EnriqueEnriquez
Frannie, you said:
If you think about it, this could be a perfect description of what Le Pendu is experiencing. We could imagine how hard has to be to keep breathing while you are upside-down, and how our heart will race in despair. There is an inner race in that card, because we never want to run so much as when we are tied up.
Sometimes we are doing a reading, the cards are on the table, and the person is talking. She may be employing words that are very similar to what you just said. In these occasions, we scan the cards, trying to recognize the client, and her words, on them.
A card like Le Pendu, la Maison Dieu, etc, have a very particular quality: they only feel right if we look twice. At first glance Le Pendu feels horrible, tortured, punished, hanging there. We have all experienced the horrified gasp our clients let out when this cards pops out. It is only when we look again than we see his playful tongue. I think it is important to respond to both feelings. It is important to experience what is in front of us. It is often said that pain isn’t caused by the events we experience but by our opinion of them. This may be true, but a positive outlook is also an opinion.
There is something important about generating an experiential feeling from the cards, and it has to do with the fact that we tend to believe art is appreciated at a subjective level. This is a very recent idea, as recent as the late 19th-20th Century. I suspect the idea doesn’t holds any truth when it comes to the tarot. Not only because -by the time when the tarot was printed- image makers worked with very specific communicational intentions, but because these initial gut feeling about the tarot imagery. It is very unlikely that you will find a person who will jump in happiness by looking at Le Pendu, just as it is very unlikely that someone will be moved by the cheerful disposition of Albert Durer’s “Melancholy”:
http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/bierman/Elsinore/melancholy/melancholy images/Durer.jpg
Look at that image. How many of you would chose it to illustrate the invitation to your birthday party?
I would like to think that, by looking at the cards, we aren’t just allowing our subjectivity to take over, but are are truthfully tapping into each image original intention. is just that we don’t do it at an intellectual level, by means of a rational approach to iconography, history, etc. We do it as Francesco Clemente suggest in here:
“An analogical chain is a way of seeing images without skepticism. I accept all images as material that can be used to make other images. We live in the time of the fragment. The Cubists left us nothing but fragments. I piece them back together without any worry about how it was before the image was broken apart.”
Contrary to what some people think, we will never rationally know what the people in Medieval times thought. But we can feel what they felt, by engaging to their images at an experiential level.
Best,
EE
franniee said:
If you think about it, this could be a perfect description of what Le Pendu is experiencing. We could imagine how hard has to be to keep breathing while you are upside-down, and how our heart will race in despair. There is an inner race in that card, because we never want to run so much as when we are tied up.
Sometimes we are doing a reading, the cards are on the table, and the person is talking. She may be employing words that are very similar to what you just said. In these occasions, we scan the cards, trying to recognize the client, and her words, on them.
A card like Le Pendu, la Maison Dieu, etc, have a very particular quality: they only feel right if we look twice. At first glance Le Pendu feels horrible, tortured, punished, hanging there. We have all experienced the horrified gasp our clients let out when this cards pops out. It is only when we look again than we see his playful tongue. I think it is important to respond to both feelings. It is important to experience what is in front of us. It is often said that pain isn’t caused by the events we experience but by our opinion of them. This may be true, but a positive outlook is also an opinion.
There is something important about generating an experiential feeling from the cards, and it has to do with the fact that we tend to believe art is appreciated at a subjective level. This is a very recent idea, as recent as the late 19th-20th Century. I suspect the idea doesn’t holds any truth when it comes to the tarot. Not only because -by the time when the tarot was printed- image makers worked with very specific communicational intentions, but because these initial gut feeling about the tarot imagery. It is very unlikely that you will find a person who will jump in happiness by looking at Le Pendu, just as it is very unlikely that someone will be moved by the cheerful disposition of Albert Durer’s “Melancholy”:
http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/bierman/Elsinore/melancholy/melancholy images/Durer.jpg
Look at that image. How many of you would chose it to illustrate the invitation to your birthday party?
I would like to think that, by looking at the cards, we aren’t just allowing our subjectivity to take over, but are are truthfully tapping into each image original intention. is just that we don’t do it at an intellectual level, by means of a rational approach to iconography, history, etc. We do it as Francesco Clemente suggest in here:
“An analogical chain is a way of seeing images without skepticism. I accept all images as material that can be used to make other images. We live in the time of the fragment. The Cubists left us nothing but fragments. I piece them back together without any worry about how it was before the image was broken apart.”
Contrary to what some people think, we will never rationally know what the people in Medieval times thought. But we can feel what they felt, by engaging to their images at an experiential level.
Best,
EE
