The Fool Who Let the Dogs Out
Wild Cards Now Open For Enrollment
Reminder: I will be returning to the California Institute of Integral Studies in April! This two-day online workshop, Cultivating Decolonial Perspectives on Divination with Tarot, will be held from April 12-13, from 10:00am -1:00pm PDT.
In this workshop participants will leave with an understanding of Tarot as radical literacy with solid foundations in ethical tarot reading. Please bring your questions, your experience, your tarot decks and your intentions as diviner. Sign up: Here
Dear reader,
How many times have you pulled the Fool card in recent memory? The Fool is who you find at the beginning but like T.S. Eliot says, “what we call the beginning is often the end”. Where exactly does civilization end and the wild begin? In a constant environmental unraveling, it’s impossible to discern.
This card singularly commences the carnival that is Tarot. He comes clankering with a loud, continuous and incomprehensible cacophony. The origins of this sound are primordial. In it’s darkness there is no clear identification. He is the wild card of all wild cards. He comes with the wind. Dispersed all around is an invitation to join the wild ruckus, to displace all the rules dictated by an ingratiated religious dogma, a colonial order, a coercive capitalist time orientation. He say’s today is a day of inversion, faggotology, anarchist merriment. His sound will make you mad, irreverent, lewd. Where does this Fool belong? No where but the wild.
“Wildness names simultaneously a chaotic force of nature, the outside of categorization, unrestrained forms of embodiment, the refusal to submit to social regulation, loss of control, the unpredictable. This sequence suggests a romantic wild, a space of potential, an undoing that beckons and seduces. But, obviously, the wild has also served to name the orders of being that colonial authority comes to tame: the others to a disastrous discourse of civilization, the racialized orientation to order, reifying operations of racial discourse. For this reason, to work with the wild is also to risk reengaging these meanings. I take the risk here because wildness offers proximity to the critiques of those regimes of meaning and it opens up the possibility of unmaking and unbuilding worlds.”1
The Fool is often attacked by small animals, exposing his sensitive flesh with their fangs and claws all out. You will mostly see him unflinched by these bites. He is as the animals pushing and pulling him in his frantic pilgrimage, uncollared and so undomesticated. He migrates, he evades, he hungers. This Fool is feral.
So let us learn from the bestiary of incongruous creatures that accompany him. Let us study a bestial relation to the body. Let us read tarot like a beast. I am writing you to announce that the next iteration of Wild Cards, a seven-week class in untaming the tarot, is open for enrollment.
In this class we will journey from bewilderment to chaos. We will realize wildness is not limited to the natural world. These Wild Cards will tie together aesthetics, anticolonial theory, subjugated knowledge, and desire. The wild other has a long colonial history. We will be working with the spiritual tool that is tarot to work against the colonial fantasies that persist in the spiritual tourism that Europeans and North Americans so eagerly engage. Fascinated with the wildness these brown beings have been made to signify: the magical, enigmatic, healing power that could cure the existential malaise of their Euro-American cultural values, these encounters are endlessly extractive.
“The mechanics of knowledge production in the vicinity of Black and Brown bodies always partakes in the discourse of wildness: whether the wild enters as a kind of reiteration of sexual excess or inheres to a darkness that is always the byproduct of and the antithesis of enlightenment discourse, it necessarily produces racialized bodies as unknowable, as spectacles, as specimens, and as an undercommons who nonetheless escape colonial figurations and use signification for their own purposes.”2
Wildness is in the in-between of colonial terror and representation. But where else can we theorize the wild, can we find places that aren’t prescribed by a colonial order? José Esteban Muñoz thought of these as the “brown undercommons,” which like tarot, has a haptic order. Wild Cards gives meaning to bodies and beings in space and time as much through analogy and vast theoretical sources as through the touch of the cards that are shuffled and arrayed on the the table randomly. We will stage a new wild encounter. We will be birds murmuring together, the many who remain many and become, in their multiplicity, a new entity entirely.
We will approach these images from perspectives beyond the lenses of alienating taxonomy. We will summon the spirit of the unknown and the disorderly to disrupt convention. We will be held in a warm embrace even and especially as our Brown, Black and Red bodies are continuously cast as the wild ones that must be tamed.
By looking into the eye of the raven, the eye of the stallion, the eye of the dingoe, and on we will see a “submerged perspective” looking back. We will then engage a disobedient reading of animal images, representations, and stagings toward oppositional purposes of their colonial context of creation. Thus, this course disrupts anthropocentrism, which is the fourth logic of white supremacy.
I am so excited to teach this truly unique material and embolden the sense we make of animal omens, familiars and decolonial comrades, as animals undoubtedly continue to be the subjects of colonial domination and displacement, the objects of colonial knowledge and at times the agents of colonial conquest and settlement.
By divining a dialogue with the animals present in our tarot decks we can better relate the animals of our natural world to the cultural and supernal worlds we share. This course continues to build decolonial epistemologies through the focused of prism of revolutionizing our animal considerations and thus animal relations.
Considering literacy as an ecosystem enables a communion with the more-than-human, toward a liberation that is not at the expense of the animal or the natural, but alongside, within and in reverence toward the animal, the natural, the wild, the queer, the native.
This course offers a decolonial ethic that accounts for animal bodies as resurgent bodies. The tarot will be our counterpoint to create a circuit of coherence amongst the various cultural layers, significations, and vantages that coexist within the cards animal references. No prior experience with tarot required but always welcome.
I’m thrilled that students from Thresholds will be joining me in this next run and that students from the last round of this class are continuing to join me in community space in The Cartier Club (our last meeting was all about dreams and our next meeting is April 18. Definitely join us if you want ongoing psychic community).
The students who study with me provide uncanny contributions in oracular explorations. Each run is unique, but students are consistently stunning. I’m so excited to see this class continue to deepen and expand as more students encounter its wilds.
Here’s what Kieuntha had to say about her study:
With Thresholds I saw changes across all areas of my life, especially my relationship with myself in terms of really embracing my uniqueness and building my confidence and self trust. Tarot has become an essential part of my daily life because now it feels like an accountability buddy. Wild cards really shifted my world viewpoint. I've always been mindful of my media consumption, but Wild Cards added a layer of critical analysis to everything, especially things I've been following or watching for a long time. I feel like I see MORE of the world now and I feel more of it. And I really love the community. It's also a huge part of my growth. This is such an amazing space filled with amazing people that I'm so happy to exchange ideas with and so happy to know. Your teaching style is phenomenal! I love to see the mastery unfold.
Learn To Read Tarot Like A Beast
May 8 - June 19 / Thursdays / Fridays, 3pm PST / payment plans available.
Week 1: Introductions, Orientations & Entry points - State Species: The Digital Animal and Domestication
Thursday May 8, 3pm pst, Zoom
Are you a dog person? How does one learn about wildness? Let us stretch the ingrained notion of the wild animal within our childhood reveries. Animating animality from horses in the chauvet grotto to the cartoon creatures, we will consider the visual politic of how humans control animals as proxies for state formations, affective engagement, responses and the cards that can especially cue possibilities for alterity.
Week 2: From Cage to Stage
Friday May 16, 3pm pst, Zoom
How do zoos endorse and naturalize an ethical captivity? How do we regard the idea of decent, dignified behavior due to animals and what is implicated by being denied and despised? What is the role of the displayed animal? How does the wild child “grow up sideways” while also epitomizing the colonial imagination? This week we will examine the white gaze of extinction, displayed by the taxonomy established from zoos to museums to the circus. We will examine the Major Arcana that help us understand native land stolen and repurposed to establish the colonial garden of eden.
Week 3: Lets Go Lil Kitty Kat
Friday May 23, 3pm pst, Zoom
If the human humanizes himself through the negation of his animality what doest the Strength arcana offer us? What does it mean to be wild? What does it mean to be tame? We will consider the history of the Strength arcana, as a mode of gendered, racial analysis from the iconographic history. By updating the philosophical underpinnings, along with the association of the feline with the trickster aspect of female sexuality through the tarot’s cat cards, we will connect this to the modern 'Proud Mary,’ Tina Turner, and similarly deploy a disidentificatory move in consciously forging a personal animal association and insisting on the radical hybridity of the self.
Week 4: The Grotesque Bestiary
Thursday May 29, 3pm pst, Zoom
What is happening in the depth of the forest? Where can the wild take you? How does the bestiary, that is not meant to be zoological, engage animality and what can it offer our readings? What ways can the Devil arcanum engage “monstrous intimacies?” What if some forms of desire stood outside of commodification? Continuing our hybrid explorations from last week, this week we are the attendants to the beasts within and without, and we will shapeshift. It’ll be an afternoon with a faun, serpent women, spider seers and deer ladies. From these stories we understand animals as observers, adversaries, guardians and protagonists with their agency and own perspectives.
Week 5: The Beast and the Sovereign (the Cockroach court)
Friday June 6, 3pm pst, Zoom
Con Que Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha? How can the animal extract us from the logic of the human? How can each rank of the court help us reconsider human-animal relationality? Which animal is/isn’t the pillar of settler technology? Animal allegories are embedded within the major arcana, to which the Wheel of Fortune is a nexus. This week we deconstruct the court cards by looking to the series of lectures by Derrida which call attention to the parallel between the monarch and the animal. By focusing on Indigenous relationalities we will disrupt the idea of taming the Wild West. The cards will help us become unbridled and wild.
Week 6: The Assembly of Birds & Siren Songs
Thursday June 12, 3pm pst, Zoom
What is a bird? What are the cards of extinction? When is innocence tempted? Let us take flight and engage in musical self-questioning, and with enough curiosity we may get free of ourselves. Our insistent hybridity continues in our attempts to reconcile disparate desires of domesticity and independence. The winged women guide us through this tension. Murmurations will meld into our thinking.
Week 7: Sea Country
Thursday June 19, 3pm pst, Zoom
How can fish provide a problem for colonial authority? Where do interspecies agreement emerge? How do we read like a beast? What does it mean to live alongside wildness? How can animals help us access nonordinary realms? How do we interpret the animal omen? As we wrap up will dwell in the oceanic depths to contact the leviathan. We will sit at the seacoast and direct a multifocal gaze downwards into the dirt, into the waterways which connect all life forms. We will practice engaging in the speculative narration of animal subjectivities as co-creators of lifeworlds, coexisting in proximity, understanding that these lives are not fully visible or knowable. I leave you with suggestions for animal altars so as to restore the reverence, respect and spiritual communion with animals that was disrupted by the settler project which used these modes of relation as evidence of the savagery of Indigenous peoples. You will leave certain of non-human animals as knowledge-holders, council, independent actors, symbol and signified by the cards of the tarot.
Enroll and become like the Fool, an anticolonial wanderer conjuring otherworlds where the wild comes to us in an animal divination. Let us consider how to create a more egalitarian, wilder world.
x,
Christopher
Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2020, 4.
Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2020, 40.