Why tarot and James Joyce?

Link: Penelope's Guide to Mme Marion Bloom's Tarot 

With a name like Penelope...One may assume there to be some artistic pressure for me in The Final Chapter, 18, "The Penelope Chapter". Yes, it is an already much commented on chapter.  Yes, it is the stream-of-consciousness female-narrator, having her period, gushing prose chapter.  Yes, it has no punctuation save for 8-periods.  Yes, it is the chapter in which she responds to her  getting her period by directly addresses her creator in the "O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh" line .  Yes, it is the chapter in which it is argued  because her symbol is eight, "he sent me the 8 big poppies because mine was the 8th",  the figure eight of her reclining body symbolizes , and draws the symbol for infinity and all the implications therein.  Yes. it is the chapter where every Joyce reader can feel erudite discussing one three-letter word.  Yes, my name is Penelope so it is often assumed because my mother went into labour during a Ulysses exam that it is also my origin. Yes, because of all these interpretations, I do feel compelled to do Chapter 18 justice.   

Artistically representing this chapter calls for a response as open-ended, intricate, complicated, capricious, convoluted, symbolic,  as this chapter's claims on time, experience, epic, and as culmination of my experience with it, a final chapter for  Joyce as Lived Experience!  

For the first 17 Chapters, I shackled myself to certain artistic manacles when compiling my Ulysses guide.  "Buy nothing but tape!" For my fodder/material,  I plumbed the depths of recycling bins, coffee shops, garment tags, advertisements, wrappers,  everything sent to me by post, and thoroughly investigated the packaging of all consumables for years in order to find images that related to the text, theme, commentary, describing my own imagination, literal and figurative illumination, etc.  To highlight Homeric parallels, episodic idiosyncrasies,  and  (Gilbert/Linati) Schemata each chapter was distinct in tone, image, ink colour, and style. This image treasure hunt,  calling out to be met by coincidence, allowing the universe and the intent/content to come to me, was, I've come to believe, a practice of divination. Kismet and magic figure large .

Repurposing Joyce's Reimagined Epic in Epic Proportion

Therefore, for the guide's 18th chapter, had to be "a something more"*, a next step.  It necessitated a jumping off the page, and to hurl itself at the timelessness, usefulness, of the Epic form.  

Ulysses as a modern epic, or the refiguring of the epic, holds tremendous magical responsibility.  According to an authority I admire, Harvard's Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, the ancient Greeks believed that every emotion contained within the human breast, every morality, every answer, and useful yarn for a babe-bounced-on-knee was contained in Homer.  I argue that Ulysses fulfills this "whole-education" function.  

Epic also colloquially means, "big" and "cool".  No pressure there. 

(*Greek, from the Greek epithon- "a something more/ something added"; "epithet" from the verb "to add on", epitithenai)

So the  the ante in this project's scope and loftiness upped. I had to drop my worm's eye view, and  recognized challenges even before I began.  For example, Robert Anton Wilson calls the novel"inexhaustible".  The "Gifford/Seidman"'s  epigram incites, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality."   Of course the professors and participants busily discussed James Joyce's "ecretive" artistic mode at the 'Art of James Joyce: The 26th International James Joyce Symposium' in Antwerp; my Joyce response necessitated storytelling as rich as improvisation: (yes) AND!AND! AND!  Begging a stratospheric level of mastery, art, expression, and complexity, I needed a medium vast enough to fulfill the drive to create, emulate, and interpret Joyce.

So I became that medium.

Next Steps, First Steps, Millionth Steps

 Wales' poet laureate Gwyneth Lewis' deserves credit for her nudge into my  'going-forth-for-the-millionth time' next step.  In Bread Loaf Summer Session 2017, not only did she challenge me with "your guide is well and good and pleasurable, but what next?" She also shared,  "A teacher of mine would do a tarot reading whenever she had to take a next step."  This advice 'tuned in' with the way my artistic drive works; Ulysses is a lived experience, full of archetype, role, and many turns.  

Carl Jung, a figure who provides deliciously low-hanging fruit for Joyce Scholarship (his criticism and praise of Joyce may be argued as  almost as vast as his own contributions to human flourishing), in his much talked about September 1932 letter,  said of the Penelope Chapter, "The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches."  Jung, however, championed the use of Tarot Cards,  and asserted, "The cards combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of mankind.”    Could correspondences to Ulysses also contribute to the playful development of mankind?  Could detritus and trash reveal an object to facilitate that play? 

James Joyce themed 52-Card playing card decks were conceived by Anthony Burgess and Richard Ellman.

Seeing clearly for myself the connection between Joyce and Tarot, I felt compelled  to learn everything about Tarot as it may or may not relate to James Joyce studies.  Immediately, I therefore over-complicated it.  

Here's how I commenced on my personal FOOL's journey.  Although a renown chiromancer since summer camp, it was my little sister (very featured in the cards) who was card-literate**.    I had much to learn.  There were explicit connexions and many occult.  Initially, I had a borrowed copied of Papus,'  "Tarot of the Bohemians" and decided to supplement that very intricate text with ad hoc Hebrew lessons from one of my high school-age students.   In the context of 16 June, 1904 Yeats, Joyce and Yeats (both Yeats boys relationship to iconic illustrator Pamela "Pixie" Colman  Smith) seemed a good lead. Not only was Pixie Smith the Art Nouveau poster artist for Irish Revival Plays, but her tarot images and illustrations are probably the ones you know.  (In tarot deck maker communities and online forums, be prepared to answer if your deck is a Rider-Waite-Smith "clone". Mine is not.) Smith will bring a seeker to the  philosophies of Golden Dawn, and how her views differed from W.B.'s.  Crowley and Yeats became the next first step, (then a rabbit hole dropped me in  Robert Anton Wilson's Tao of Joyce...).  

For the sake of additional familiarity, for 18-months, I have been practicing daily tarot readings using  primarily Crowley's Thoth deck, and (in no ordinal affiliation) the  Irish Revival Poster/centennial Smith tarot deck, the Celtic/ Wild Wood tarot, Goddess Tarot, Happy Tarot, the tarot of Cathars, the tarot of Helen, Tarot of Japanese Fairy tale,  and Ulysses again and again.  

[Note tarot decks make great gifts; it is a widely held cross-cultural superstition that a reader cannot purchase a deck: the cards will lie.]

I have been awash in interpretation, hoping that this art project may lend itself to daily interpretation and reading Ulysses, albeit  in a refigured mode.  My hope is to make the cards printable for personal use in the open source gregariousness shown by  Dark Tarot.   and in artistic revolutionaries like Sal Randolph's FREE CULTURE and FREE WORDS projects.  

FROM THE TEXT (the text that launched a thousand shifts): “God yes wait yes hold on he was on the cards this morning when I laid out the deck union with a young stranger neither dark nor fair you met before I thought it meant him but hes no chicken nor a stranger either besides my face was turned the other way what was the 7th card after that the 10 of spaces for a Journey by land then there was a letter on its way and scandals too the 3 queens and the 8 of diamonds for a rise in society yes wait it all came out and 2 red 8s for new garments look at that and didnt I dream something too yes there was something about poetry in it” (U. 18)

MAJOR ARCANA

Link to Major Arcana just images 

MAJOR ARCANA: Reverse order (21-00), from completion to potential. I did not necessarily construct them in order.  I tried to match the images with the tarot symbology as well as the meaning from the Joyce.  Sometimes the image would appear to me, or a symbol and I would have to build the card right then and there.  Other times, pieces of the cards would take months to emerge, or the text would best fit under a different archetype/trump card. 

THE COURT CARDS

Link to Court Cards Just Images 

PRINCESS OF WANDS/ GERTY MACDOWELL

Nostrils, Eyes, Fireworks, Tiger of fear, wedding slipper, tumescence/de-tumescence, dancing muses, positive energy

**I, like Flaubert and Joyce am proudly the "idiot of the family".  (See my Guide's "Nighttown with Sesquipedalians (Joyceans) "/ "Ulysses as lived experience" pp 177-179; "Idiot, from the Greek, "He who plays by himself" like idiosyncrasy, having one's own timeline; Nimrod's punishment in Dante's Inferno is to have a language unto himself.  Robert Pinksy discovered Nimrod's words are an anagram for the Jesus-on-the-cross Aramaic "O Lord, Why Have You Forsaken Me?".  There is a fine line between esoteric and totally obscure.  I hope the tarot conveys the playfulness and foolishness it intends.