Assembling the Memory Box of Connection
On Cartomancy and Cuarting the Poetic Theater of Divination
Dear Reader,
I’ve been reflecting on Mars in the 8th house of my horoscope, always a mysterious point of meditation for me. Emmalea Russo offered me a helpful consideration in bringing to mind Joseph Cornell’s memory boxes that are “sort of collage-like, trippy. Questions of how to store / sort through the past / other people’s stuff,” as related to this placement.
These poetic theaters are a deliberate assemblage of collected, found objects: typed and handwritten notes, exhibition announcements, magazine clippings, postcards, bird feathers, watch parts, metal discs, marbles, compasses, and on, building files akin to “the image-making of poetry.”
They are miniature tableaus mixing both deeply intimate affects with compelling universal symbols.
Suffice it to say, I deeply relate to this my divination practice with clients. Through these objects: the decks, the cards, I peer into the other’s shadow box and, hopefully, share fresh perspectives from my vantage. I tell stories with the guts of what’s presented, offer suggestions for rearrangement, and as the cards become these memory boxes (a very Six of Cups orientation, aka my Sun in Scorpio), something everyday, something prosaic becomes poetry.
The uncanny reflection divination directs is compelling. It’s always an unexpected juxtaposition. An astrologer tells me of many intense connections with my Mars placement and I’m clocked so instantly. Without a cutting curation, it can easily become a cramped, overwhelming cluttering. I look around and see the way my dresser, my desk, my bookshelves, my altars are all so similarly works of assemblage to Cornell’s. Sorting through a miniature materiality has helped me grasp looming existential questions of love, purpose and being.
I believe this is why tarot is such an efficacious tool to work through the psychic landscapes of clients. I can hold a card in my hand to somehow make tangible, manageable in the small world of each, the vast interiority and particular sociocultural positioning of the client.
Given that Neptune is now in the Mars-ruled sign, Aries, maybe this also relevant to the moment of this cosmic weather. Neptune is the dreamy, existential, alien energy now bringing its fog and mystery to the Two of Wands, a card connecting to the first decan of Aries. In the Smith-Waite deck, there is the simulacram. We hold a card, a representation, of a person holding a representation of the world. Neptune’s transit through Aries may further confuse the real, the representation, the image, the dream.
Obviously Aries is distinct from Scorpio but with the Mars connections constellating, a martial divination, or a red reading resists and recovers the nihilistic impulse, all too easy to succumb to in this relentlessly militarized world. My hope is that Neptune’s transit through Aries dispels and disllusions people from their investments in nationalism, detention centers, incarceration, police, military, heroism.
Reading Baudrillard will surely make your mind hazy and spin out, but when you sit with clients and work to interpret the divinatory symbols offered in a session, you realize how meaningful interpretation is to relink the parts that are split off by trauma. To be the High Priestess or the Hierophant or the Queen of Swords or Queen of Cups or King of Swords (the figures particularly skilled in hermenuetics in my practice) is to make interpretation a bridge that brings forth both vital physical and psychic energy for becoming one’s holiest itieration of self, as my friend and southern-style diviner Selah would say.
Cornell was never formally trained as an artist. He was self-taught, an independent creative voice, like many tarot readers. Before learning to make custom wood cases, he used found boxes. Maybe I’ll make a deck one day, but for now these found boxes are suiting me just fine.
These cards are compartments with secreted contents I keep in velvet pouches. I open the card to explore and find that by the time I’ve closed them, more and more is contained within the card such that each becomes a cherished library of stories, visited time and time again to provide a lifetime of narrative sustenance. This bread’s poetry is always fresh. Each word is a found object, and each essay is a box bespoke. The cards become portraits for the curious mind, both aesthetically rigorous and consistently awe-inspiring wherein we cry, we laugh, we hunt, we play, we pray.
Then I have an affinity for photographic tarots, with similar assemblages and arrangements. Each card is a cabinet of curiosities, each containing multitudes.
I’ve written to you of my deep love for the decks that Hettienne Grobler has brought into the world because each card literally becomes an altar. They are visitual testimony to the relationships we forge between people, spirits, states of consciousness, realms. These are instruments for relationships, centering the Other’s presence. At the heart of spiritual aptitude is the need to connect.
Tarot is a tool prodding you to remember, to provoke your seeking connection. These altars are places to pray, to be Divinely affiliated, a place to inhabit sacred relationship.
With any tarot deck there may be a relative minimal composition but each possesses a capcity for a masterful visual economy. Out of swords, stones, cups and wands, I gain access to the wealth of my client’s raw material.
My Mars in the 8th wants the visceral inquiries, the life or death hands we are dealt. It wants the courageous self-disclosure. It wants the risk warranted of loving, of resurrection, of letting go. My Mars takes the commonly discarded and alchemizes the refuse into a compelling visual ontology.
That my North Node is also in my 8th house, is that it is immensely sacred, perhaps destined, to sit with clients to discuss crossroads such as:
-desirability, embodied self-pleasure, celibacy, polyamory, basically all matters of sexual liberation, relational fidelity, cheating partners,
-abusive pasts, overcoming addictions, self-abandoment, displacement, insurance claims,
- séance with certain ancestors, vocation, childbirth, abortion, adoption,
-relocation, surviving higher education, livelihood,
-coming out, aging, caregiving, medical surgery,
-regret, depression, shame,
-artistic practices, grief practices, decolonizing client practices
-dreams, conscious and subconscious
-and on and on and on.
It’s all such a marvelous fleeting intimacy. A reading is a glorious catharsis.
My dear reader, know you have a welcome invitation to share your shadows with me. In the reading we are pilgrims visiting sacred sites together. And while we seek revelations deeper than any money could offer, offering readings and classes are how this poet sustains a livelihood. If you liked to be so affiliated my bookings are open for February.
And should you ever create your own altar, shadowbox &/ or tarot or oracle deck, may be they duly adored.
x,
Christopher
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