TFA No. 67: THREE OF SWORDS

Pierced by experience

The TAROT FOR ARTISTS project began in the spring of 2021. This is number 67 in a series of 78.

QUICK HITS

the wound that opens the heart / betrayal of a beloved inner image / plaintive “am I broken”–song stuck on repeat in the back of the brain / exquisite pain of the anguish addict / awakening of an ancient ache / emotional scar tissue / cold & metallic blockages to your love’s full flow / accelerated multiplication of fragmentary thought patterns / chest-wrenching grief / the initially uncomfortable return to presence after a period of numb survival / sinkhole of sorrow / unwelcome gauntlet of healing / ultimate transformation of foundational beliefs / challenge to surrender your swords / acceptance of wreckage as a source of fresh energy / reception of a major revelation /

THE IMAGE INSIDE THE IMAGE

The radical restructuring of your core vibratory pulse in response to three penetrating points.

A STORY IN THREE PARTS

THREE OF SWORDS is an easy place to freeze.

If you’re reading this, it means I’m back. Which is to say, that I’ll be writing and posting here regularly again, after an unexpected break of nearly five months. This chapter sat in my drafts in various stages for so long, that it began to feel impossible that I could ever finish it. I believe that when I post this, in all of its inevitable imperfection, it will represent a victory. To connect this to the card’s image, I will have pulled the swords out of my heart and handed them over.

THREE OF SWORDS is a tight, numb ache in the chest. THREE OF SWORDS scatters your attention. THREE OF SWORDS is the feeling that you’re barely managing the minimum when the moment is asking for more than you’ve ever given. THREE OF SWORDS is the inner landscape of the melancholy zombie.

1.

When my son was little, he liked to sift through my tarot cards and ask me what the different pictures were all about. One day, when he was five or six, he picked up a deck that I’d left out on my dresser. He flipped a card over and asked, “Is this a good card or a bad card?”

“That’s not really how they work,” I explained. He nodded and flipped over another one.

“Is this a good card or a bad card?”

“There aren’t any ‘bad’ cards,” I said. “Some of them are just less comfortable than others.”

“What about this one?” he asked, holding up an image of a heart pierced through the middle by three swords. “This one looks like a bad card.”

I paused. “Yeah, that one’s not great.”

“What does it mean?” he asked me.

“It depends,” I said. After a moment, I added that I had pulled that card many times when thinking about “Mama’s book.” My son was familiar with the radiant anxiety strobing off those two words, he knew that I was writing a book about my mother and her “forgetting disease.” He didn’t know what a deadline was, but he knew I’d missed more than one. He’d heard me answer friends, when they asked me how my mother was doing, with pained confessions of not visiting her in too long. “It’s ridiculous. I’m too busy writing a book about my mother to go see my mother,” I’d say. It was impossible for me to see my mother “enough,” and so the guilt and shame built up into a wall that made it that much more difficult to get in the car and drive across the border to see her.

Levi sighed as he studied the stormy-looking card in his hand, then put it back, ready to move on to another image. “Yes, Mama’s had a very hard time with her book,” he said.

2.

In December 2022, I presented my first art show at a small gallery in Toronto. The work was built around lists of animal names that my mother made in the first year or two after she was first diagnosed with dementia. She had begun making these lists with the intention of showing them to her doctor as evidence that her memory was improving. Even after she had moved into institutional living, several doctors later, she continued to compulsively copy out this list of more than 150 animal names — she filled notebooks and sketchpads and scrawled the list inside the covers of novels and across her two of her pillowcases. Dozens and dozens of lists. A sample of them appear in my book about her, but I didn’t feel satisfied by their inclusion there. I couldn’t let them go, I had to do something with them. When a curator, who had bought a bunch of my hand-printed zines, asked me if I’d like to create a series of framable prints to show at her gallery, I said yes. I said yes — even though I’d never done anything like that before — because I thought, okay, here’s my chance. Through a process of trial and error, I developed a process for accurately reproducing my mother’s writing. First, I photographed details of the lists, enlarging specific selections and transferring the words in reverse onto linoleum blocks. Then I carved along the flipped loops of mother’s handwriting, keeping a steady pressure on my hand as I guided the tool slowly so that the v-shaped blade would not slip. It was physical work that demanded total focus. I loved it. I loved rolling the ink across the smooth surface of the block, I loved moving the baren in methodical circles as I pressed the paper into the ink. For weeks, I made print after print after print, chasing the ghost of my mother’s mind. The repetition of this only increased the value I found in small variations. I obsessively experimented with different arrangements of animal names, with different combinations of ink colours. 44. Golden Jackal, 45. Red Kangaroo. Dozens and dozens of prints. Levi grew resentful of how distracted I was as I spent hours bent over the dining room table, barely responsive, often working deep into the night only to begin again first thing the next morning. 126. Black Footed Ferret, 116. White Spotted Skunk. When Mike gently asked how many prints I thought I needed, I said, “Oh there’s nothing practical about this. I know I’m not going to sell all of these prints. I want to cover the walls with them.” I imagined the gallery as a cave filled with Joanna’s animals. 51. Snow Leopard, 52. Clouded Leopard, 53. Leopard Lynx. I realized that I had become consumed with the same manic compulsion that drove my mother to create the lists in the first place. Chasing the ideal sequence that would distill chaos into a formal order. I was trying to change something I couldn’t change. Through it all, I kept saying, “I have to go see my mother before I finish this project,” but I ran out of time. I was too busy making art about my mother to go visit my mother.

After the show, the social worker at the nursing home where my mother lived called to tell me that my mother had stopped eating.

3.

My mother died on January 16, 2023, at approximately 9:40 AM. I’m not sure of the exact time, because I was alone in the room with her and I didn’t want to break the spell of hovering in that threshold with her by looking at my phone.

I don’t know how much of the story to include. There’s too much for the shape of this container. THREE OF SWORDS is a small space. On her last night, I slept beside my mother in her nursing home bed. “It’s okay, Mama,” I told her. “I’m right here. I’m not leaving. I’m staying with you.”

No beeps, no bright lights. No clocks. No machines to track what was happening. Only the temperature of her skin and the rhythm of her breath shifting by degrees. I had to pay close attention to the details of her body as the energy inside it constricted. (“Shutting down,” they call it.) Waiting for death is strange, because no one can definitely tell you what a body will do. When I asked the aides who worked hospice, they told me it could be hours, days, or even weeks. “It’s really up to Joanna,” they said. In the morning, perched at the edge of her bed, I spent a very long time crafting a very short email to my students to let them know we wouldn’t be meeting for our first day of class. When I turned back to my mother, and placed my hand on her cheek, I noticed that her face felt very cold. I knew it would not be weeks, or even days.

THREE OF SWORDS is intense. The number THREE is traditionally seen as a point of generative action — THREE is associated with reproduction and dimensionality. THREE is inherently creative. THREE OF SWORDS pins you in place, but this is not a trap so much as it is a trial. You cannot stay here forever. You cannot stay the same.

I loved my mother. I feel guilt and shame for not seeing her more often while she was alive. The trial has been to accept a past that doesn’t line up with my ideas about what I think is right. THREE OF SWORDS isn’t done with you until you accept the unacceptable. Once you do this, it leaves behind an empty space that expands your capacities.

When designing the THREE OF SWORDS for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, Pamela Colman Smith and Arthur Waite adapted the image of an impaled-heart from the THREE OF SWORDS in the Sola Busca Tarot. I own a reproduction of this Renaissance-era deck, which comes with a brief but excellent text on the history of the cards by Professor Andrea Vitali, who is identified as a Historian of Symbolism and the President of the Cultural Association of Tarot. Vitali writes that “…the image of rays that pierce the heart of the believer was quite usual in Italian art between the end of the 14th and the first half of the 15th centuries. A point of reference can be found in a passage from the Confessions of St. Augustine, Book IX: ‘You have pierced our heart with the arrows of your love.’” Vitali argues that the source image for this card carries a deeper meaning than the surface suggestion of betrayal, loss, and pain. Beneath these associations is a much older dream of transformation, what Vitali describes as “a scene of suffering ending in joy.”

THREE OF SWORDS will change you. The holes that the swords leave behind will never disappear, but the work you must do to remove them — to move past this chapter and into the next — will open your heart and redefine your purpose.

QUESTIONS

What is the transformation that you’re learning to name? What difficult sensations are you thinking your way through? What is happening inside your heart? What old injury are you ready to heal? What must you accept in order to open?

ACTIONS

Practice slow, deep breathing. Fill your lungs to the brim, hold, and release. Remember that you can’t protect yourself from what’s already happened. Feel for where you are frozen in the places where others have hurt you and in the places where you have hurt yourself. Consider the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tonglen meditation as a method for confronting your resistance to the discomfort of total presence. As a writing exercise, experiment by creating dynamic three-word clusters. Do this every day for three days — or thirty — then read over these lists and study the patterns. What stories emerged? How did those stories shift in response to your continued attention? Practice slow, deep breathing. Fill your lungs to the brim. Hold. Release.

THE READING

I wrote this next sentence in late November of 2022, right after pulling the THREE OF SWORDS: “Sixty-seven turns into thirteen (DEATH XIII), which turns into four (THE EMPEROR IV).” It was the first sentence I wrote for this chapter, and it was very strange to read it a couple months later, after my mother had died. I had forgotten that I had tied this chapter to the DEATH card. Chance operation is wild. What can I say about this pairing? Death is real. THE EMPEROR, for me, in this context, represents the law of death, its inescapable rigid reality. In the earliest Tarot decks that have survived, the card we call DEATH did not have a name attached to it. Tarot readers sometimes called this card “The Nameless One.” It’s helpful to remember that this image system first appeared in Europe in the wake of devastating plagues. Yesterday, I saw a clip of an old television interview with Maya Angelou in which the interviewer tells her “you seem to be fearless.” Angelou explains, “Once I admitted I would die, that it is the one promise I can be sure will not be reneged upon, once I understood that, then I could be present. And I’m totally present all the time. I try. I don’t make it all the time. But I try to bring all my stuff here in this studio. Everything I’ve got is here. And when I leave here, everything I got will be in that taxi!”

It makes perfect sense to me that the cure for fear is a state of heightened attention. When the interviewer asks whether the practice of living every moment fully might lead to greed, Angelou clarifies further. “Give everything I’ve got! Not take — I mean, what is that? Give everything. All the time. It’s great fun.”

That’s the reading. Give everything. All the time. Have fun. Die trying.

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What do you see in the THREE OF SWORDS?