A Vertigo Study Aid from an Ancient Source
It's great to have a place to put the odds and ends—and you may think this is one very odd end, but be persistent and read on through—I've got two thousand years of scholarly experience to back up my idea.
Several years ago, passing by a table in a bookstore, I glanced at a copy of a Talmud that was on display—the first I'd ever seen—propped open on a tilted stand. I can still remember being struck with amazement and going over to check out the fascinating page layout—what I saw was a small paragraph of text printed in the center of the page and then a variety of long and short commentaries on this text (and commentaries on the commentaries) surrounding it in different patterns and font styles and sizes. If you've never seen a page from the Talmud, there's no hope of my giving you a sufficiently vivid idea of how fascinating it looks—but we live in an age that annihilates distance almost as effectively as Captain Kirk's transporter, so please give yourself the gift of a trip to this wonderful site, where you'll be able to see for yourself:
www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/TalmudMap/Mishnah.html
When Chronata first proposed this Study Group, and I began to cast about in my imagination for some way to bring a lot of scattered insights about each Vertigo card together and arrange them on a page so that I could take them in at a glance, the memory of that Talmud cropped up. So a few days ago, when there were ten or so posts in the Strength thread, I thought it was time to see if I could adapt the same page layout to my work with the Vertigo deck.
The results of my experiment seem to be working wonderfully for me, and I thought I'd pass along the details in case any of you want to try applying an age-old approach to our current study:
I took my downloaded copy of Strength and dragged it onto a new page in my Draw application (part of AppleWorks, a very standard and bare-boned application—anything you've got would do the trick), reduced its size by 50%, centered it on the page (I can tell because I've got my rulers showing at top and left) and let it snap there.
[Fancy Step that you can Ignore: Figuring out how to do that (I looked in Page Preview and there it was, a blank page with a small card in the middle) spurred me on to create a Master Page—something with no card at all on it that I'd be able to Save and use again and again just by dragging all the different cards, one at a time, into its center—featuring a very fancy (!) quarter-inch border all around the edge with a tiny knot pattern in it that will change color with the basic color of the card— with Strength it's the purple I've now learned is so spiritual a color.
So my Master Page is all blank except for the border (which will change color); as each new card comes up for study, I'll call it up and click up a clone that I can change without disturbing the MP, slip a half-size card onto it and be ready to go.]
With my first printout—my [bordered] page with a half-sized picture of Strength in the center—propped up against a notebook on my desk, I logged on to the Vertigo Study Group and started going over each post in the Strength thread, writing down (often with my own adjustments) the sentences, phrases, and key words that struck me as especially helpful, treating the card image as if it were the central text on a page of the Talmud and weaving all the other texts—your comments and mine—around it.
I arranged all these words on the page in ways that I thought would be most likely to catch and focus my attention—often writing them down next to an appropriate body part, for example—with large print or small print, tight or loose spacing, horizontal or vertical, cursive writing, a diagram (for the surface of the water and the unconscious arrowing down beneath), and a few framing rectangles. Next time around, I might even use felt-tip pens in different colors—I'm on a roll! Can post-it notes be far off?
One thing I enjoyed was the sense of play—and I noticed especially this phenomenon: that while I can't seem to accept contradictions or paradoxical interpretations in straightforward prose, I had no problem dealing with two apparently incompatible nuggets when I was impulsively arranging them around the page. As if a right-brainy thing were finally being allowed a small-scale explosion.
For some this will be too artsy-craftsy (OK, forget the colored pens), but it's got me engaged in this journey with more focus than I thought I could bring to it, and it's going to be a great prop for my decrepit memory and an even greater kick for my scattered study habits. Here's hoping it works for you.
Try it; you'll like it. etal
PS When Riversea opened up a discussion of the Death card, it didn't take me more than two or three minutes to open my Master Page, click to create a clone that I could work on and save without disturbing the Master Page, slip Death into the center, resize it, change the color of the border to blue and print. Now I'm ready to start writing down your insights and commentary as I go along—and I'll always have a very graphic and useful shorthand reference page for each card in years to come, with the bonus that there's a picture of the card in question in the middle of the page to jog my recalcitrant recall.
