So I never really thought I’d write a post about tarot cards, but The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life comes with a fascinating proposition: Just as writers and artists have used the tarot, or variations of it, for centuries as part of their creative process, so too can any writer use it as a way to gain insight into how to write more productively.
One reason The Creative Tarot is so interesting--interesting enough that I spent my own money on it, and didn’t work from a review copy--is that it’s by Jessa Crispin, one of my favorite working critics. She’s best known for founding and running Bookslut, one of the first great literary websites and blogs. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit here that for several years I was a reviewer and columnist for Bookslut, and also contributed a weekly blog post about poetry.) In addition to Bookslut and The Creative Tarot, Crispin has also published The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries, a book of travel writing / criticism / literary history that came out last year with the University of Chicago Press. So Crispin knows about writers and their ways.
And this is an important point: Despite the publisher’s subtitle, and despite the fact the book appears in the “Spirituality” section of iBooks, this is very much a book about creativity and productivity, not the quasi-religious aspects of the tarot. Indeed, the book is as interested in writers who mostly used the tarot as a source of randomness as it is in writers who believe in its deeper mysteries. Crispin argues that the tarot is a “tool for storytelling": “Each reading is, essentially, a story . . . . It is not necessarily about telling the future. It is about retelling the present.”
Crispin proposes not that we find truth somehow “in” the cards, but rather that the cards can provide a different lens through which to view our work. The payoff, in other words, comes not from some mystical source, but simply in the way a tarot reading can free us to notice different things about a draft or a project, thus enabling us to gain fresh insights. Fundamentally, the book is about trying to find ways to be creative:
Nothing kills creativity faster than anxiety: worrying if you’re doing things “right,” worrying that no one else is going to like what you’re doing, panicking about how it’s all going to turn out.
Almost every time, the solution is listening to and honoring your intuitive sense of not what you think you need but what your project needs to come to fruition. Maybe that is the greatest thing the cards can do for us: quiet down our worried thoughts and our expectations for how it’s “supposed” to go and help us get bck in touch with our imagination.
Given Crispin’s interest in creativity, the structure of The Creative Tarot makes perfect sense: there’s a brief history of the tarot and her relationship with it, and then an extended discussion of each of the cards. As she discusses each card, Crispin also proposes works of art that might be considered in light of it. So, for example, she explains that the Chariot is the card of paradox, and of thriving off that paradox to drive oneself onward, and uses that as an occasion to think about friendly rivalries, such as Matisse and Picasso’s. She then recommends checking out Jack Flam’s Matisse and Picasso: The Story of their Rivalry and Friendship, Milos Forman’s Amadeus, and Carol Brightman’s Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. These vignettes are both helpful in clarifying the symbolism of each card, and also a light introduction to many writers and artists.
At the end of the book, she discusses various problems that often trouble creative works, and suggests procedures for tarot readings that might help a writer move get past them. For example, if you find yourself struggling to find a project’s structure, she suggests counting up the different parts of the project (different chapters, different works of art, different points in a narrative or an argument) and assigning each part a card:
Use the story of those cards to reorder your project. For example, I write mostly essays, and when I"m collecting them, it can be difficult to figure out how to order them. It doesn’t always make sense to put them in chronological order. So I can group the essays by theme, designate a card to represent each them, and then use the story of the card to create an arc that had eluded me when looking only at the essays themselves.
Assigning a card to a fragment of the whole also helps you see the essence of that fragment: its core meaning. Is it excessive, and thus fogging up the essential truth? Assigning a card can also help you pare down a bloated fragment to its essence, or figure out how to frame it so that its true nature is showcased better.
Obviously, this isn’t always going to work, or, to put it differently, one might need to try different drawings to find a story that’s powerful. But the point is that the cards can give you a perspective on your work that frees you to see it a bit differently, a bit more productively.
As you see, Crispin’s most powerful interest is in figuring out ways to see creative work differently--that is, ways to carry out the work of creation and revision. The tarot is a helpful part of that, she finds, for its surprising capacity to work in different directions--sometimes focusing attention, other times relaxing a too-tense conscious control. It’s definitely worth reading--and it is a book that’s easy to dip in and out of, as well.
Do you use tarot cards as a creativity tool? Do you have another procedural method for working through obstacles to creativity? Please share in comments!
Photo “Signs & Portents” by Flickr user Mike Licht / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0