project #908426813

Pick ten random Tarot cards. Do not weight the selection to favor the Major Arcana; the Three of Cups and the Nine of Wands are just as interesting as the Hanged Man and Death for this exercise. Snag some books on the stuff, read up on varying interpretations of each of the cards, then draw an image for each. Load with narrative and motion; do not weigh them down with dozens of Symbolicq Objeckts in the background of every picture.

Do not repeat. The object of this is not to generate Peggy's Tarot. The object is to use the fractal layers of interpretations these things have had to make some art outside of my usual themes.

( Further thoughts... )

research

In reference to this morning's entry with the idea for a Tarot art project, I grabbed prickvixen's copy of Crowley's book on the stuff, "The Book Of Thoth (The Egyptian Tarot)". I attempted to read the intro and the first couple major arcana on the bus.

My mental immune system is reacting against it.

I think that if I end up pulling any of the Majors to do, I shall number them in binary, rather than the traditional mixture of 0 for the Fool and Roman numerals for the rest (which, Crowley says, is to "avoid confusion with the Roman numerals of the Seprioth", the Seprioth being ten important symbols in the Qabalah - the word literally means "Numbers"). Why binary? Because. Because it generates everything from 1 and 0 and what's more mystical than the eternal dance of Thingness and No-Thingness, of the Male Phallic Principle of One and the Female Vulval Principle of Zero? Because the I Ching is very much a binary system, though there are those transformations applied during the process. Because I am a smart-ass person with hacker tendencies.

I also end up thinking that Crowley was a fairly intelligent man who was building vast towers of theory on complete and utter bullshit. Every "fact" he presents regarding the True History And Sekret Meaning Of Tarot seems to be the sort of thing that ultimately boils down to "because I said so" or "because it just sounds right" (he may not be the one doing the saying, in the case of references to one obscure tract or another, but if you chased the pointers, "because I said so" would be the ultimate justification for most of this); I can see the appeal of that sort of thinking, it's pretty, it's like putting together a grand jigsaw puzzle... but it's also imposing a very human structure on the essentially inhuman and messy universe. He packed his head with all this deliberately incomprehensible and obfuscatory bullshit, then made this mad effort to make sense of it. But I ultimately feel like I'm trying to make sense of the Time Cube guy or something. Elaborate crystals of hand-hewn bullshit.

bus doodles

I was sitting in the side-facing seats on the way home today. When I pulled out my sketchbook, a kid sitting across from me started preening and posing. He thought I was drawing him.

( Little did he know... )