Tarot Notes: On Sensitivity, Evictions, Ontology, and Of Wizards, Wands, & Class Society
Sunday, Feast of the Resurection, 10 Hextember 2025, Day 10,648. Year of the Wood Snake.
Sensetivity
sensitive and sensitivity aren't bad things. that's something i have to remind myself because i was punished for them. that we are well attuned to noticing something means we notice its effects, which if they effect us will surely effects some portion of other people as well. it is an act of solidarity (and by the way a good strategy) to both oneself and one's comrades to address it, yet we are told forcefully that if we are sensitive, very sensitive, too sensitive, than that's our fault, that it is either "naturally innocuous" and doesn't register as a real issue based on the legitimate and rightful needs of the one doing the categorizing, despite its effects on our own needs, which will be deemed legitimate or illegitimate, rightful or criminal, ruler or ruled. or else we are told we are entirely making it up from whole cloth, and have a great deal of what makes us us judged as unreal. this sort of ontological eviction is exactly the kind of bullshit a ruling class gets up to when its been founded upon the principle of extracting rent from their control over land. now they're trying to evict us from reality itself. well, I say Down With Landlords, Down with Rent, and Down with evictions.
other notes:
..
Tarot and Class
i remember when i got my first tarot deck i had only a vague sense of what the suits would be. as an autistic child my special interests included witches and wizards and magic and potions and religion, so when i read "suit of wands" my only thought was of a tool explicitly for magic, ceremony, religious ritual, and the like. the sight of the wands as walking sticks wasn
't the biggest surprise (wizards are depicted walking around with their staves all the time), but cards like the 10 of wands really surprised me: these were clearly branches, often explicitly firewood. these were the harvest of peasants, while the other three suits depict the heirs of the aristocratic violence, clergy administering the rite of eating a god, and merchant princes (who in Tarot's locale, renaissance italy often outpaced literal princes in wealth and influence).
this was, quite explicitly, an articulation of class society in precisely the age that gave way to the Columbian genocides.
this is simultaneously disturbing and fascinating. the tarot specifically comes about as an art commission of the Visconti Dukes, a recentlyish ascended dynasty where the founder married his employer's daughter, slew his wife's father, and took up the title of the Duchy.
here therefore is a a text printed to show off the wealth of a family which was simultaneously precariously implanted into aristocratic stock. should we wonder that they would commission *a deck of cards*, the equipment of chance, fortune, and gambling on which to stamp their likeness?
i cannot read the visconti tarot, not as they could. i am illiterate in the finely tuned sciences of icon writing. the fabric's pattern and its cut slides like water over my eyes: where their eyes take in the contents and their import in a glance.
there is, in a Derridean sense, neither such a thing as literacy or illiteracy. there's a perfect passage in The Will To Battle, circa chapter 3, but i don't have a print copy to hand.
..
..