This is a game played with cards, a conversation which will try to answer a relatively simple question: Can the Tarot deck, or any system like it, describe reality?
Mostly it reminds me of books like Anne Lamott's "Bird By Bird." You know, a sort of brilliant non-fiction self-help book filled with entertaining editorial anecdotes that make you feel like someone really understands your predicament; also in the sense that you wind up having to read and re-read it over and over in order to make any of it stick, and each time you walk away with new ideas. A very human, intimate sort of book about a very intimidating technical field.
I think the Deck is well understood as a "loose-leaf dictionary." Of course, the complaint could be made that the cards are richer than words, but this seems to me just part of having a language composed of only 78 words.
Let's say experimentally that what we have is a vocabulary of 22 verbs, 16 nouns, 4 tones, and 40 adverb/adjectives. This is the entirety of a language, and the dictionary usually comes packaged with a cursory grammar explaining syntax (spreads), conjugations (attributions), and etymology (those terrible historical bits).
Mostly it reminds me of books like Anne Lamott's "Bird By Bird." You know, a sort of brilliant non-fiction self-help book filled with entertaining editorial anecdotes that make you feel like someone really understands your predicament; also in the sense that you wind up having to read and re-read it over and over in order to make any of it stick, and each time you walk away with new ideas. A very human, intimate sort of book about a very intimidating technical field.
ReplyDeleteI think the Deck is well understood as a "loose-leaf dictionary." Of course, the complaint could be made that the cards are richer than words, but this seems to me just part of having a language composed of only 78 words.
ReplyDeleteLet's say experimentally that what we have is a vocabulary of 22 verbs, 16 nouns, 4 tones, and 40 adverb/adjectives. This is the entirety of a language, and the dictionary usually comes packaged with a cursory grammar explaining syntax (spreads), conjugations (attributions), and etymology (those terrible historical bits).