation it represents. The number  itself (2) signifies paradox, balance, partnership, opposition. It is a Sword; its element is therefore Air. Swords deal with rationality, intellect, the pursuit of knowledge, and the attendant emotional coldness, distance, and insensitivity. The Sword's dedication to the pursuit of truth and confidence in the primacy of the solitary intellect becomes cruel if untempered by the sensitivity of Cups, fanatical, reckless, and stubborn if unchecked by the pragmatism of Pentacles, and chimeric, feckless, and eventually incommunicable if not fueled by the dynamism of Wands (pretty much everyone in the PB is very, very Sword-- at least while they're in college).

So how does any of that help me understand the significance of a blindfolded woman on a riverbank? Should I ask Bobby to the Prom or not?!

To begin with, note how the card's imagery reinforces what we already know: the woman is alone (the Swords' fierce independence). She is female, but her feminine traits (intuition, sentimentality, mysticism, empathy) are undermined by her clear separation from, and seemingly willful ignorance of, the river behind her. The river signifies those traits not only because fluidity seems to recall them in our minds, but because Water is the element of Cups.

Swords are Vulcans, Cups are Betazoids.
(No, I cannot take credit for this work of art.)

She is simultaneously at war with herself (the duplicity implied by the number 2) and the outside world. There are no visible threats, and so she seems excessively antagonistic (Sword)-- in the Prague card especially her stance seems more one of defiance than of defense. 

Is she compensating for her blindness? For that she can blame only herself-- her hands are not bound, and she could remove the blindfold easily if she'd put down the damn swords. Her blindness again highlights her fundamental imbalance: vision, like all the senses, is part of the physicality central to Cups, which signify primacy of the felt over the known; the importance of the unrationalized, unanalyzed, and unexplained. But the Sword, in its stubborn gnosticism, has no desire to see, and rejects the possibility of gentle interaction (and with it the possibility of emotional pain/vulnerability more broadly),  in favor of isolation and impenetrability (not to beat you over the head with the gender theme or anything).

WHEW! So, back to this divination business. Now that we have a basic idea of what the Two of Swords carries within it, what does it mean if it turns up in the "outcome" position in, say, a very basic five card spread? That depends somewhat on the other four cards, but much more than that it depends on the querent himself. 

The "potential/probable outcome" position is always about self-knowledge and never about the immutability of fate. Think about it: the entire tarot, as I've described it, is nothing but a tool to help us tell stories about ourselves. If a card here or there makes it to the end of the reading neither shaped by nor shaping the narrative, the whole thing's pretty useless, isn't it? 

At this point I'm gonna let you in on some of my ground rules.

1. No readings for complete strangers.
2. Really try to avoid readings for "acquaintances".
3. The querent has to want the reading.
4. The querent must be seeking guidance/direction, not a clear answer to some binary.
5. The querent should not tell me their query.
6. If the querent absolutely must tell me their query (and sometimes they do, you'd be surprised), make them wait until the reading is completely over.

These rules have evolved organically over the years, but I think they're essential now, and here's why: they maintain an appropriate distance between querent and reader-- not too far, but not too close. 

As we saw earlier, tarot cards are incredibly gravid and complex, and very often bring to the surface equally deep and complicated problems. I've inadvertently driven more than one querent to tears over the course of a reading and that's not because the cards are demonic-- it's because the symbolism is well-crafted and powerful, and it's incredibly unnerving to see our neuroses, weaknesses, vanities, and fears stare up at us blankly from a card table at a cocktail party. 

Tarot readings are, when you get right down to it, like group therapy sessions-- with thousands of people, spanning hundreds of years. We on the right so often bemoan the death of tradition-- here's one for you boys, neatly stacked and tied with a gold ribbon. The tarot represents, no, embodies, accumulated knowledge of human nature, personal relationships, and political and entrepreneurial ambition-- all we need do is lay out the cards and look. 

Which brings me back to my imaginary querent, who was unfortunate enough to find the Two of Swords, er, not-staring right at him at the end of the spread. To unlock the key to his future (ooooo),  the reader must figure out the querent's relationship with Swords. Is he himself more like a Sword or a Cup? Is the card a warning or an encouragement? Does the story of the previous four cards make sense if this is the conclusion? How does the querent seem to feel about this as a conclusion to their story?

There are, when it comes down to it, two options: either the final card flows with the rest of the story, or it doesn't. If it does, but the outcome seems undesirable, examining its relationship to the rest of the spread and figuring out how the querent feels about those certain repeated elements is nothing more than a useful psychological exercise.

For example, if we have the Six of Swords in the second position ('the present') and the Two of Swords in the fifth position ('potential outcome'), it's clear that the querent runs the risk of emerging from the difficult transition period indicated in the Six not with strength and quiet dignity, but damaged, defensive, and afraid. If the querent already sees something of the Six in his situation, then the Two is a very appropriate warning, and again, not because of divination, but because of the elegance with which the tarot lays out human psychology. The same applies for a desirable outcome in a spread that fully coheres.

However, if the final card makes no sense whatsoever, no matter what aspect of it is emphasized or how its message is spun... the querent still learns something about himself, noting his own confusion at the incongruity.

Let's say you have a really Pentacle heavy spread, all about money, business, duty, craftsmanship, etc, but the last card-- the "probable outcome"-- was the Hanged Man, who typically signifies suspension-- both of thought and of action. He may be Limbo, or Nirvana, or even just a sabbatical, but he's definitely alien to everything else in the spread-- the past, the present, the warning and the suggestion are all firmly rooted, down-to-earth, and devoid of the faintest hint of spirituality. So ought the hypothetical querent faced with this reading tremble and be fearful, worrying every moment that his life will be completely upended?

No! He should decide whether he wants to embrace what the Hanged Man signifies. Ideally the rest of the reading will help him evaluate the proper place of the Hanged Man in his life. 

Dreams, how do they work?

So anyone who knows me knows I walk a bizarre line between reviling and embracing gypsy culture-- I think this stems partly from the "but they're my enemies!" phenomenon (I'm reminded of when I saw Yale's production of Assassins with a fellow Russophile-- one of the protagonists was Polish, and we both found ourselves liking him though had it been a musical about Russians [perish the thought] he certainly would have left a bad taste in our mouths) and partly because (and this will get me into hot water!) there is frankly quite a bit of overlap between the peasant Slavs from whom I'm descended and the gypsies about whom my grandmother so energetically rants.

I bring this up to address one of my stronger superstitions: that dreams are of immense import. "Tristyn drunkenly recounts a dream" is a genre with which many of my friends will be familiar; "Friend X tells Tristyn she's being ridiculous for worrying about a dream" is certainly one I've encountered plenty of times. Apropos of a particularly unsettling dream I had last week, I thought I'd take this opportunity to explain why Serious Dream Consideration is not as ridiculous as it seems.

To make this easier, I'll briefly recount the dream: I was in my parents' living room, very ill and on the verge of death-- it was understood but unsaid that I was expected to die within hours, though no one knew exactly when. The only people there were my mother and a small group of friends from college. I was frantically running about, trying to figure out how I wanted to spend my last hours and what I wanted the last things I said to be. My mother was very anxious that I calm down and lay down in a very comfortable chair they'd prepared for me-- it was again understood but unsaid that once I lay down, I would not wake. All the friends that were there were from the "Pythagorean Brotherhood" and I finally, inexplicably requested that we sing our anthem, much to the consternation of my mother, who in addition to not being fond of said organization, did not think this an appropriate way to "adjourn" (forgive the pun) my life. None of my other family members or friends were there, and in fact the friends present were ciphers--- in the dream I knew them to be members of the brotherhood, but none of them had faces recognizable to me. I remember quieting everyone down to give my final soliloquy, and at that point the dream dissolves into nothingness.

I took this dream as a Very Bad Sign. Why? Not simply because it was about my death-- as in tarot, death in dreams does not always, and in fact rarely, augurs imminent demise. I took it as a Very Bad Sign because nowhere in the dream was there any religious imagery, and in fact in the dream I thought nothing about the Church, God, the hereafter-- any of it. As soon as I woke up and began to process it this stuck out to me immediately and left me profoundly unsettled. Why?

Dreams are in many ways like the tarot: they do not necessarily act as a medium through which the Divine (or the Satanic) can work, but they definitely can function as windows to better understanding ourselves. When explaining the tarot to superstitious Catholics I explain that the cards themselves have no power, nor by doing readings am I invoking some unholy force, but that simply through the construction of narrative and the reading of symbol the reader and the querent together open a window into the querent's own mind-- the absurdity and distance of it allows us to examine ourselves in a new light-- man is very adept at interpreting things such that they make sense to him, and so we are able to map the symbols of the tarot onto our own lives and use them to help us think through our problems in novel ways.

Dreams are much the same. There is the simple fact, first of all, that the majority of the time dreams reflect what we spend most of our waking time thinking about. Now we get to why my dream bothered me so much: even in the moments before I would face my Creator, I thought nothing of Him, my sinfulness, my unrepentence. This unsettled me because I knew its message to be true: I spend all of my time indulging vanity, pettiness, vindictiveness, self-pity-- and none of it, no matter how many Christian blogs I read, strengthening my relationship with God.

Had I been good enough to ask myself whether my spiritual state was healthy, I would have known the answer-- but I didn't, and we are all of us very, very good at letting such questions sit in the recesses of our minds wholly ignored.

There is some part of us, however, that ignores the superficially self-preserving biases of our fully conscious selves, and that gives voice to the long ignored questions that sit quietly smoldering so long.

The tarot is one way of seeing them, and dreams another.

I think the long tradition of dream interpretation among superstitious folks of all stripes is an example of what I'll dub "unearned knowledge"-- things that are valuable, good, true, that were such long before they were vetted by science or philosophy. The old German saying alluding to symptoms of cystic fibrosis I mentioned last week is another such example. Tradition and culture bear more than we know-- that's essentially the point! This isn't to suggest that the hard sciences are simply rediscovering already known truths, although sometimes they do, but simply that we be humble in evaluating "absurd" cultural practices, and that we be truly liberal in our open-mindedness, and truly open in our scientific curiosity.

A dream

Actually dreamed that I was some kind of Slavic mystic healer last night.

I was a middle aged peasant in peasant homes, and an older bearded man (not yet greying) was taking me from house to house, and would gather a group of people around the sick one's bed, and was very adamant that I stand at the front of the bed, behind the sick person, but for some reason I would only ever stand at their feet. The dream was mostly in Russian, and even though I, in the dream, was one of them, I was still plagued by my lack of fluency, which only added to the confusion I felt at what everyone was demanding of me. I didn't understand why they thought I could be looked to to do this.

Like all dreams I have of an even vaguely spiritual bent, I woke up in horror and tried to erase it from my memory. I looked around my room and felt the panicked anxiety I knew so well as a child afraid of the dark, worried, convinced, that my fear would summon forth something terrible.

I successfully freed myself from the memory all day, until this passage in The Icon and the Axe reached something in my subconscious and brought it flooding back:

"A Russian colony had assembled there around Zinaida Volkonsky. She had brought with her a rich art collection and memories of her intimate relationship with Alexander I and the poet Venevitinov. She seems to have viewed herself as a kind of Russian Joan of Arc--having written, and sung the title role in, an opera of that name. It was in Rome, in the shadow of the Volkonsky villa, that Gogol and Ivanov were to create their greatest masterpieces."

I do not like that my life is a postmodern novel.

Well when I woke up tonight I said I...

Tonight I woke up, assuming I was in Petersburg, and in my head, made plans to visit the graves of the Romanovs. I gained some small degree of consciousness, recognized the music I was listening to, and assumed I was in DC, and so made plans to visit the Hillwood Estate. Finally I opened my eyes, realized it was 10pm on Long Island, had a drink, wrote this, and am now going back to sleep.

Life is farce, my friends. Farce.