En Rune Quiz Ere Qi: The Language of the Birds in Manhattan: Toward the How and Why Enrique Enriquez Reads the Marseille Tarot. A Collaborative Interview with Paul Nagy

Enrique Enriquez resides in Manhattan and is well known for his appreciation of historic tarot decks. His fresh and disciplined approach to the interpretation of this antique imagery bears only a superficial resemblance to the more synthetic ways tarot is usually read. Because of this distinctive approach to tarot reading, Paul thought an investigative interview designed to explain Enrique’s suppositions would make clear to the tarot reading community what he is does when he reads.

Paul Nagy is a professional tarot reader with a background in anthropology and the study of religions. He has been reading tarot infrequently for nearly 40 years. He has a special interest in how the iconic images of the tarot create communities of discourse and meaning. His website is  HYPERLINK “http://www.tarothermeneutics.com” www.tarothermeneutics.com 

Paul: The purpose of this interview is to ask you to show other tarot readers how and why you read the tarot the way you do. Let us begin with some direct examples of how you approach reading the Marseille tarot.

Enrique: Let me point out one main characteristic to a reading: an emphasis on the concrete as a source of unexpected swerves. Instead of moving from the cards to a place where I want to go, I move towards the cards, hoping they will take me to an unexpected place.

In principle, I hope to stay at the descriptive level. Instead of attempting to decode a symbolic system, I create an opportunity for me and others to contemplate the tarot as an object: its materiality, visual organization, temporal placement, its patterns and overall design. This way of reading is strictly about the material qualities of the tarot, not about its meaning.

A first level of reading tackles the whole image. The card ‘Judgement’ may be described as “an angel blows a trumpet and a man wakes up”, or even as “a noise wakes up a person”. The Fool may be described as “a man walking” or as “a man leaving”. You put these two cards together and you have “get up and leave”.

This makes it possible for anybody to address the tarot, and for the tarot to address anybody. It rules out a need for any type of special ‘knowledge’, occult or otherwise. It also rules out any need to possess some sort of psychic or ‘intuitive’ gift to look at the cards, nor does one need to believe in some external agency working in the cards than just the mere reality of cardboard, ink and pictures.

Within this first level of reading, and depending on the situation, one may respond to the imagistic analogies present in the cards. Every card offers an image that can be described by more than one word or sound. Death can be the Grim Reaper, or a gardener. Temperance can be a moral virtue or a bartender. Usually, it is the client’s question that anchors these analogies to one sense or another.

What I would try to avoid is to project my subjectivity on the images. If we can see a bartender in Temperance is because the image of temperance and a bartender share some concrete qualities. That would be very different from seeing a seagull in Temperance’s dress, for example. I do my best to avoid seeing Elvis on a toasted bread slice. The tarot is not a Rorschach test.

At another level, a homophony [quality of having the same pronunciation as one or more other words with a different origin and meaning], can be found in the way one or more cards, together, spell something. Perhaps it becomes a pun as: The Sun/ the son.

The Fool spells “Full”.

The Fool  next to The Wheel of Fortune spells “fooling around”.

The Wheel of Fortune spells “the will of fortune” and “four tunes”,

The Wheel of Fortune next to The World spells “around the world”.

Judgement next to The Hanged Man spells “blow your noose/nose”.

The Star next to Justice spells “wash/watch the scales”.

The Tower alone spells “Fall” alluding either to the act of falling down or to the autumn season.

The Sun spells “the son”.

Next to The Empress, The Tower spells “her fall/fault” and also “hair falls”. Hour to impress!

La Papesse is a nun, so, she spells both “none” and “noon”.

As long as you look for exceptions instead of rules, the game is endless.

A second level of descriptive, or literal, reading may focus on the relationship between the elements of two or more cards that are somehow similar. This is looking for homologies such as colors, animals, articles of apparel, body gestures, gaze, direction of movement,

When you place two cards next to each other, the eyes start bouncing between patterns. The eyes look without knowing, until they know.

Let us say we have two cards: Strength and The Fool. The characters in these two cards look towards the right. The woman in Strength stands still and struggles with a big blue creature in front of her, a lion.

Figure 1 Jean-Claude Flornoy’s Jean Dodal Marseille Tarot. All rights reserved

A first level of reading would present us with a woman standing, seeing how a man walks away. We could ‘spell’ that as “forced to leave”. We could also see it as a woman who is struggling at the fact that this man is leaving. I would present all of these observations as layers of the same reading, without favoring any of them, unless there is a question in the air raised by the client that derails my observations in one precise direction.

A second level of reading shows how the man in The Fool walks forward, while ignoring a small blue creature that is behind him, a cat. Since both cards show a person and both cards show a blue creature, I will take the two persons to be one and the same, just as the blue creatures are one and the same.

Paul: Now is this what you mean by similarity? What about variety such as a hand on a walking stick or her hand over/in the mouth of lion?

Enrique: That is part of the similarities, of course. From a bodily point of view, you can map similarities between the heads of the characters (facing left, center or right), the bodies of the characters (sitting, standing, walking), and whatever the character’s hands are doing. Having two or more characters showing a ‘turn’ of the head, from left (past) to right (future) is a story in itself. The same thing applies with hands struggling with something and then holding a cane. There is a whole narrative process going on there.

We may perceive this similarity as a key to a possible narrative. To make these visual rhymes obvious to myself and to shape what I may say I follow two simple rules, both based on the idea of treating the tarot’s images as language (We will discuss the poets who inspire this image-to-language approach later):

- All elements showing similar shapes refer to the same idea.

- Elements from different cards that occupy the same position within the surface of the card (i.e. “center”, “upper left corner”, etc) are related.

If we look again at Strength and The Fool, we see how my initial observations follow these two rules. Rule number one connects the blue creatures as representing one single idea: the same big thing we struggle with in the first card is the small one we leave behind in the second card.

Rule number two accounts for the relationship between the two human figures: the person who stands in the first card and the person who walks away in the second card are one and the same. Understanding this is instantaneous. It only takes a glance. I like to think this is akin to “thinking” with our eyes.

I like to think that, if we stay at the level of concrete images, without venturing any definitive significance to these visual connections, we are enacting beautiful thinking. The Greek word for ‘beautiful thinking’ is ‘eunoia’. This is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. The shortest word in French containing the five vowels is ‘oiseau’ (‘bird’). The word eunoia is used in medicine to define a normal, healthy, mind. I like the connection between a bird flying from tree to tree, and therefore connecting these trees as if it were outlining some sort of invisible drawing, and the idea of a healthy mind that draws connections between apparently distant ideas.

A healthy mind flies like a bird.

At the center of the whole image-to-language translation lays a poetics of erasures. Not only are we erasing all the cultural baggage that comes with the cards, but more importantly, when you notice a common element in two or more cards, the rest of the details in these cards vanish.

Paul: Do different elements vanish in different readings?

Enrique: It is only by placing two or more cards together that you see which elements these cards have in common. It is only by noticing what these cards have in common that you will know what to vanish. This is similar to making anagrams: the same elements arrange in several different ways to show, and conceal, several different things.

In our example, as soon as we ‘lock in’ the lion-cat rhyme, the rest of the elements in these two cards become more or less irrelevant. The beauty of it is how the second card is the one telling us how to read (or what to see in) the first card.

Each card re-contextualizes the previous ones. I like how that outlines the fact that the Marseille tarot follows the logistics of a language: the context gives meaning to its units.

Things get really exciting when we work with the pips. Let us say we have the IIII of Swords followed by the Queen of Coins and the V of Cups.

Figure 2 Jean-Claude Flornoy’s Jean Dodal Marseille Tarot. All rights reserved

Following the first rule we notice how the flower in the IIII of Swords looks similar to the blue vines in the V of Cups. That yellow flower also looks similar to the golden coin held by the Queen of Coins.

Look at the center of these cards: if we follow the second rule, we see a flower in the IIII of Swords, a hand holding a scepter in the Queen of Coins, and a cup in the V of Cups. If we look at the upper left corner of these three cards, we see how the IIII of Swords shows the tip of two scimitars and a little flower bud, the Queen of Coins shows a hand holding a coin and the V of Cups shows a cup.

The fact that these elements can be linked to each other has intrinsic narrative qualities. I can simply point that out, and it will be meaningful. I like the idea of the reading being an object I toss to the other person. The act of meaning-making becomes a matter of how that person catches the object.

Paul: Is that because the object stays concrete? It is sort of like a physical pun? “Anna logical is an oxy moron, because met a four adore I need to open.” “Analogical is an oxymoron because metaphor [is] a door I need to open.”

Enrique: Exactly. We can only get to the pun, or to the swerve, if we address the image’s concrete nature. I try to stay at the concrete level to leave the interpretative aspects to my client. Projecting my own subjectivity into the cards serves no useful purpose. It is the client’s subjectivity that counts the connections.

I am also aware of the fact that any description is in itself a form of interpretation. At times, describing these visual rhymes could be fascinating enough. I like to think that the rhythm we see in the cards may somehow find their match in the spoken rhythms we create when we describe these cards.

So, here is where I am now: I am looking for a visual-oral cadence that can help me thread these visual correspondences into a consistent sound pattern.

Perhaps I was inspired to do this by René Guenón’s definition of the language of the birds as “the science of rhythm”. If there is rhythm in the cards, then there should be rhythm in the voice that describes the cards.

I believe in ‘retrospective inspiration’. Sometimes I am working on something and after the fact I discover that someone else did the same thing before I did, so, that person inspires me to have my own idea again. That can be humbling, sobering, crushing, or inspiring. But I have discovered it can help me make sense of what I am doing on a whole new level.

I like the idea of seeing these elements turning into each other, because the notion of transformation also has inherent narrative qualities. Anne Tardos says that life consists on “trying to preserve a certain form”, but I suspect it is the other way around: Life is the narration of how our forms are constantly changing.

It wasn’t until I saw Richard Serra talking about how, at the beginning of his career, he created his sculptures by using verbs to have an effect on industrial materials that it hit me: a reading consists on using words to have an effect on the cards.

Paul: Now you are really moving into an exciting way of generating tarot readings, and I hope others are following along with you at this important level of transition; it seems to be two things at once. It is the image, and it is the suggestive transformative verb. The words and sentences suggested by the images. The verb is the nerve of a sentence. It is of the soul of utterance. Yet here the utterance is the formal quality, an isolated image, held together by a homology, by likeness, thereby difference? 

Enrique: Yes. ‘Verb’ here is understood both as part of the sentence, technically speaking, and as the soul of the cards, the utterance that gives them life.

I started by working with the verb ‘turn’, in a very simple matrix:

_________ TURNS INTO __________

My choice of this verb comes from the actual experience or reading a sequence of cards in a narrative fashion. When I read the tarot I assume that the characters and elements in the first card become the characters and elements in the second card. Their transformations account for the pass of time and the actual action in the whole sequence. Spring turns into summer. Night turns into day. Childhood turns into adolescence. We are all familiar with such ways of mapping the narrative of life.

If we ‘fill in’ this matrix with the rhymes we saw above, we get:

a flower TURNS INTO a hand, a hand TURNS INTO a cup.

two scimitars TURN INTO a coin, a coin TURNS INTO a cup.

By this repetition of the matrix verb and the individual elements, we obtain an automatic cadence that is both pleasing and intriguing to the ear. This pattern also has an inherently narrative quality. Anybody can do this. It does not have anything to do with being ‘intuitive’, ‘gifted’, or touched by lightning. Rather it is adhering to the constraints of the rules and the transformation of elements of the cards’ images into words in a disciplined way.

Just as Serra made a list of verbs to use, I thought I could use other verbs besides ‘turn’. But I struggled to find a coherent way of choosing these verbs. The tarot follows a specific logic based on chance operations. It seemed to me that simply choosing verbs at will wasn’t consistent with that logic.

Paul: I like your economy of choice. Sure any old verb will do, but will it be true to the natural integrity of the tarot? Even with the quaint innovations in Jodorowsky’s reading of the Marseille tarot, he attempts to stay within the natural economy of the cards.

Enrique: I agree. You can’t cut an apple with a tennis ball. The material should dictate the way you play with it.

Then I realized that if you borrow the structure of a sentence: subject-verb-object and impose in to a three-card sequence, you are automatically turning any middle card into a verb.

As I was walking on the street I named three random cards aloud and noticed that I actually was spelling a sentence: “Temperance coins the Chariot”. This is almost like treating the three-card sequence as a rebus (a sentence made of pictures whose names spell syllables or words), or a visual pun.

I got lucky because, by chance, the first time I thought of this I got coins as my second card. See what happens there? The word ‘coin’ can function both as a noun and as a verb. This made the fact that the second card may function as a verb even more obvious to me. But at that point I realized you do not need an actual verb in the middle place. You can use any element as a verb. The idea of turning cups, swords or wands into verbs fills me with wonder.

Paul: Nouns become verbs when names are allowed to act as well as designate.

Enrique: Beautiful, yes, and words inspire in me, a desire to take a second look at the image-words, and let them open up to phases and new turns of nouns and verbs.

I assume that a person comes for a tarot reading because she ran out of reasonable options. I feel it is my duty as a tarot reader to present her with signs and sounds she may not have considered, and the card images, following the constraints, seem to suggest in the words.

Back to our example, IIII of swords followed by the queen of coins and the V of cups becomes:

swords turn into cups · swords queen cups

a flower turns into a hand · a flower queens a hand

a hand turns into a cup · a hand queens a cup

two scimitars turn into a hand · two scimitars queen a hand

a hand turns into a cup · a hand queens a cup

Read aloud it gives rhythm to the card-image transformations. Now we have music!

I like to think that the end result becomes a score for a performance piece, not so much as performed by me, but by the person hearing this reading. A reading like that should take them right to that point in space where they are reading it. They are seeing and hearing it.

Paul: If I understand what you are saying so far, there does not seem to be serious solicitation of the needs or the wants of the client as preamble to the reading: such as asking if they have a purpose for the reading or a question. I agree with you in practice that a tarot reader’s discipline is to read the cards and not attempt to psych the client, but sometimes having a sense of the client’s concerns helps shape the reading. Do you follow any rules of thumb here?

Enrique: A person needs to have a very particular kind of intelligence to engage with images (any kind of images) in a useful way. The whole enterprise of art is based on the fact that we, human beings, possess such intelligence, but it is also commonly assumed that art is not for everybody.

At the moment I can’t honestly subscribe to any bombastic claim about the purpose of tarot readings. The tarot may not be for everybody. Tarot readings won’t accomplish the same things for everybody.

So far I have been talking about the performance of tarot, which may or may not be the same thing as the performance of a reading for a client. On top of having empathy with the images, a reading asks for creating rapport with another human being.

So far I have been discussing my quest to find the tarot’s crank, or its pedals; that contraption which, once located, guarantees I may get some sound out of the cards. I simply hope to be the monkey grinding the organ.  I seek for beauty in the performance of the tarot, by a notion that, if such beauty is brought forth, the client will in turn make beauty into meaning for them.

By the same token, I would not betray the simplicity of the Marseille tarot. It only takes a glance to get a direct answer from the cards. If a person just has a question, I am happy to answer it, so long as the person leaves right away!

I never know what can be accomplished in a reading until the reading is over.

Paul: That is better than me, I will often do a reading and have no idea what it is about, but, the client seems to know and that seems good enough.

Enrique: That would be my ideal approach, in that it is the best way to make room for extraordinary happenstances.

)

II

Paul: Enrique can you say how you became aware of tarot? And then how you became a tarot reader? Provide us with some autobiographical context?

Enrique: I was that child you find in every classroom: the one who can draw better than the other kids. I remember my kindergarten classmates teasing me. It was the 70’s and there was this idea, aliens were coming to take all the talented people. I was the only kid in my class who could draw a horse with four legs; not four sticks, but actual legs with hooves and everything. So, my classmates thought I was doomed. I had to be on the aliens’ list! But the aliens never came. Not for me at least. Perhaps I wasn’t that talented!

I am thankful to drawing because drawing made me who I am. Drawing is not art, but a practice, like language is a practice, or like tarot is a practice. It builds us up. Drawing is a form of thinking and a way we have to interrogate the world.

The tarot is drawing made language.

Paul: Drawing is re-seeing? 

Enrique: In terms of ‘seeing’ drawing helps me apprehend the shape of objects, and more importantly, I learn to see their relationship in space. It is interesting how close drawing and metaphor are. Both share the notion of bringing things from one realm into another realm. The word ‘draw’ includes the act to marking the surface of the paper with a pencil, the act of mapping an analogy, and the act of bringing something out. I understand drawing as all of these things at once. In terms of ‘doing’ drawing is a very similar process to spelling: the body contorts to create forms that weren’t there before, forms whose language can be meaningful to others. Here, ‘spelling’ should be taken both as speaking and as exorcizing. We ‘spell’ out words or images ejected from the body into the world.

When we point out the visual relationships between two or more elements in the cards, or in space, either by gestures or with our voice, we are drawing. When we map the connection between two objects with our eyes, we are drawing.

The actual making of the drawing amounts to a bureaucratic task that I am not interested in anymore. That holds nothing for me.

Paul: If I had an artist’s gift of rendition, confronted with Marseille tarot deck’s images, I might study the images for their vocabulary of design, but as a designer, I would be tempted to redesign the images to bring out what I see and what is not seen because of visual drift. 

Enrique: That is the route Jean-Claude Flornoy followed. He understood the Marseille tarot by re-drawing it. I don’t mean re-interpreting it or by making it his own deck, but by copying the existing ones. That was also the advice Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres gave to his students: “the secret of the masters was to be humble, to copy everything dumbly”.

Jean-Claude Flornoy left us with two great reconstituted decks: the Jean Noblet and the Jean Dodal. I use them both. The Noblet is crasser, and even so, it is more elegant. The Dodal is clumsier, but it is full of details the Noblet is lacking; details that the Marseille tarot folklore regards as relevant: Death has no name; there is a black bird in The Star; one of the kids in The Sun is blind…

Jean-Claude taught me that you do not work with the images, but the images work you. Images affect you, change you. To me that links the experience of the tarot to the experience of art, not to divination.

I personally have experienced the possibilities of drawing as a repository of memories in the most absolute primal sense: whatever I was thinking, hearing or experiencing while I made a drawing, anything, even if it wasn’t related to the drawing in itself, can be retrieved back by me when I look at the drawing again.

For example: when I was 18 I did some drawings in my grandfather’s house. I would be drawing while he was in the next room watching TV. I would look at these drawings a week or two weeks after I made them and recall bits of the shows he was watching. It wasn’t the whole drawing that elicited these memories, but specific lines, or sections of the drawing, as if one line could contain the memories of an auditory experience. This happened only at a personal, subjective, level. I could not make another person hear the jingle I was hearing just by looking at my drawing. I think Jean-Claude believed he could connect with the original card-makers by copying the cards.

Paul: This is an intriguing observation. Of course there are many approaches to learning tarot where the tarot reader is enjoined to copy their own deck for reading. I crudely render tarot card images all the time. I also discover in the process of copying I see things by tracing and concentrating on parts and the way an image inheres strikes me as if I have never seen it before.

Enrique: That experience of encoding a sound in a line, in a way that can be replayed by another person, is something I have only achieved through the tarot.

Paul: You seem to not want to redraw the deck to your own ability, but rather you seem to want to re-see, envision the crude images in there suggestive but also occulted complexity. 

Enrique: The fact that I can draw doesn’t mean I have to show my drawings. The fact that I can draw doesn’t even mean I have to make drawings! Rather I “talk drawing” with other people, through the Marseille tarot, by using my eyes and not my ‘I’.

There is a notion I have borrowed from Conceptual Writing that I find useful to explain how I approach the tarot: “source text”. The writer takes any found text, a text she did not write, and apply a set of constrains to it, creating a new text. For example, poet Jen Bervin took several of Shakespeare’s sonnets and picked only a few words in them to create new poems. The position of the words in the page remains the same as in the original sonnet, but by eliminating most of the words, the ones remaining draw new relationships among themselves.

Or we have poet Michael Stewart, who only kept the words “and” in Magdalena Tulli’s “Dreams and Stones” while eliminating all the other words on the page. You could do this right now with this interview: change every single word to white except for the word “tarot” and you will find what Stewart found: the repeated word, scattered on the page, creates constellations like the ones we see up there in the sky.

Paul: Yep, I am already anchoring myths to those patterns…

Enrique: I like to see the Marseille tarot as a “source text”. I don’t want to make new images. There is nothing wrong or incomplete in them. I want to make these images new by re-telling them while following some specific constraint I have previously defined by looking at the cards themselves.

Sometimes I would read them by paying attention only to the direction of the character’s gaze. Some other times I would read them by describing these things that two or more cards have in common. Or I would read them by looking only at what the character’s hands are doing; or by describing the next card in sequence to the one I am seeing: or by paying attention only to the shapes taken by the color blue as I demonstrated above in the tarot reading example.

The cards tell me how to read them. They dictate which constraint I should use.

Paul: This claim is made by Camion and Jodorowsky among others that the cards themselves are sufficient to significance. The importation of other systems of signification is not necessary to the oracular voice of the deck. 

The art in tarot, once the deck is created, is not so much in the deck as it is the tarot reader who reads the deck toward uniqueness, because the cards’ images themselves are mass produced and mechanically alike.

Enrique: Yes, the art of the tarot is in the performance of the tarot. As I do it now: I translate pieces of tarot images into words and sentences following the constraints suggested by the deck in itself.

We have seen, in the last fifty years, much thought and work devoted to the visual aspect of the tarot, but very little in regards its aural level (the eye-in-the-ear so to speak). Usually most tarot readings seem to have a “default” sound defined by the social purpose given to the reading: a reading would sound like a weather forecast if the reader is a fortuneteller, like a therapy session if the reader is a therapist, or like a fairy tale, etc.

I am interested in reworking the sound of readings. That may include the reverberations of forecasting or therapy, but it should open up to other sounds that would make the reading interesting in itself.

Paul: Seeing-to-hear and looking-to-tongue-or-voice is often how we catch ourselves in space and naturally extend our self a bit beyond the surface of our body. So you also bring forth what you see by drawing. It becomes your drawing by telling the visual language of tarot.

Enrique: I discovered the tarot when I was 18 and went to study graphic design. What we were taught there was that: a visual language, or the ability to communicate visually. I never had any intention to work as a graphic designer, and I never did.

Back in Caracas, at that time, all the art schools were in the government’s hands and all of them were quite mediocre. So, whomever wanted to become an artist had to get into this small private school modeled after the Bauhaus. You couldn’t say you wanted to be an artist, of course. You had to put on a face that says “I don’t want to express myself, I want to communicate to the masses!” and cheat the system. In order to be accepted you had to endure a two-week long test, 8 hours a day, and you were competing with hundreds of other applicants for 20 spots. I got in. I don’t remember much of these two weeks. I only remember those two weeks made me allergic to gin.

I also remember a self-portrait made by this beautiful girl from Sweden who was also taking the test: she drew herself standing in front of a tree that had a bird-headed man hanging from it by the neck. “Who is that?” I asked her. She said he was a friend.

In retrospect, I might relate that bird-headed man to The Hanged Man, but I had no knowledge of the tarot at the time. There was a great library at this institute. I remember seeing tarot cards, for the first time in my life, in a book about the history of printing. There were some knights, queens, a devil, a tower… Medieval-looking, crude, images that I found very intriguing. I didn’t found them intriguing because of what they meant. I didn’t know their meaning. I found them intriguing because of what they were: basic, solid images lacking artifice and therefore being primal, primitive, truthful, like the German Expressionist woodcuts are truthful in that they lack any affectation. They were pure.

It would be tempting to do a reading on these cards I saw in the book, but I never apply the cards to my own life. I think about the cards and that makes my life better, not because any message or meaning the cards may have, but because the beauty of the visual connections I draw between them is uplifting.

Paul: Likewise I rarely read the cards for myself. If I have an issue I want to consult an oracle about, I go to another reader because I am too aware of self-deception. However I read cards very often about the meaning of cards.

Enrique: There is something else I remember from these times: there was an art history teacher who decided to hate me as soon as he laid eyes on me. I was never in his class, nor did I ever speak to him, but he hated me anyway.

He was a tarot reader! It seems that having a reading with him was some sort of secret privilege. A girl told me he would see you at his apartment, and read the tarot to you for an entire afternoon. Since most of the students at that institute were –quite gorgeous– women, I always thought he had something great going on.

Paul: Is tarot a trope for seduction as well as suspect persuasion? Given how often the query is about a serious love or soul mate?

Enrique: I would quote Prophet Muhammad: “avoid ye rhyming prose of the soothsayers or diviners”. I personally love that quote because my aim is to achieve in my readings what Muhammad is reproving: a sound-sense of rhyming prose. The quote points out that a reading is always an act of seduction, even if not necessarily sexual seduction. A tarot reader is selling a story. Selling is an act of seduction.

Paul: The persuasion of the sing-song rhyme subverts our reason by lulling us into trance.

Enrique: I am convinced that readings operate through hypnotic patterns. This is both exciting and terrifying. Outside the tarot world, where people tend to be compassionate, and we have several authors giving serious thought to what we do, the tarot inhabits a world of ignorance: ignorant people looking for lottery numbers going to see ignorant people possessed by the fictions of their own ‘gifts’. Ignorance fueled by the power of seduction adds up to a nightmarish landscape.

Paul: Thank goodness I know no such devious tarot readers! The worst I see is people who cannot see beyond their own projections, and since I can make no claim to privileged knowledge and am as gullible as any when it comes to my blind spots, at least perhaps, I can amuse a client with an entertaining tarot reading. 

Enrique: There is a key element in the art experience that has been eradicated from tarot readings: pleasure. For the enthusiast the tarot is a source of pleasure; but I would go as far as saying that pleasure is the last thing the average client looks for in a tarot reading. They come for practical purposes. They want to know how things are going to play out. They want answers, insights, and solutions to their problems.

I tend to find that a little terrifying.

We can get straightforward practical advice from the tarot if we use the images as traffic signals: The Fool suggest to “go for it.” La Papesse directs us to “sit down and wait,” etc. But putting our blind faith in the cards that way would be a form of madness, unless we are consciously taking these instructions as constraints we accept with certain playfulness. Such playfulness is the underlying principle of any kind of art.

Michel Foucault said something like “madness is life without art”. When you take the pleasure off the equation, you are left with madness.

I eventually left the institute to focus on my painting, and I forgot about the tarot. (Well, that is not true. My wife recalls that the day we met, at an art show where I had one piece, that piece was a tarot deck. I basically re-painted the Marseille trumps onto oversized wooden plates, creating a clumsy, heavy deck that could not be shuffled).

‘Botánicas’, the shops where people linked to spiritism and Afro-Cuban religions went for their materials, interested me. Those were the only places where you would find tarot cards, and the only tarot you would find there was the Marseille.

I was fascinated by the imagery of these shops, where you could buy an armadillo tail or a stone that came from the place where a lightning bolt touched the earth. You want to travel more? Tie up a toy airplane to your bed. Do you want to break a couple? Put two figurines representing them in your refrigerator. In a sense, a tarot reading is no different: we affect people’s minds with symbols.

Now I understand that what these shops really sold were metaphors.

Paul: Yes that is what magic is: concrete analogies, metaphors, where something is itself and something other. Much like language: it is speech sounds that are another thing, what the speech sounds represent. Though supposedly a complex idea built out of many analogies and metaphors, symbols are actually the seed for the analytics or particular additive or subtractive functions of analogy and metaphor. This is the echo of our theory of mind: The shift of what makes humans speak.

Enrique: Magic symbols do not live exclusively in old grimoires anymore, but in art, advertising and fashion, so, even when I started out as a painter, I soon moved onto the idea of using mass-media as my art material. I took any intervention I could make in the media as my artwork. That included interviews, articles I wrote, projects I designed for posters, billboards, magazines or radio stations, and any gesture that would turn the artist’s practice into a media event. That certainly taps into the idea of the artist-as-trickster but without the spiritual overtones of the artist as shaman. I wasn’t trying to ‘heal’ the world, but to sabotage it.

There is a word in Spanish ‘bochinche’ that perfectly summons up my philosophy at the time. It means something like a “playful sabotage,” a derailment from the established order taken for amusement purposes. I won’t waste too much time talking about the things I did before becoming a tarot reader. Suffice to say that I had enough notoriety to get away with many shenanigans. (I still think that is a good definition for ‘happiness,’ by the way). But whatever I was doing was derivative and of little consequence for the world at large.

At some point someone offered me the possibility to move to New York to work in animation. I jumped at it, but it did not last. I became a tarot reader because there was nothing else I wanted to be, or perhaps, because there was nothing else this city was willing to accept from me.

I am happy enough to be called a “tarot reader”; although these days I feel the word “fortuneteller” is more beautiful. I love conjoined words.

Paul: So does James Joyce! Soothsayer is soothing, wouldn’t you agree?

Enrique: Absolutely! Although I cannot help but seeing the ‘tooth’ in soothsaying, which to me suggest that the word is made of xilocaine.

My work as tarot reader is informed by many of these ideas I borrow from the arts, but I do not think I can make art more interesting than it is. I think the tarot can be made more interesting than what people think it is.

Paul: This seems to be crucial. You stay with the image as the processes of thinking to speaking, and these cards for you become the vocabulary of the speech act as the process of discovery and invention.

Enrique: The cards are my source text to create unlimited texts. Here, we can go back to the idea of drawing as a repository of memories: the words I said while pointing at a card become attached to their recollection of the cards. By recalling the images  my listeners recall my words, just like when I looked at the drawings I made at my grandfather’s house and recalled the sounds of the TV shows he was watching.

Paul: Also how has the culture of New York City aided you in reading the cards? 

Enrique: I believe in the idea of living a ‘beautiful life’; a life in which you wake up every day and go do something you love in a context where you can experience and create beauty. New York is a place where you can find the most diverse range of people and personal stories. Every person I see on the street is a landscape I want to travel in. I need a bridge. I have years of experience using drawing to think about reality. I have been flirting with the tarot images for years. It seems natural to start “speaking tarot”.

I found a coffee shop, sat in there once a week to read tarot for free, and became part of this city, part of its many landscapes.

(There is that other version of why I became a tarot reader that I have told before, about a “tall, dark, stranger” telling me that I inherited the ‘gift’ from my great-grandmother. That’s a true story and it may be a better tale, but is not one I believe. I made myself a tarot reader because I needed to survive. I don’t mean making money. I needed to relocate myself within the world of images, a world outside of which I don’t know how to live).

Paul: Reading the Marseille tarot is a creation of beauty! How so?

Enrique: Traditionally, we see the creation of beauty as mainly consisting on putting together some pleasing arrangement: a painting, a sculpture, a symphony, an outfit, a meal, or a bouquet. I am interested in how our ability to map connections between things is pleasing in itself. In other words, crafting a pattern, as in making a drawing, a poem, or a song, can create beauty, and that beauty will give us pleasure; but detecting a pattern is also a pleasing act derived from its inherent beauty. I don’t mean only the beauty of the pattern, but the beauty of seeing the pattern.

Detecting a pattern is creating a pattern.

To be able to see is a kind of beauty in itself. There is also beauty in sharing that ability to see, not as one final, finished product (a drawing), but as an experience. I can turn my eyes into birds and have them flying from one object to another, but it is way more memorable if I also turn your eyes into birds and you can fly with me.

Paul: Here perhaps we are at the crux of your practice! Drawing is a way for you to think about how things can become. 

Enrique: Exactly!

I draw with my eyes by using only straight lines. My sight travels on a straight line to the moon. Then, it travels on a straight line to a hole in a curtain. Perhaps my finger follows that gesture by drawing an actual straight line in the air. That straight line is just a reminder of the fact that I have drawn two things together: the moon and a hole in a black curtain. After I drew that straight line, I know more about the moon, the sky, a curtain, and a hole, that I knew before.

Paul: The Marseille tarot images have captivated you for some years. Given the primitive, visually simplified, stylized tarot images, what were the elements that cause you to see in new ways these simple images when set in relation to each other during random selections? 

Enrique: Every material brings its own ideas. The ideas you would have while dealing with a piano are not the same ideas you would have while cutting a woman’s hair. I want to stress the fact that the possibility of seeing the Marseille tarot as a visual language is contained in its own forms. I didn’t make it up. If it weren’t for the Marseille tarot I wouldn’t have had these ideas and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. There is an actual consistency in the Marseille tarot’s images that manifests through homomorphism and visual rhyme; and there is a folklore risen up during the last century around the Marseille tarot that suggests this approach.

You can find these ideas hinted by Paul Marteau, outlined by Tchalai Unger, exploited by Philippe Camoin, and echoed by several other readers and authors, like Jean-Claude Flornoy or Alejandro Jodorowsky.

I am simply following that tradition while trying to expand on it by drawing a connection between that visual language and certain poetic traditions based on wordplay and punning. The distance I see between me and those tarot authors I mentioned has to do with the fact that I don’t go around talking about secret codes, but I keep repeating:

“Look! That way of reading the tarot is identical to the way poets play with words!”

)

III

Paul: How would you succinctly sum up your tarot practice? 

Enrique: My practice is focused on the performative aspects of the Marseille tarot, which include -but are not limited to- tarot readings.

I focus on the experience of the Marseille tarot as a concrete object in space (pieces of cardboard with images printed on them), an object whose poetics can be narrated. I would make a distinction between the poetics of the tarot’s images and the mythologies surrounding the tarot. Thinking in terms of how La Papesse’s crown is The Tower’s crown has little to do with the meaning assigned to these two images. I am becoming increasingly interested in the narrative of how the object works, and less concerned with the narrative of what the object means in it possible historic or mythic contexts.

There are others ways of approaching the tarot different from readings for people, like the tarot as a poetic artifact, as in the whole Tarocchi Appropriati tradition. Tarocchi Appropriati was a poetic game consisting on using the tarot’s trumps to describe a person in an amusing, poetic, way. It seems that almost from the moment people started playing with tarot card trumps in games, they also started using the tarot for poetry.

A big part of what interests me deals with the sound patterns of tarot readings; that aural layer of the cards I mentioned before, which cannot be reduced to voice alone: a gasp is part of it, crying or laughter are parts of it. The sounds of gambling are also part of the tarot’s sounds.

There is the tarot as the score of a performance, as in Calvino’s ‘Castle of Crossed Destinies’, which I have reenacted a few times. Calvino laid the whole deck on a table and wrote the stories he saw both in the horizontal and vertical rows these cards created. Calvino was a member of OuLiPo (‘Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle’, or, ‘workshop for potential literature’), a literary group whose main mission is to create ‘writing machines’, literary devices that could help writers create texts. These writing procedures hoped to function as substitutes for inspiration. Following Calvino I have improvised stories for an audience, starting with the full deck face down, and asking some participants to turn several cards over. Calvino uses very direct descriptions for the cards. For example: “a man attacked in the woods (The Hanged Man) is found by a woman who licks his wounds like a lioness would do (Strength).” It is powerful to see the power of the voice at re-contextualizing these images. His treatment of the pips is also very direct: coins are money, cups describe a party, wands describe the woods and swords describe battles. The Castle of Crossed Destinies is all one needs to read to understand what to do with the Marseille tarot.

I have been working on a series of situations in which a tarot card could instigate a poetic subversion of reality, like when I stopped the subway commute by trying to use the Chariot card as my metro card and acted as if I wasn’t aware of the absurdity of it. Overall, there is the idea of how all these visual and verbal connections the Marseille tarot are a tool for beautiful thinking. The tarot as an object whose poetics can be narrated and such narration can be a means in itself, a way to achieve stasis, a point of equilibrium in which we confuse the inner logic of a game with an outer truth about life.

Paul: When I hear you say what the objective means in the narrative, it seems to me, you are alluding to the exegesis [interpretation based upon the subjective experience and bias of the reader or client]. In theory one may court an objective meaning to the image that is only the appearance of the image and does not allude to learned discourse on medieval social customs and outmoded theological minutiae. That theory is an exegesis [interpretation based upon the objective card and image itself and the cultural-historical contexts that produced it], but in practice let us discover what is to be gained?

Enrique: I try to make my description as literal as possible because I trust my client will turn all these literal accounts into metaphorical statements about his/her situation.

The fact that we are meaning-seeking machines becomes especially true in the context of a reading. We use what we know to understand what we don’t know. That’s the basis of metaphorical thinking. That’s why tarot readings work.

If at any point I allude to the tarot’s iconography “The Hanged Man is an image derived from Italian Shame Paintings, depicting the way traitors were punished” or folklore, “Justice carries around her neck the rope to hang The Hanged Man” I would present that information as something that has being said about the cards, not as something I say. In other words, such information becomes part of my description of the tarot as an artifact, not my own opinion.

I can’t help it if the object, through the narration of its poetics, becomes an allegory for something else; but I do not see the crafting of a discourse about another person’s life, or her problems, as my ultimate goal; and I am not interested in elaborating a discourse about my ‘abilities’. Where the market expects for the reader to promote his/her own uniqueness, I divert all the focus away from myself and into the tarot.

Paul: It seems to me now that you are practicing a form of learned amnesia? Forgetting the arsenal of historic, cultural, and psychological associations these cards accumulate with past readings and study, you let the at-hand letters and images and perhaps fragments of images recombine among each other in an anagrammatic dance of new possibilities with little deliberate recall?

Enrique: It has been said that all the words we use are anagrams for ‘abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz’. We don’t really know what these letters in that sequence mean, but that doesn’t prevent us from understanding the meaning of any of the words we find by anagramming it. In the same fashion, we don’t need to know the original meaning of the whole trump series (if there was any) to understand the meaning of any sub-sequence we find by anagramming it.

Any reading of the tarot, any tarot, we do will be defined by some constraints we impose to it. Assuming a kabalistic approach is a type of constraint that would render a very specific kind of reading. Opting for an astrological approach would signify another type of constraint whose end result would be a very specific type of reading, different from working with a ‘four elements’ constraint, or a numerological constraint, or a combination of all these constrains, or a “go with your gut” constraint. I have simply chosen a type of constraint based on the way the Marseille tarot’s visual language has created a folklore that in turn created the Marseille tarot’s visual language.

Paul: Does this practice have a process you follow?

Enrique: There seems to be poetry in these cards. I would like to bring it out. You look at the cards and you discover that they are linked to each other through (visual) rhyme and pattern. You read their names and find puns in them. (The folklore says that La Maison Diev sounds at once like “the house of god” and “the soul and its god”; but let us not forget that The Sun is blue in the face, or that The Fool doesn’t have where to hang up his spoon). I play with the aural description of the cards, with layers of sounds on top of the images, and I get all kinds of weird correspondences between them. (L’Empereur is anagram for ‘merle pure’ (pure blackbird), like the one we see in Le Toille. The woman in Le Toille/le toilette is watering herself. To water oneself, ‘eaux soi’, is anagram for ‘oiseaux’ the French word for birds).

The French call that world play “la langue des oiseaux” (“the language of the birds”). I pay attention to the work of any author that plays with this language in one way or another. I read lots of poetry, and more precisely, word-play-based poetry mostly written by French authors because French is the Marseille tarot’s language.

Paul: You privilege French because the Marseille tarot is generally a French artifact? 

Enrique: Yes. By this I simply mean that these tarots were made in France; their images are inhabited by the French language. The French language has it as almost everything sounds like something else.

Think of example on how Robert Desnos wrote an entire poem using phrases that are homophones to its title, Rose Sélavy: Rose aisselle a vit/Rr’ose, essaiea lá, vit/Rots et sel á vie/Rose S, L, have I… or how the OuLiPo group wrote 32 homophonic sentences to “le tramway de Strasbourg” to be placed in 32 respective train stops. It is hard to think in any other language where you can take tone sentence and find 32 other sentences that sound the same but mean something else.

Similarly, in the Marseille tarot everything also looks like something else. Both are languages full of swerves: you think you know where they are going, and they end up taking you elsewhere. It makes sense then to have some folklore around the Marseille tarot suggesting it can be ‘played’ (as in ‘performed’) as the French play with their own language:

Le Tarot contient de 22 lames ses leçons/Le Tarot qu’on tient, devin de lames, c’est le son. 

(Roughly: the tarot contains its lessons in 22 cards/the tarot the diviner holds is made of sound.)

I haven’t been able to pin point the actual origin of that phrase, which is an example of what the French call ‘rime riche’ or ‘rich rhyme’; where several words with different meaning are pronounced identically. That phrase is both defining and exemplifying how to play with the Marseille tarot. I brush my teeth with it every morning

Raymond Roussel was a master of rime riche. Here is his classical example:

“les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard”

 (the white letters on the sides of the old billiard table)

“les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard”

(the white man’s letters about the old pillager’s band)

Roussel wrote that, for him, writing a novel consisted on setting one of these sentences as his starting point and writing his way towards the second sentence. Writing becomes the act of reflecting on the unexpected connections between two dissimilar ideas brought together by an accidental similarity in shape. (Roussel biographers suggest that he was quite familiar with the ‘têtes de carton’, huge paper maché effigies of politicians and prominent people that would carry humorous, pun-based captions on their heads. For example, the effigy of a bald man would carry a sign saying “Je suis chauve, hein!” ‘chauve’ means ‘bald’ but “chauve, hein” sounds like “chau-vin”, this is, a chauvinist).

The Marseille tarot’s design also allows for a visual version of rime riche, where several elements in the cards have similar shapes but represent totally different things. The World card and the II of Swords are the same image made from different elements. The mandorla (that blue floral ornament in The World card) resembles the elliptical shape of the two scimitars we see in the II of Swords. They share the same shape but differ in meaning. Thinking with our eyes we draw a straight line from the mandorla to the scimitars. By doing so we trace all kinds of connections between the idea of swords and what they represent, and the mandorla and what it represents, very much in the way Roussel did in his writings.

Figure 3 Jean-Claude Flornoy’s Jean Dodal Marseille Tarot. All rights reserved

The woman in The World takes the shape of a flower in the II of Swords. A flower blossoming inside the clash of two swords gets visually and conceptually paired to a woman inhabiting a garland of blue leaves. Reading the Marseille tarot becomes an act of reflecting on the unexpected connections between these two things.

What French wordplay allows and what the Marseille tarot allows are one and the same thing: their forms take us where we weren’t going in an accidental way that, once it becomes evident, doesn’t seems that accidental.

All over the Marseille tarot’s images we see a similarity of forms drawing connections between dissimilar objects. The working principle in rime riche is homophony: a similar sound draws two different words together. The visual version of this would be homomorphism: a similar shape draws two different things together. That is the Marseille tarot’s visual language active principle.

I don’t see any real evidence of a secret code embedded in the Marseille tarot. To me, redrawing the images would be a futile exercise. I did it when I was twenty, and I accomplished nothing.

Even so, there are plenty of authors swearing they possess the only key to the Marseille tarot’s ‘decoding’. So, if there is something to be discovered there, I am sure there are other people more suited to find it than myself.

I am not interested in the tarot because it is the repository of ancient knowledge, but because some of its performative aspects are the result of misreading a simple game of chance into an oracle. This is as wonderfully absurd as convincing a lady that her left shoe is a French poodle, and as such, it is full of poetic possibilities. I am fascinated by the potential of such swerves, even if I don’t care for the direction a particular swerve has taken us so far.

Paul: I see more continuity between oracles and games of chance, divination and gambling, so the absurdity is not that her shoe is mistaken as a French poodle as she wants to wear shoes that resemble a dog.

Enrique: I agree with you about oracles and games, but wearing shoes that look like dogs will not take you out of your narrative. Petting a shoe as if it were a dog will. That’s the gesture I am pursuing.

Paul: The Camoin-Jodorowsky reconstruction of the tarot Marseille is an example of accepting the limitation of the image while also inventing a consistency of a detailing and coloring that one would be hard pressed to prove were in the previous versions of the Marseille tarot.

Enrique: Their tarot is an extraordinary extension of the Marseille tradition. They truly brought the deck to the 21st century. It was literally as if they blew the dust off the cards! Sadly they presented it as a restoration of the ‘original’ Marseille tarot. I understand how clever this marketing ploy is, but I feel it betrays Jodorowsky’s accomplishment at bringing shamanism to a contemporary audience. No one has done what he has done.

The idea that something can only be meaningful if it has an ‘ancient’ origin is one of the biggest conceptual limitations of the new age world.

Paul: Personally I like your approaches to wordplay that derive from your reading Francophone poets and artists. The Dadaists and Surrealists among others are rife with astounding metaphors derived from mechanical happenstance and found images. 

Enrique: Here is a cool conjunction: by the time Paul Marteau reinstated the Marseille tarot, in the 1930s, the Surrealist movement was the main cultural force in Paris. Bretón and his cohort had rediscovered the work of authors like Roussel, or Jean-Pierre Brisset, who wrote: “All ideas uttered with similar sounds have the same origin and all refer, in principle, to the same object”; or Alfred Jarry, who wrote: “the alliterations, the rhymes and the assonances reveal these deep kinship between words”. Jarry used to play a game he called ‘Les Propos des Assassins’ in which the participants would say words aloud, looking for homophonic associations, either by saying these words forward or backwards. Eventually, dadaists and surrealist would repeat these games.

Those were authors who made an extraordinary use of homophony, wordplay, puns, constrained writing, etc. Jarry stated that through such humorous wordplay and association one would find the truth at every detour “On retrouve la verité à tous les detours”. In his view, wordplay could take us to a more accurate, truthful representation of the world “les jeux de mots ne sont pas un jeu” (“wordplay is not just a game”). If we move forward 30 years or so, we find and echo of such ideas in Michael Leiris words: “By dissecting the words we like, without bothering about conforming either to their etymologies or to their accepted significations, we discover their most hidden qualities and the secret ramifications that are propagated through the whole language, channeled by associations of sounds, forms and ideas. Then language changes into an oracle, and there we have a thread (however slender it may be) to guide us through the babel of our minds”.

Jarry is especially relevant because he is the creator of ’pataphysics, a science of exceptions and imaginary solutions. As charming as the Marseille Folklore is, nothing in it amounts to a whole coherent system or ‘code’. What we have is the regularization of exceptions, which is an eminently ’pataphysical gesture.

‘Pataphysics does not aim at unveiling that what is invisible, but to derail it. That pretty much sums up what I personally expect from tarot readings.

Through ’pataphysics I arrived at the work of other -more contemporary- authors, like bp Nichol, Christian Bök, or the OuLiPo group. I read their poetry, I read about their poetics. All these authors shared a desire to play with language, either by means of free association or severe constrains, hoping that language would then take them to a place where they were not going.

Eventually, Bretón wrote Arcane 17, a whole book inspired in Lestoille (The Star) card. If you read that book expecting to find the ‘meaning’ of The Star in the way a tarot enthusiast is used to think of ‘meaning’ you will be lost. The book is an extraordinary example of analogy as thought-process. In Arcane 17, the morning star becomes a promise of a new day. That new day is brought by a woman’s hand operating through/on nature. The 17^th trump becomes an analogy for the recovery of Europe after World War II by means of ecology and feminism.

“…the star found here again is the early morning star, which tended to eclipse the other heavenly bodies in the window. It surrenders to me the secret of its structure, explains to me why it numbers twice as many points as they, why its points are fiery red and yellow, as if it were two overlapping stars with alternating rays. It is the product of the actual unity of these two mysteries: love summoned to rebirth from the loss of the love object and only then rising to its full consciousness, to its complete dignity; liberty vowing to really know itself well and to become dynamic since its own loss is at stake. In the nocturnal image that was my guide, the resolution of this double contradiction takes place under the protection of the tree that enclose the remnants of dead wisdom, through exchanges between the butterfly and the flower and by virtue of the principle of the uninterrupted expansion of fluids, connected to the certainty of eternal renewal”.

For Bretón, the morning start suggested the unavoidability of a new day, a new life. After La Maison Dieu comes Lestoille. After the fire from the Heavens overthrows the Devil, the maid comes to heal the world.

Just as I read all that poetry, I make as many attempts as I can at playing with language in the way they did, not to write poems, but to develop a way of thinking about the tarot based on the poetics of wordplay. That is what I call my ‘tongue exercises’. I don’t consider the things I write to be poems. They are my shared thoughts. It is my view that, if you follow my tongue exercises, you will learn tarot. I don’t mean that every single tongue exercise needs to be applied to the cards. It is the persistence of their gestures what could have you thinking in terms that follow the Marseille tarot’s logic.

Paul: Perhaps a few selected examples of your tongue exercises here with explanations of constraints or rules of transformation?

Enrique: My favorite tongue exercise is this one:

It interests me because it shows, step by step, the process of turning an image into sound in such a way that the sound takes us to a whole different direction from the one the image was going. The act of voicing YL aloud takes us in a detour in which two consonants pronounced in English are turned into the French word for vowels.

I love when a simple gesture presents us with more than one layer of significance. At one level we have an image: Y L which turns into two different phonemes when you read it aloud: WY EL. At another level we have the notion of consonants being the body of a word (con-sonant, to sound with, the consonant is the physical resistance that tongue, teeth and lips make to the air passing through the mouth) and vowels being the soul of words (a breath from the bowels, the most primal sign of life). But a breath is a bowel movement, a ‘soul’ created by the physicality of breathing. That notion is reflected by the fact that, in the exercise, two consonants create ‘vowels’.

Paul: Analogously I am reminded of the number odd-even rule: Two odds (consonants) equal one even (vowel), One odd plus one even equals one odd. One even plus one even equals one even. 

Vowels are open sounds, Consonants are closed sounds. Two closed sounds open. One closed and one open sound equals one closed sound. One even sound plus another even sound equals a diphthong!

Enrique: Beautiful! The body against itself equals one soul.

There is also that other level where the whole thing becomes an allusion of the fact that our experience of the tarot is embodied: we only understand what the characters in the cards are doing because we have experience these actions ourselves. At one level the exercise is saying: “pay attention to the swerve that occurs when you describe a card aloud. Follow it!” At another level, the exercise reinstates the embodied nature of the tarot experience.

Another tongue exercise I especially like is this one:

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

I made this tongue exercise after meeting Vito Acconci. It was Acconci who made me aware of the fact that words hide words in them; just like a sequence of tarot cards hide visual rhymes.

I was curious of what kind of words could be concealed in the alphabet itself. What I found was an epiphany.

Finding the word ‘bijoux’ (jewel) hidden in the alphabet is a way to exemplify the search for patterns within a sequence of cards. At some point you find a group of elements within the whole image that says something coherent and allows you to ‘erase’ the rest. What makes this tongue exercise especially relevant for me is the revelation of the ‘hidden gem’ in the alphabet. The gesture literally shows that the alphabet hides treasures.  By extension, this tongue exercise shows that there are always hidden gems in any word or image, waiting for us to uncover them.

Paul: “I was a hidden treasure who loved to be known; therefore, I created the universes so that I might be known,” is the sacred Sufi saying (hadith) of Mohammad speaking in the divine voice indicating the ultimate motivation for the creation.

Enrique: Aha! We go back to the idea of pleasure. We look at other people’s creations because it gives us pleasure. We create, not only out of necessity, but out of pleasure.

Here is another tongue exercise I like:

ow, ow

slowdown

woo, woo

swoon woods

ow, ow

lowdown

ow, ow

owl snow

woo, woo

wools woos

.wo, wo

wow won

This is a very simple exercise that proposes the recognition of a pattern: ow ow. The exercise also proposes the recognition of a mirror pattern: wo wo. (the mirroring gesture is hinted by the dot in front of the ‘w’ in the second to last line). The pattern is ‘hidden’ in the words of the text. In the same way, all kinds of patterns are hidden in the tarot. For example, there is a pattern of wings hidden in a sequence of cards like Temperance, The Lover, Judgement. There is also a pattern of two small characters being topped by a huge character in many of the cards. We see a sword-flower-sword pattern in the suit of swords, and so on.

All these patterns give a distinctive visual sense to a sequence. At the same time, repetitions of visual patterns translate into repetitions of sound-patterns. The tongue exercise makes this evident: the sound “ow wo” gets repeated in every single line of the text. We would get a similar sound-sense by describing the patterns we find in any sequence of cards: a pattern of wings, wings, wings; a pattern of crowns, crowns, crowns, a pattern of thrones, thrones, thrones, etc.

I did a variation of that exercise in which the hidden pattern was oo, o o:

oo, o o

soon, solo

There are two letters ‘o’ in the first word and in the second word, but while in the first word they are together. In the second word they are separated by another letter. There is a difference between ‘oo’ and ‘o o’, just as there is a difference between seeing Temperance’s vases in Justice’s scale and seeing Temperance’s vases in The Chariot’s horses.

The main intention behind all tongue exercises is to instill a spirit of playfulness in the way we deal with any language. Any language can be used in ways that transcend everyday communication. The non-standard use of any language opens up unexpected ideas. The only caveat is that all these ideas arise from taking any the signs of language for what they are, at a concrete level, while leaving aside their traditional meaning.

Someone said that “poetry is evidence of inquiry”. I like that. I use that. I use poetic thinking to inquire on the formal aspects of tarot because I don’t think that prose is the most useful way of thinking about it.

Paul: Your observation causes me to be reminded how mind numbing even some of the best guidebooks to the tarot can feel after one becomes absorbed in the mystery of card readings. Perhaps we need to encourage our tarot interpreters to return to poetry and be sparing with prose. Who knows the world is awash in too much self-confident, self-deceiving prose!

Enrique: Most of the prose you read in books regarding the meaning of the tarot is the author’s creative response to the images. That creative response is embellished, or informed, by the author’s personal tastes: those who find beauty in numerology would respond to the images with a numerological-informed kind of prose. The same thing goes for those who find beauty in astrology, the kabala, or the Holly Grail. It can be said that I am also responding to my personal preference for poetry, except for the fact that I never cared for poetry before I started contemplating the Marseille tarot. It was the Marseille tarot’s own visual logic what  lead me to poetry, and to the work of all these authors we discussed, plus many others like Richard Kostelanetz, Victor Coleman, Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, Vanessa Place, or Kenneth Goldsmith.

I hope that the Marseille tarot in itself would dictate the constraints I would use to craft my creative response to it. Poetry provided the resources to accomplish this. It was as if the tarot were telling me: “learn about rhyme, rhythm, homophony, and wordplay and you will get what I am saying.”

When you realize that the ‘ear’ is concealed in the ‘pearl’ you start seeing the cards differently. You start thinking with your eyes, and you realize that the yellow sprout in the Ace of Baston rhymes with the fire in La Maison Diev; the fire in La Maison Diev Rhymes with the water stream in Temperance; Temperance’s vases rhyme with Le Toille’s vase; Le Toille’s black bird rhymes with Lemperevur’s black eagle; Lemperevur’s crossed legs rhyme with Le Pandu’s crossed legs, and so on.

Just as the Marseille tarot demands a style of readings that emerges from its own forms, I hope these forms will eventually point out an organic way of performing the tarot in which readings may only play a part.

Paul: How so?

Enrique: There are people who inspire me without even trying, nor knowing it. I spent “Sword-Swallower’s Day” keeping company with Harley Newman, a performer of fantastic, death-defying, stunts. He told me something that was a revelation to me: “the same thing I accomplish by swallowing a sword or hanging upside-down in a straitjacket, you accomplish by changing a letter in a word. We throw people off-balance so they find themselves outside of what they thought was possible.”

I have thought long and hard about that. I am fascinated by the subversive power of the smallest gestures.

I have been thinking a lot on Aram Saroyan’s ‘Lighght’ poem. Saroyan added an extra ‘gh’ to the word ‘light’ so the word cannot be pronounced anymore, only experienced. Some people swear that this poem IS the actual experience of light. Saroyan’s gesture takes us back to Alfred Jarry, who opened his play ‘Ubu Roi’ by adding an extra ‘r’ to the French word for shit: ‘merde’. Saroyan’s ‘Lighght’ and Jarry’s ‘merdre’ speak of how a small gesture such as adding a letter to a word can have us stepping out of the world, out of the way we use language.

Incidentally, both Jarry and Saroyan raised riots with these small gestures.

‘Reality’ is a big word. I see the tarot as the extra letter that can turn ‘reality’ into a whole different experience. I just need to figure out where exactly should I slip that extra letter, for the whole wor[l]d to topple over?

I am working on it. I try to stay open to all these games I play with images and words, so the tarot can become a source of signs and sounds, a source for pleasure. I don’t necessarily know where I will go with all this. I only know that, after every twist and turn, I always go back to the simplicity of the Marseille tarot, and to the visual coherence of its images, as a source of inspiration.

I go wherever the Marseille tarot takes me, and I always come back to it for more.

Paul: I’ll keep my eyes open and my ears alert and perhaps I’ll catch a whiff of what you are working on! Thank you, Enrique!

Enrique: Thank you, Paul!

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