Hey! I'm not lost, just wandering a bit
Dear Chronata et al,
A hearty hello and thanks and welcome: it's so good to be back. Now if we can only bag, nag, drag Chronata into rewriting at least a bit (there was ONE PRECIOUS paragraph towards the end) of her perfect little essay on John Constantine=the Fool.
I hope that others will recommit and repost too. And I look forward to seeing the Fool rise again and again to the top of New Posts as the months--dare we hope years?--go by.
I had written my own contribution out in Word before posting—so no mental excavation needed to dig it up:
Deep thanks to Chronata for beginning and leading this long-desired Study Group. I hope it will attract and sustain a good number of Vertigo fans and inspire us all to deepen our understanding of these edgy, evocative cards.
A note: Unhampered as I am (!) by any acquaintance with the DC comics that inspired the deck, I’ve had to draw my interpretations from the cards alone.
Countdown to Zero: I found it a useful exercise to imagine the Fool as he might look in a normal, everyday setting, just a moment or two before he slips into Dave McKean’s alternative reality at point zero.
When I do this, I can recognize him much more clearly as Everyman/-woman because I see him and hundreds like him--including me--every day in my city: Head bent downward, mouth set grim, shoulders stooped, hands shoved into his drab coat, he plods along the street with his eyes half closed and averted from the bustling world, determined to avoid any interaction with the unknown passersby. Self-absorbed, he is nonetheless out of touch with the Self. His goals are outer only: making it to the subway, to his job, to sleep. You’ve seen him in the line at the check-out counter at your local supermarket where you too were standing, marking time along with him and me.
Then he takes a few steps forward, lands on this card, and his head explodes. A fiery vision fills his imagination, emotions and strivings that he has starved and stuffed leap out of his chest, and he catches a glimpse of a once-fresh innocence and beauty that seem blasted now.
1. “My hair is on fire.” The Fool’s vision pulsates with volcanic color and energy, surging up from the roiling unconscious with premonitions of adventure and risk that both frighten and tempt. He sees the image of his Self on the edge of a fire-seared cliff, dancing in the light, arms outstretched in welcome to the unknown dark, free and unbound, about to take the leap of hope and faith that will begin the Journey.
2. “Feed the hungry.” The Fool’s instinctive drives have been starved of fulfilling experience. Before he appeared on this card, the Fool had allowed his animal core to become dead bone, fossilized, so non-living that it resembles stone. Yet as long as life persists, the yearning pulse at the center of life remains alive and ravenous--look how it runs and chews its way through his chest and strives to lunge out beyond the frame at the right side of the card!
3. “Say it with flowers.” Innocent sensuality--the fresh and frank love of all that is beautiful in nature--has withered in the world before this card. Like the fossilized creature in his chest, the fruits of the earth seem dead. But the stem still thrusts upward from the ground, and at its tip is a flower still in bud that the Fool can take with him.
Portent: The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said, “You cannot step in the same river twice.” We change with our every breath, yet as creatures of habit, we often fear change and fight it. Even when (or perhaps because) we know our lives have become deadened to exploration, the promptings of instinct, the moment-by-moment awareness of nature’s beautiful gifts, we resist the ineluctable movement toward change.
During the countdown to zero, the Fool has done so too, but the Vertigo card both imagines and urges the beginning of a new take on life. The risks may seem daunting--the cliff is so barren and high! But the inner Self offers an invitation to dance, and to refuse would be to humiliate it, perhaps to silence its soft voice forever. Instinct lunges forward. A failure of courage here would be disastrous.
You may feel dispirited, lonely, withered, and dead. But a miracle has happened and old bones have been called to new life. You are dancing the dance of the universe, which will bear you along on its music. Take courage. Take the last living flower in your hands. And take the leap.
