Day 1 - Saturday, ruled by Saturn: Obstacles and Blockades
Card: 6 of Coin - The Razor's Edge
This is a card of self-sacrifice and self-realization. It encapsulates how straight is the gate and narrow is the way. As such, it is also a card about prodigality, deceit, covetousness, and spite. Tyrone Power's character eschews materialism and searches instead for a deeper meaning to life. Meantime, the people he had known variously fall into misfortune, petty self-interest, and mundane existence. One character in particular, the jilted Gene Tierney, becomes the embodiment of lovelessness and resentment. Out of sheer malice, she undoes the good Power has done with the pathetic character played by Ann Baxter, which directly leads to her gruesome demise. In the end, there is no hope for Tierney, and Power must turn his back on her forever as he faces the unknown alone.
As to
Obstacles and
Blockades, this 6 of Coin card clearly signifies the many slings and arrows along the road to enlightenment. Wisdom and grace come at a cost, one worth the price but also reliant on not a small amount of good luck. What's more, certain people in the world actually make it a matter of pride and joy to do you harm and see you fail. Today, I will try to stay mindful of the greater good, steer clear of meanness, and be generous of spirit.
Addendum: The first half of the day I remained focused, working on music and doing chores around the house like cleaning out the gutters. In the late afternoon, a friend of mine visited and, under what could be called his impish influence, I strayed from the straight and narrow.
Day 2 - Sunday, ruled by the Sun: Inspiration and Goals
Card: Judgment XX The Academy Awards
In Hollywood, the Oscar is a kind of gold standard. It is the pre-eminent industry award which many people in the business aspire to. In a straight-forward way then, it represents today's attribution: Goals. As for inspiration, anyone who's ever sat through an Academy Awards ceremony will know it's anything but inspiring.
I can't say that I am motivated by the recognition of my peers, celebrity, or the promise of immortality. Nevertheless, I do endeavor with the things I create to maintain a certain craftsmanship and quality. Read upright, and with today's allocation, this is what the Judgment card means to me. On the dark side, it may be noted that the Academy Awards were created by studio bosses to congratulate themselves, and it wasn't long before the whole affair became a mutual admiration society. The Academy of Motion Picture Art & Sciences, which distributes the Oscar, was the brainchild of mogul Louis B. Mayer. It was actually created to mediate labour disputes and disarm workers within the industry from forming a union. This may indicate that a gift or plaudit that comes my way may indeed be at base a subterfuge or little more than empty flattery.
Looked at in the bigger picture, today is Remembrance Day. Cheap awards mean nothing next to the horrific reality of war. Rather than indulge in self-centered concerns, I will look today toward how other people are and what they need.
Addendum: In the morning I ran an errand for my parents, helped a new postal clerk with her job, and gave away a chest freezer to an elderly couple. In the evening, I relaxed with friends. The Marx Brothers never came close to winning an Oscar, but my friends and I watched
Monkey Business and laughed so heartily that the experience of watching this one film was easily worth all the Academy Awards Ceremonies put together.
Day 3 - Monday, ruled by the Moon: Dreams and Fears
Card: The World XXI
One of the things this card represents is the worldly domination American films achieved during its Golden Era. Hollywood's unqualified success, in turn, influenced not only generations of Americans but many generations across the globe. The flickering images people watched in the dark went from reflecting a people's imagination to shaping those people's image of themselves. As such, Hollywood's pervasiveness demands some qualifying.
Today's Dream aspect may be summed up in the 4 corners of the card, representing the 4 minor suits and symbolized by the dreams of the 4 main characters in
The Wizard of Oz - the Tin Man's dream of knowledge, the Scarecrow's dream of feeling, the Lion's dream of courage, and Dorothy's dream of home. A balance of these attributes has been achieved on The World card. Of course, as we know, Dorothy is at home, sick in bed suffering from fevered dreams; a metaphor of Hollywood's dream factory. If one is lucky, one may wake up to find everything they need right there in black and white, in their own version of Kansas. If not, they may find themselves a tool of an industry which exploits people, bends them out of shape, such that there's no way anymore to wake up, as personified in Judy Garland.
To many, the dream of stardom is the greatest dream; the idea of an empty theatre a nightmare. I look at it from the other way around. One part of this card's dream logic is to break the spell of watching
en masse and replace it with individual becoming. This card could see everything served up on a platter and go on forever in a figure eight, or it could be a countdown - as at the beginning of a reel of film - from 2 to 1 to the 0 of The Fool.
Addendum: The morning I spent finishing up a number of things I had been letting slide, notably the edit of the Charles Dickens Tarot galley proof for Schiffer. The afternoon and evening I spent mixing music and decided, during a restless night of tossing and turning, to begin tomorrow an important construction project I have been putting off now for a while.
Day 4 - Tuesday, ruled by Mars: Conflicts and Challenges
Card: 8 0f Spades - Mildred Pierce
This is a card of focused intensity, one that resonates with pain. It is a card of piercing dread. The figure eight going on forever mentioned yesterday is here, today, folded back on itself, creating a centre from which all routes away emanate and all eyes are on.
The first layer of the card sees Joan Crawford the actress, having worked her way up the Hollywood casting couch playing jazz-age hussies and mistresses just trying to make it in the world, looking for new kinds of female roles to play now that she has reached middle-age, and finding it in
Mildred Pierce, her first film with her new studio, Warner Brothers. The film concerns a woman dealing earnestly with a series of hardships - an alcoholic husband, poverty, the death of a child, sexism - all of which she overcomes with aplomb. The real thorn in her side turns out to be her daughter, one of the cruelest young women in film history - exactly how cruel The Motion Picture Production Code refused to let the film fully explore.
The first layer of meaning, then, sees a practical hard-working woman pull herself up from very little against the odds. Having created a certain persona in doing so, she has the strength to realize she can't go on playing that role into her 40s so she completely reshapes her image into that of the industrious but hard-done-by martyr. On a deeper level, we see this image as a carefully crafted smoke-screen for the person Joan Crawford really was - a neurotic perfectionist entirely pre-occupied with appearance and obsessively driven to succeed. As a child, she had been abused, and like many such people, her relationships in later life were abusive in turn, including the one she had with her adopted daughter and eventually exposed in
Mommie Dearest. This then flips the
Mildred Pierce story on its head, with Joan the cruel daughter to her daughter, the faultless mother. Seen further, the horrible daughter could be the younger Joan, doing whatever she can to get ahead; indeed, it may be to this part of herself she is on the phone to - Joan, the consummate phony, on the blower to her adolescent id, who is no doubt letting it ring off the hook.
In short then, for me today, the
Challenge is to reform myself, honestly assess my assets and the best way forward and proceed despite what setbacks come my way. The
Conflict arises from within - my upbringing, the person I was in the past, what I demand of myself, and my relationship with my inner child. I am beginning an important renovation project today, and so I must prevent my single-mindedness from driving me to abuse those who are only trying to help: my family and friends.
Addendum: The night before, I suffered from a dry throat. All day my gullet was raw and sore. This card haunted me all day, symbolizing as it did the second I saw it the throat (the center circle) of a sword-swallower. I guess I have some sort of infection - my throat feels like a leSueur. At first I chalked it up to my wayward ways which started when my friend arrived unexpectedly on Saturday, the
Razor's Edge day, but whatever it is, it sticks - and I kid you not - in my craw.
Day 5 - Wednesday, ruled by Mercury: Interactions and Change
Card: Queen of Cups - Carole Lombard
This is the companion card to the card I drew last Thursday, The King of Cups - Clark Gable. Lombard was a tomboy who was discovered at 12. At 16 she left school with a simple Hollywood contract, but at 17 she was involved in a disfiguring car accident. No one thought she'd work in film again, but she opted to undergo a radical series of new surgical procedures which - along with make-up and lighting - allowed her to resume her career. Lombard played straight roles, but her real forte was comedy, namely screwball comedy. She met and respected the dapper and mature William Powell. They married, but with vastly different temperaments and 16 years between them, they were ill-matched. Their separation was so amicable, Powell suggested his ex-wife star with him in
My Man Godfrey.
Speaking of
Interactions and
Change, Lombard had met Gable a couple times - they actually appeared in a film together - and they had instantly taken a disliking to one another. When they met again later, it was true love. Gable [stage-]managed a divorce from his wife, and he and Lombard were married. To her distress, Gable carried on his philandering ways, which Lombard for the most part quietly tolerated. She was an ardent supporter of FDR, and the 2 actually became friends. Days after the Pearl Harbor attack, Lombard headed Hollywood's Victory Committee to raise money for the war effort. When Lombard was on the road campaigning for war bonds, Gable struck up an affair with the up-and-coming Lana Turner. Anxious to return home to circumvent this relationship, Lombard finagled a flight on a Sleeper Transport which crashed - some say sabotaged by the Nazis.
Examples of
Change and
Interaction abound in this card's back-story. Even the blackeye Lombard sports, echoing the implied blackeye on Gable's card, suggests the ups and downs of a volatile relationship. Lombard is a model of rolling with the punches. Unfortunately, she truly loved Gable, which resembled the dark side of this card, the area of self-doubt and co-dependence. Had she been able to accept the idea of losing Gable to the no-talent Turner, Lombard may not have died at 33.
This suggests detachment, in the Buddhistic sense. Counter-intuitive perhaps for such an iconic Water Sign card, but with today's allocation, the emphasis is on
going with the flow rather than solidifying and containing. With, along the way, the chance to hopefully enjoy some of the emancipating aspects of humour.
Addendum: I can't say the day held much in the way of humour. In fact, I was kinda grouchy all day, set off by hours wasted trying to deal with the red-tape surrounding a dead friend's probate (a friend who - on a small aside - intentionally called an early girlfriend of mine "Carole" which was not her name). Anyhow, by the end, I felt like I'd been given a blackeye. So far, my experience dealing with the bureaucracy surrounding probate has been a real pain in the lumbar.
Day 6 - Thursday, ruled by Jupiter: Power and Influences
Card: Knave of Spades - Jack Benny
Because of today's allocation, and because I've been trying in vain to deal with a friend's will, estate, the Indian government, and phone-calls to a non-existent civil service in my own country, I figured today's card for
Power and
Influence would be the Knaves of Cups - Laurel & Hardy. As it turns out, I was being optimistic - instead of silly and heartfelt, I get the slow burn and the running jokes that so span the decades they make the transition from vaudeville to radio and on into television.
As it happens, Benny appeared with yesterday's card, Carole Lombard, in the delightful
To Be Or Not To Be - a tone-perfect comedy about authoritarianism made during WWII by the incomparable Ernst Lubitsch. Sadly, this was Lombard's last film and, sadly, not Benny's. In the GAHT,
To Be Or Not To Be is referenced on the Death card, which I'm hoping is an allusion to my friend's death and an end to the related paperwork. Unfortunately, I suspect all my frustrated efforts will elicit little more than the sarcastic strains of a plaintive violin played badly.
Almost as big a skinflint as Benny, maybe this knave card - a double Jack - is telling me to loosen up, share the wealth, and focus less on the monetary cost of things. In reality, Benny employed many writers whom he treated well. He also derived much humour and appeal by letting secondary and minor characters get their moment in the spotlight, rather than always hogging it all himself. In this, perhaps, is another lesson for me. Benny was a master of timing, so this too may be a factor for me today.
Addendum: I mentioned a hopeful end to the paperwork surrounding a recently deceased friend, and today I spoke with Service Canada and finally got that ball rolling. Instead of trying to cut corners and save myself some monetary outlay, I moved forward with doing things by the book and paying all the attendant fees - admittedly, to my chagrin. What's more, while recording late last night, the apple of my eye, my old Mac Powerbook laptop - like Benny's Maxwell roadster - conked out and finally gave up the ghost. Fortunately, I had planned for just such an occurrence and bought another of its kind some years ago. But in all seriousness, perhaps it's time for me to break down and buy a new, up-to-date machine.
Day 7 - Friday, ruled by Venus: Love and Attraction
Card: King of Batons - Cary Grant
Three Court cards in a row!
This card is traditionally associated with lust and jealousy. Grant had a number of relationships over the years, with both men and women, and some were rocky. In later life he regretted the way he had treated many of his paramours at different times. This was after years of therapy and the therapeutic use of LSD. Grant came to understand that his insensitivity to his partners was born of a deep insecurity and an inability to understand himself.
Grant's home life had been hard. His mother suffered from clinical depression and his father was an alcoholic. The young Archie Leach (Grant's given surname is the same as mine) escaped into theatre and performance. In his early years, he found most of his amorous comfort among men - his fear and distrust of women being strong. It took some years playing small parts, but Grant eventually became one of Hollywood's biggest and longest-lasting icons. With his debonair charm and solid good-looks, women became desirous of Grant and his fear of them thawed. Grant was always gentlemanly and gracious, but this concealed his own self-doubt, loneliness, and a dark side to himself which he just couldn't countenance.
What I take from this card, right now, with today's allocation, is that bursts of energy such as the Baton suit implies are necessary and propulsive, but as important - especially in love - is the dedication and resolve needed to accomplish the deeper and more meaningful bonds found in lasting, long-term relationships. On the Grant card here, Cary's Studio glamour shot looms in the background. In the foreground, Cary jokingly "carries" away a beautiful woman (for the record, Priscilla Lane, also seen [but not heard] on the 8 of Batons). By doing this, he also blocks his own glamorous image - notably, his image's own eyes. What I note is Cary's right foot, which drops down below the horizon line (or horizontal baton?), is seemingly stuck to the spot, preventing him from going or really getting anywhere. This represents his inability to see his true self. Until Cary faces what lies beneath the surface - what both attracts him and keeps him captive - no amount of glamour, charm, or good looks will see him take the relationships in his life, especially with women, for anything but granted. In short, the route to a genuine
Love for the Other is through a serious and accepting relationship with Oneself.
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And what about those who just want to have a Deck of the Week, Card of the Day reading? They can just jump in and leave the planetary lore away. 
