Tarot No. 70: EIGHT OF COINS
Making work the way
Okay here we go — EIGHT OF COINS, and then eight cards left in this series.
(And then what? Well, EIGHT OF COINS is all about focusing on the task at hand.)
QUICK HITS
Elevated Structure on a Stable Foundation / Healthy Roots & Juicy Fruits / An Unobstructed Flow From Idea to Execution / What You Give Is What You Get / The Manufacturer’s Guarantee That Your Results Will Be Proportional to Your Efforts / Whistling Working Song of That “Time to Make the Donuts” Guy / Continuous Creative Practice / The Steady Performance of a Slowly Acquired Skill / The Artist’s Ability to Disappear Into the Infinity Loop of Making New Nouns / The Call to Gather Dropped Threads & Get Back to Braiding Them / Cosmic How-To Manual on Finishing Without Fear / Process Over Product / A Gentle Reminder to Return to the Deeply Rewarding Task at Hand / Conscious Three-Dimensional Participation in the Miraculous as Independent Business Tip / Work as a Direct Exchange Between You & the Unnameable Everything / The Job of Making It Awesome for All of Us /
THE IMAGE
An artisan in action, eyes locked on the life-force of an evolving object. On the table, a note inside an envelope reads: The villa of your life is sturdy enough to support a second story.
EIGHT OF COINS
In an earlier draft of EIGHT OF COINS, I’d written “Find your fuel” at the top of the newsletter. EIGHT OF COINS represents an ideal state of sustainable growth, what the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky calls “Paradise on earth. The planet seen as a flourishing garden.” This card is traditionally associated with a success that’s earned through the disciplined performance of craft and skill. EIGHT OF COINS also emphasizes the spirit with which a task is performed, and that’s what I was thinking about when I reached for the metaphor of fuel. I was looking for w way to talk about how imbuing an action with a sense of greater meaning will provide the necessary motivation to stay focused on seeing it through, even when it might feel like a chore. But now I think fuel is a misleading metaphor for this card. The word calls up associations with the fiery heat of ambition and desire, and these are themes better represented in the suit of the WANDS. The COINS speak more clearly about the physical world and how we choose to interact with it. The EIGHT OF COINS is interested in how you feed your knowledge into the material of your daily life and how the material of your daily life, in turn, feeds back into your knowledge. The EIGHT OF COINS isn’t interested in chasing specific goals or in straining to control a particular outcome. EIGHT OF COINS is the long-game play that chooses the wealth of consistent contribution over any flashy fantasy of effortless gain.
Steve Albini was singular. He was a musician who delighted in discovering what weird new sounds his guitar might make. He was a songwriter who experimented with narrative, often writing from the point of view of fictional characters facing, fighting, or enacting devastation. He was a performer who could meet the moment as well or better than any other person I’ve ever seen stand on a stage; he wore his instrument strapped to his waist so that his arms could move freely as he sang and screamed and sweat and joked and talked back to the crowd. Onstage or off, he spoke improvisationally in syntactically precise paragraphs and was an inventive and expressive insult comic. (I remember when Shellac played in Toronto years ago, one of the final shows of the band’s first Canadian tour, Steve told the audience that “Tim Horton’s coffee can eat a bag of maple-glazed dick.”) He was a sought-after recording engineer who had no desire to bend a band’s vision to match the shape of his own aesthetics. He was a relentless problem solver in the pursuit of accuracy and was recognized as a master at capturing music as it sounds when played by humans performing together live in the same room. He earned a degree in journalism at Northwestern University and though he never pursued a living as a writer, his byline appeared often in the underground press for years. Steve famously rejected the title “producer” as well as the industry-wide practice of taking a percentage of the royalties on the albums he recorded; he made his income as a recording engineer by charging a flat fee and staying busy. When he wasn’t working in the studio or touring as a musician, he was elevating his hobbies to the semi-professional sphere with the same level of rigorous attention he brought to everything he did. In his later years, he made a portion of his annual revenue by playing poker — he won not one but two world championship bracelets. He liked to build elegant end tables for his friends as wedding presents. He was an insanely great cook.
I met Steve in the 1990s when I became friends his wife, Heather Whinna. I met Heather, more than half my life ago and it’s impossible for me to overstate the influence they’ve both had on me over the years. I’m hardly alone. I’m finding it almost impossible to write the sentence I’ve been avoiding, the one that tries to describe the shock and grief that ran through the unmappably complex circles of friends and fans surrounding Heather and Steve at the news of his death last spring. What I want to do here is connect Steve’s philosophy of work and art and love and community to the ideal represented by EIGHT OF COINS. This vision that Jodorowsky calls “paradise on earth” isn’t a life free from struggle or pain or mistakes. It’s a life in which you continuously strive to improve the conditions around you and how that commitment radiates out in patterns you may never even know.
A couple years ago, I interviewed Steve about his creative process. I read excerpts from our conversation at a celebration of his life this summer. Below is a condensed sample of what he said about creative community, offered as a model of work that I see in the image of EIGHT OF COINS as a flourishing garden.
“The things that have never mattered to me have been these professional awards or milestones in a music career, or the acquisition of a certain amount of money. I’ve always figured, if I have enough to live on and I get to keep doing it, then that’s a win. The mindset that I’ve had, and this infiltrated from the tacit understanding of the punk rock world, is that whether you’re in the crowd or on the stage, we’re all the same gig, and we’re all hoping for the same outcome. We all want it to be awesome. It’s not that there is a passive audience receiving a scripted performance. It’s that we’re all doing this thing together. If we all do it well, then it’ll be great.... As a group, we should try to make the experience amazing, all of us working together. In some cases, that means I am choosing to buy a ticket to go to a thing so that I can be a part of this chosen family. In some cases, it means I invite the band to stay at my house, if they don’t have a place to stay. Or I can make myself useful to them in some other way. Again, this is all informed by my experiences in the punk rock where everybody was doing everything. Everybody in a band was also a flyer artist and was also a gig promoter, and was also a guy that you could borrow a bass amp from. Everybody was everything and everybody was contributing to the greater experience, the greater project, which was making it awesome for us. I think that approach applies pretty broadly.... And that’s what I’ve always gotten out of the music that I admire, a sense of communion with the person who made it. They chose a mode for us to have that interaction, and it was successful. And like, Bravo, we did it. Good job, team. We got to have that experience.”I watched online a video online in which Nardwuar the Human Serviette ends an interview by asking Steve, “Why should people care about Steve Albini?” Steve pauses, shaking his head, and then says with what I can only describe as a vocal shrug, “I’m doing my best.” There’s another pause and then he adds, with a bemused smile, “I don’t have any particular sales pitch for myself. I’m just trying to earn an honest living and hold up my end of the culture.”
This is the way.
IDEAS FOR CREATIVE PRACTICE
Identify and embrace the step you’re standing on. Consider these words that Gustave Flaubert wrote to his best bro Alfred Le Poittevin: “For a thing to be interesting, you need only look at it for a long time.” Get interested in the present moment of your physical life. Get involved in what’s in front of you. Do your best work as if it’s a small part of an intricate web that grows stronger whenever one more person is doing their best work. Then take care of the people you love and get some sleep. Repeat.
QUESTION(S) TO CONSIDER
What are you working on and what are you working for?
THE READING
Throughout this series, I’ve been pairing each card I’m writing about with the card or cards that match the number of the newsletter — since this is the seventieth entry in the Tarot for Artists project, I’ve placed THE CHARIOT (VII) beside EIGHT OF COINS. Are you stuck? Here’s the thing about being stuck: you’ll stay stuck until you choose to move. Your wheels will spin uselessly in the mud for an hour or a year or a lifetime, they will spin for as long as you continue to watch them spin. There’s no joy in trying to figure out which road leads to the pinnacle of unquestioned achievement. EIGHT OF COINS and THE CHARIOT combined together present an antidote to perfectionism and self-doubt. EIGHT OF COINS is a great re-focuser. Begin where you are in space and time. Practice dreaming while your hand is in motion. Believe in your own knowledge while remaining capable of admitting when you get it wrong. You’re going to make mistakes. Keep showing up to the show. THE CHARIOT heightens your performance by acknowledging there’s an audience. THE CHARIOT is brave and more than a little vain. Channel the determined glamour of Gena Rowlands in Opening Night, a film through which the late actress carries herself like a shining star, even through the chaos of her character’s nervous breakdown. It’s messy, she falls down a lot — at one point she’s forced to murder a malevolent duende-slash-doppleganger-slash-ingenue-ghost — but over and over, she keeps pushing toward truth and, ultimately, applause. Grab the wheel and keep the tires on the road as it unrolls before you.
For more of the qualities associated with the number EIGHT in the tarot system, see also EIGHT OF WANDS, EIGHT OF CUPS, and EIGHT OF SWORDS. (That’s all the EIGHTS, tied up in a bow.) Note: In the major arcana, the number eight was originally attributed to the card called JUSTICE, but in the early 20th century ole Arthur Waite switched the position of the eighth card with the eleventh card, STRENGTH, and many contemporary decks repeat this shuffle. I recommend that you read them both and synthesize what resonates.
And for more inspiration on the spirit of contribution, check out the Letters to Santa charity initiative that Heather founded and which Steve tirelessly supported for more than twenty years.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
I’ll be teaching a pair of rare in-person workshops in Toronto, one on tarot and one on astrology, over the weekend of October 12-13, 2024. More details on that next week.
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