Consider The Fool

And the case for playing tarot at the end of the world

The world is an insane disaster, but have you ever played with tarot cards?

For the uninitiated, a tarot deck is made up of seventy-eight cards, seventy-eight symbols that reflect energy. That might sound like it requires some level of expertise, but you don’t have to be familiar with the twenty-two major arcana or fifty-six remaining cards and their corresponding suits to have a good idea of what it might mean when you draw The Devil. With archetypes like Strength and The Sun, it could be said that tarot is older than linear time, but, also it started as a card game played in Italy. “Tarocchi” was another name for the deck found in the parlors of Dukes and other rich people in the 1400s, though it’s not so easy to quantify humanity’s relationship with The Moon.

I have a particular kinship to tarot, perhaps because my ancestry can be traced back to Napolitan graffiti on its way to Queens, but you don’t need to be descended from an ancient lineage of pizza rats to play with tarot. You could pick up a card right now, and you would have a sense of what it was telling you just from looking at the picture.

If you were to get a tarot deck and start drawing cards, one thing you would notice is the same cards coming up over and over again, beyond coincidence, probably, or what you might think rational. Lately, for me, it’s been The Fool, and I wanted to share that card with you.

In considering The Fool in the crappy cellphone photo below, you may want to reflect on the images for a moment, to get a sense of the essence of the symbol beyond words. The same way you would listen to music — if The Fool were a song, how would it make you feel? (If you’re not at all familiar with tarot, that just makes this more interesting.)

The Fool is the zero card of the deck, zero as in nothing and everything, the zero that has also been spotlighting as the “o” in eternal now. The Fool is the infinite potential of the new beginning, indeed, the rest of the major arcana can be described as The Fool’s journey, all the given stories of creation unfolding.

In textbook terms, the sun shining on the bright yellow background is The Rider-Waite Tarot. Rider-Waite is the classic deck, but I wouldn’t tell you that you have to learn on it anymore than I would tell you to read the King James Bible, or, with all due respect, The Canterbury Tales, which is to say, it gets boring. Still, I enjoy the Rider-Waite take on this symbol, where The Fool is gay as in happy, if not self-identified queer, gaze pointed up and out to the future where we learn how to fly.

Before I drew The Fool three times, I thought of the symbol as boundless optimism. The infinite potential is bursting off the character bounding over white-and-blue geometry in The Fountain Tarot, or toned down to chick perched on the branch of The Wild Unknown Tarot, and, down below, in the swirling oceans of Margarete Petersen’s deck, there is more intensity, and with it, the possibility of immense power. I always found optimism in these cards, until I finally saw The Fool’s predicament. You see, there’s not always a little dog involved in the image, but, no matter what, The Fool cannot exist without a great leap.

In February, I drew The Fool, then my partner drew The Fool for me at the beginning of March, and then my friend offered me a reading, and there guiding, the card appeared for the third time. And it was then, mere weeks before April Fool’s Day that was when my perspective shifted, and I saw the dog who had always been following The Fool take the bit all the way and bite The Fool in the ass. And then it occurred to me the cliff is not optional.

One thing you may notice, when you start working with tarot cards, is the resonance in every vibrating chord of in all the details of your mundanity, the way the symbol of your recurring card comes up in deep conversations and/or whatever you overhear at the grocery store. The Fool was lighting up all around me over the past few months. Early on, I learned about Diogenes — the philosopher-clown who did performance art about being busy. A talk from Krishnamurti that my partner sent me deepened my meditation practice when I connected The Fool to the question, “Who am I now?” And yet, it’s more often the very smallest things that shift consciousness, and, in this case, it was my queer kickball league.

I’ve been playing kickball for awhile now. I’m fast, and I can kick the thing, but mostly I am in the outfield trying to manifest that the play doesn’t come to me… and then we had a scrimmage. One team forfeited, we all mingled into an unofficial game, and, all of a sudden, I was on third base, running goddamn plays. With the invitation to make mistakes, I did, and spectacularly, but I also got one of my captain out, and performed several miracles that moments earlier had seemed completely out of the realm of hand-eye coordination. In case I didn’t realize I was allowed to have fun at kickball with my friends, the very concept of “play” occurred to me as if beset by Bach, and thank God, because I had been staring straight down off the cliff, seeing only what would happen if we never learn to fly.

With The Fool dogging me through these terrifying times, the brilliant optimism wore down to the bone, until it seemed like the card was tapping me on the shoulder and calling me an idiot. Amid the murkiness of my season of The Fool, I watched a documentary about hummingbirds in which a citizen scientist filmed hummingbirds building nests and found only half make it out of the nest. “Fifty-fifty baby hummingbird survival rate?” I thought, “I don’t like those odds,” and my stomach sank, because I was staring into the crevasse, glaring at the pile of worst-case scenarios broken at the bottom of the pit of despair, when I might have been looking up and out at the world I want to be a part of, no matter what comes to be, for in the future, as in kickball, it helps to keep your eye on the ball.

Thank you for reading Pancake Brain, an (occasional) weekend newsletter dedicated to pop culture, politics, and the psychedelic experience. If you had a good time here today, you know what to do (like, share, forward this email to everyone and your mother).

As always, I’d love to hear what you’re reading and listening to, and please tell me your favorite tarot decks :)