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memories of my ghost sista

~ the dead are never satisfied

memories of my ghost sista

Tag Archives: the fool

THE FOOL [0] Soul of the Stukhtra

05 Thursday Jan 2023

Posted by babylon crashing in Feminism, Illustration and art, Tarot

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quote unquote, Syssk, Tarot of Syssk, the fool

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

The Fool

29 Monday Aug 2022

Posted by babylon crashing in Illustration and art, tarot

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Syssk, Tarot, Tarot of Syssk, the fool

the tiburon tarot: the fool

03 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by babylon crashing in Illustration and art, tarot

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art, on the road to find out, shark, spirit guide, taking the first step, Tarot, the fool, the sea, tiburón

tiburon tarot the fool

THE FOOL:

I have been working on an ocean-based Tarot deck for a while (at first I was calling it “La Mer,” an older French term for the ocean, until a friend pointed out calling your deck “Lamer” might not work out so well). The first card in the deck is The Fool, which represents taking the first step in the path you are following. The Rider-Waite deck shows a young man, his head in the air, walking toward the brink of a cliff, while a small dog barks to get his attention to what is about to happen.

In this version, a woman takes her first step into the sea with her spirit guide, in this case a spirit shark, glides silently by her side. The kelp part as they pass through, since once you know the language of the sea it will do anything for you. Because she is new to all this she must keep her head out of the water in order to breath; until she can master her fear of the unknown and begin swimming she will not be able to go very far, which is true with all of us when encountering something as vast and supernatural as the ocean for the first time.

um tarot suja: the fool

22 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by babylon crashing in Erotic, Illustration and art, tarot

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cat spirit, fox spirit, spirit guide, Tarot, the fool, um tarot suja, universe

Um Tarot Suja: Fool [final draft]

Um Tarot Suja: Fool [final draft]

Um Tarot Suja: Fool [rough draft #1]

Um Tarot Suja: Fool [rough draft #1]

Um Tarot Suja: Fool [rough draft #2]

Um Tarot Suja: Fool [rough draft #2]

I had been working on a tarot deck a couple of years ago, Um Tarot Suja, a sex magic deck (or at least that was the idea going into the project). I wanted to stay relatively faithful to the Rider-Waite deck. So, as they say in The Sound of Music, we’ll start at the beginning.

It helps me, at least, to think of the tarot as a narration of a spiritual journey, each card progressing down the path, as it were. The first card, The Fool, has a care-free youth starting out with his/her head in the sky, not paying attention to the abyss at they are about to plunge into. At their feet is a small animal (usually a yapping dog) which tries to get the Fool’s attention. We’ve all been there, starting out on a project full of excitement and idealism, having no idea what is in store for us.

My first two attempts (the bottom two cards) had the Fool stepping out into the (literal) darkness of the unknown. There isn’t a cliff, just the nothingness of the unknown, stepping into a blackness that has no form or shape. In the two cards both women have their hands stretched out to their spirit guides, a cat and a fox (what can I say? I like cats and foxes) and while technically either card to constitute as a Fool, neither really satisfied.

The final draft has the Fool transported to a unpleasant, godforsaken alien landscape (Utah) and the abyss, the start of our journey, is a stairway to (wait for it) the heavens. The Fool must take her first step up the stairs and into the unknown, accompanied by her guide, but once she does she can go anywhere in the universe she wishes, both literally and metaphorically.

um tarot suja — the fool

12 Tuesday Jul 2011

Posted by babylon crashing in Erotic, Illustration and art, tarot

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art, erotic, Tarot, the fool

July 12, 2011 [1]

Over the years I’ve used two different decks when it comes to Tarot — Milo Manara’s and The Cosmic Tribe. What I present here are some rough drafts of different card in the Major Arcana I’ve been thinking about. Sometimes when I’m designing cards I can see the entire deck’s theme in my head and then it’s just a matter of trying to find the right images that’ll work with each card.

This isn’t one of those times. But that’s fine too, since it means I can make it up as I go along. We’ll see what happens. It’s always good, as T.S. Eliot reminds us, to play with a wicked pack of cards.

For the most part I’ll be using the concepts of Tarot laid down in the standard Rider-Waite deck, mainly because more people seem familiar with it, and I find its ideas straight-forward and easy to adapt to what I am working on. The Fool (card 0) in the Tarot usually depicts a youth setting off on the first step of his or her journey. In the beginning we are all fools, open to anything, ready to believe in the most heretical of ideas. We will need this openness if we are to find what we are looking for. As the ancient Chinese saying goes, “a 1000 mile journey begins with the first step.” And so shall we. Buddha’s dying words to his followers were, “walk on!” And so shall we as well.

The Fool carries all her worldly possessions on a stick, thrown over her shoulder, happily looking up into the air and oblivious of the cliff she is about to step off into. Call it a leap of faith, call it falling into the unknown, but if we are willing to take our first step in attempting anything then we will need to step away from all of that which brings us comfort and complacency, so that we might confront whatever it is we are looking for. At the Fool’s feet a little white dog is barking, trying to get her to look where she is going.

While in the Rider-Waite deck the Fool is literally about to plunge off the side of a cliff, there are other less literal ways of representing that. The world of Tarot is the world of dreams, and the dream world seems like a good place to start our journey. In the middle of an empty desert a stone staircase rises into the universe. If we want to take our first step into the unknown we must be willing to follow those stairs where they lead us. In this image the Fool has yet to start climbing the stairs – has yet to commit herself to her question – and is distracted by what is around her. It’s easy to get distracted, but the moment we focus ourselves and put our foot on the first stair is the moment our journey truly begins.

July 12, 2011 [2]

A second idea I came up with for the Fool is a little different. Instead of looking like an escapee from Cirque du Soleil, I decided upon a young woman who about to step naked from behind a curtain. She has yet to do this, but she will. After all, if we are going to explore the world of poetry and passion, desire and madness, then the first step for us is being comfortable enough with our own bodies so that we can actually know what we are looking for. I’m always fascinated at how many people want to burn with fire but are so horrified at what that requires they never admit it? Passion is our birthright. The same fire that burned in John Keats and Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath burns in everyone. Pretending it is any other way, to me, is hell. The other thing that is different in both cards is that I don’t have an annoying white mutt. The dog is symbolic. It is the Fool’s guide, that which will help her on her journey. There is no reason why it has to look the way it does except that Pamela Colman Smith, who designed the cards for the original deck, happened to like little white dogs, apparently. The girl’s spirit guide here is a blue ghost fox. It stands out sharply from everything else in the room, since it belongs to the realm of sleep and half-sleep, not the bright light of logic and daytime skepticism.

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