From my notebook. I found an old Japanese woodblock print concerning childbirth, which I found fascinating since it is difficult for me to find any reference to midwifery or the ritual of giving birth from ages gone by.
One of the functions Syssk performs is that of court musician and there are several cards in this deck (5 of Cups, Dynamo of Wands) where her song illustrates the lessons that the Tarot is trying to teach. Syssk identifies as female, though no one else on Earth might agree. This is her struggle while marooned on this tiny rock, so much of humanity’s sense of self is based on biological reductionism that it makes anyone trying to redefine their own boundaries as revolutionary.
The revolution will not be televised, we are told. Nor will it be gendered.
Notes on Notes:
It’s been pointed out to me that my hand-writing is barely readable so here are what the notes say:
Syssk can sing?
There was something formlessly fashioned, that existed before heaven and earth; without sound, without substance, dependent on nothing, unchanging, all-pervading, unfailing. One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven. [Tao Te Ching]
It is quite true that there are no limits to masculine egotism in ordinary life. In order to change the conditions of life we must learn to see through the eye’s of a woman. [Leon Trotsky]
You never get nothing by bein’ an angel child. You’d better change your ways and get real wild. I’m gonna tell you something, I wouldn’t tell you a lie, Wild women are the only kind that really get by ‘Cause wild women don’t worry, wild women don’t have the blues. [Ida Cox]
We are the stars that sing. We sing with our light. We are the birds born from fire. We fly over the heavens. Our light. Our voice. We cut a road for the soul for its journey through Death. For the three of us are hunters. For we face the hills with disdain. [Passamquoddy]
Life on the planet is born of woman. [Adrienne Rich]
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing. [Rainer Maria Rilke]
In the great night my heart will go out; while toward me the darkness comes rattling. In the great night my heart will go out. [Juana Manwell]
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. ~ Douglas Adams
All stories must start somewhere.
In your grandmother’s Tarot deck the Fool is the ultimate free spirit, that proto-Flower Child who is the embodiment of beginnings, innocence and spontaneity. It is the first and last card since Zero is liminal, being both everything and nothing. We like to remind ourselves that, “We are stardust, we are golden/ We are billion-year-old carbon.” All this is true, and yet the gendered essentialism found in so much of that Tarot deck will only take us so far. Perhaps to the cliff for you, but certainly not over it for me. For that we need to find something else. As Nancy Baker puts it:
There’s a strong streak of anti-essentialism in Feminism, just as there is in Buddhism. It is the understanding that something like gender is not fixed or absolute, that not all women or men have some masculine or feminine essence that defines them. To put it in Buddhist terms, gender has no “self-nature.”
Western Pop Culture likes to claim that Buddhism is logical, agnostic and liberal in matters of gender and sexuality, conveniently overlooking all the misogynist views that the Buddha himself had about women, “of all the scents that can enslave a man none is more lethal than that of a woman.” For those of us who refuse or attempt to transcend such man-made concepts this critique is important because what we are searching for is liberation. There is nothing “enlightened” in any social structure that clings to ideas of rigid sexual morality and assigns half the world a secondary role simply by existing.
“Do not go where the path may lead,” Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us, “go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
How Syssk found herself marooned in ancient Japan, surrounded by folks who consider her unenlightened simply by existing is unimportant. The question isn’t whether she is capable of spiritual growth, we are all capable of that, the question is what are the forces attempting to block her and you from that growth? Discard everything that gets in your way and The Way (The Tao) opens before you.
This is Syssk’s path and so it will be ours as well.
[an earlier version of the fool; the design of the xenomorph was much closer to h.r. giger’s original vision, though the blue figure was taken directly from robbie morrison’s shakara (2012) … always cite the sources that you purloin]
NOTES ON NOTES:
I have been told that my handwriting is almost illegible, so I will reproduce my notes here:
Sibylline Xenomorphia
In almost all the riddle-like koan the striking characteristic is the illogical or absurd act or word. A monk once asked, “What is Buddha?” The master replied, “Three pounds of flax.” Or a Zen master remarked, “When both hands are clapped a sound is produced; listen to the sound of one hand.” ~ Heinrich Dumoulin
I alone seem to have lost everything. Mine is indeed the mind of a very idiot. So dull am I. The world is full of people that shine; I alone am dark. ~ Tao Te Ching
Chaos is the Formless Void but the Void is not Chaotic.
My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. ~ Fernando Pessoa
Giving birth to nothingness/ Giving birth to death/ Such terrible words/ I heard on the border/ Between dream and reality ~ Yosano Akiko
because I don’t have spit/ because I don’t have rubbish/ because I don’t have dust/ because I don’t have that which is in air/ because I am air/ let me try you with my magic power ~ Anne Waldman
“Chaos that/ takes I from/ I” ~ Note written for the Fool.
I’ve been trying to keep a notebook in English regarding what Syssk’s tarot cards mean. In the Rider-Waite deck the Magician is the conduit between Heaven and Earth. Here, though, there is no Heaven or Earth, only the formless Void, only Chaos personified. This is what fascinates me. The Tao Te Ching states:
There was something formlessly fashioned, that existed before Heaven and Earth; without sound, without substance, dependent on nothing, unchanging, all-pervading, unfailing. One may think of it as the Mother of all Things Under Heaven.
That “ something formlessly fashioned.” That is the conduit that I’m looking for. Neither masculine nor feminine, neither black nor white, neither solid nor liquid: Chaos, the primal substance that holds the universe together. As a result I must discard any philosophy that can only function on planet Earth for being too limiting. Humans tend to be oppressively myopic when it comes to their desires. As the Chinese feminist and revolutionary, Qiu Jin, put it, “Now that things have gotten so dangerous,/ please change your girl’s garments for a Wu sword.”
That is the teacher. Discard your “I” ~ Chaos awaits.
Notes on Notes:
It’s been pointed out to me that my hand-writing is barely readable so here are what the notes say:
Don’t tell me women are not the stuff of heroes, I alone rode over the East Sea’s winds for ten thousand leagues. My poetic thoughts ever expand, like a sail between ocean and heaven. I dreamed of your three islands, all gems, all dazzling with moonlight. I grieve to think of the bronze camels, guardians of China, lost in thorns. Ashamed, I have done nothing; not one victory to my name. I simply make my war horse sweat. Grieving over my native land hurts my heart. So tell me; how can I spend these days here? A guest enjoying your spring winds? [Qiu Jin]
Je est une autre. I is another. [Rimbaud]
I from I
Thus to name it is to raise stones, to wound the bark with stones, to batter it with stones, the stones to cut the bark, to fester in the bark.
In everything natural there is something mysterious. [Aristotle]
Qiu Jin’s carved seal: Read books/ Practice sword.
Earlier design for the Magician, from a science fiction themed tarot based on astronauts and aliens.
Tarot deck based on the fine art of, “Sibylline Xenomorphia;” featuring Syssk, an Alien marooned in Japan’s Warring States era; mapping out her attempts to pass in the bewildering and often contrary world of strife, chaos and fabulous kimonos.
A free guide book written in Armenian and Galactic Basic (Syssk’s native tongue) for the deck, translated by Lilit “Baba” Yagian, can be found here at my favorite Internet lending library:
A translation in English is in the works. The colorized editions (at this point just curiosities) date back to earlier versions of the deck which were never published.
We live in a golden age of Tarot; there are more decks and books about Tarot in circulation than ever before. Much like the allure of paper books over PDF files, we humans love our tactile experiences and it’s hard to imagine what sort of future technology might one day replace good ol’ fashion laminated playing cards.
The only thing I am certain of is that trying to do a spread in Zero-G will bring with it new sets of challenges. I can only speak for myself but these are the sorts of problems that I rarely lose any sleep over … rarely.
Whatever the future of Tarot holds, it will be fabulous.
memories of my ghost sista 