Tarot Tales

Over the past month or so, I’ve been reading two books that focus on Tarot cards—which I know almost nothing about—in various ways.

The first was Charles Williams’ The Greater Trumps, which is about as quirky as the other Williams’ books that I’ve read in the past. Williams seems to assume the traditional Hermetic principle “As above, so below; as below, so above” in his storyline, so that what happens in the material world and the spiritual world, which seem dualistically separate, are interwoven and parallel. In order to understand the book at all (I still don’t feel like I’ve understood it well), I’ve spent time learning a bit about the significance of each of the Tarot cards that appear as the plot of the book develops. The ways in which Tarot cards reflect Jungian archetypes particularly intrigued me. I’ve also reread each chapter at least twice, trying to pick out what Williams is doing with the Tarot cards and with the story of Christianity, which is also woven deeply into the plot. Williams’ use of the dance and of hands as metaphors throughout the novel is intriguing since those are both favorite images of mine. His description of prayer—especially a scene where Sybil is in contemplation—also stood out. Perhaps that’s because Joanna and Sybil are both marvelously constructed, strong characters that have made me think again and again about the meaning of mystery and love.

Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies was the second book that had Tarot cards at its center. I’ve been working my way through Calvino’s writings little by little and it happened to be the next book in the pile so it was quite by chance that I began it as I was about half way through The Greater Trumps. Calvino uses the Tarot in an entirely different way, using the images on the face of the cards to tell the stories of the lives of people who are caught together staying at a castle or a tavern. The book as a whole is sort of a Canterbury Tales using Tarot cards in place of poetry. While the stories Calvino created were intriguing, the chapters I enjoyed best were those in which he retold well-known tales—of Faust, Hamlet, or King Lear for example—using only the images found on the Marseilles tarots.

Six Memos

Despite a weekend full of almost non-stop errands, I managed to stay up late and find some quiet time to finish reading Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. These five “memos” –Calvino never got to the sixth, which was to be called “Consistency”—were written to be delivered as the 1985-86 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University, but Calvino had a sudden stroke and died just before he was to deliver them. Like much of Calvino’s fiction, they are a marvel of words that capture in their style the very essence of the five characteristics of writing that Calvino is celebrating—lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity—qualities that give us “the Promised Land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.”

Calvino not only gives us autobiographical glimpses into his life and what he sees as the meaning of his various works, but he also illustrates his literary principles he’d like to carried throughout the 21^st century with such diverse sources as Borges, Bruno, Dante, Dickinson, Felix the Cat, Ovid, the Cabala, fairy tales, and Galileo. The reader gets a sense of which books and authors mean the most to him as well as the beautiful images in each work that Calvino cherishes and why he does so. When discussing lightness, for example, his beautifully constructed yet playful analysis of both Dante and Ovid made me want to rush out and reread both authors’ works.

Beyond what he’s trying to tell us about literature, Calvino’s writing appeals to me for its reverent approach to nature, an approach that I suspect comes from having two botanists as parents. While Calvino is in very many ways a postmodern writer who writes imaginary, in some cases futuristic, stories, his description of the world around him so often captures the passion of a man who has spent much time contemplating and loving the natural world in all its particularities.

And then there is Calvino’s quirky but encyclopedic breadth of reading and knowledge. His interest in tarot cards and the way they reflect both the Cabala and archetypal ideas which he says he's built into The Castle of Crossed Destinies (which seems to overlap nicely with what I'm finding as I read Charles' Williams' The Greater Trumps) makes me excited about reading it next.