3. Judgement

What keeps Neesha up at night

This is the third of my Tarot experiments; the first in which I’ve felt what I could call a ‘breakthrough’. I discovered a core value for the people I‘ve been reading with, and in doing so shed some light for myself on my own motivation for starting the experiments. If you want to get caught up you can read the previous entries here.

Neesha and I meet on the corner of 18th and Valencia, outside the Mission’s garish pink community thrift store. She’s around a foot-and-a-half shorter than me, born and raised here in California, and buzzing with excitement over what we’re about to do. She’s the first person who’s actively reached out to me for a reading, but as we make small-talk I’m not really paying attention. I’m pre-occupied with finding a quiet (but not sepulchrally quiet) venue where we can get some privacy. In San Francisco’s Mission district, where bars and restaurants have either a 2-hour wait-list, or the look of derelict affliction, finding that balance can be difficult. On Sunday afternoons, as the sun dips behind the police station and everywhere teeters on the brink of closing, I can feel myself getting nervous.

We settle at Dolores Park cafe. It’s bright — with floor-to-ceiling glass windows facing out onto the park — and though it’s not too busy, the hard surfaces echo the din of dishes and clatter of chatter around the space. I’m worried it will be hard to make space for ourselves, for her to feel comfortable. I needn’t be.

Neesha is excited. She tells me this three times before I’ve even taken the cards out, though she is the first to admit that she doesn’t really know exactly what we’re about to do. I tell her that we’re going to make it up as we go along, but I do let her know the history of the tarot cards and the history of my experiments. What I neglect to say is that I’ve had increasing reason to believe that it is the method and process of the reading — rather than any specific personal connection — which creates a reason for one person to talk intimately, and then to be able to reflect deeply.

Neesha is a creature who on the surface oscillates between a nervous, very positive energy, and spells of pensive thoughtfulness. As we begin I’m trying to work out whether this is studied and for my benefit, whether it’s a persona crafted consciously for the world, or whether it’s her natural, unconscious state of being. By the end I still haven’t made up my mind.

The Reading

I divide the deck into three piles, as before, and she reaches over to take a card — the Nine of Swords. The card is familiar to me from the reading with Jean before, as is Neesha’s expression, which says silently, “This isn’t what I expected.” She is silent for a long time, and her hitherto palpable excitement swings to pensiveness. “9 of what?” she says rhetorically, and then not so rhetorically, looking up, “Does there have to be a meaning?” I give her a noncommittal Gallic shrug, and say nothing. “9 lives?” she says, all questions.

The next card she draws is The King of Pentacles. She looks up and tells me, “This got existential fast.” I ask what she means and she begins. “We walk the line between right and wrong. When I was working in political campaigning I had a mentor, and he told me that doing good or bad things is always a choice we make. Sometimes we have to do things we think are bad for reasons we think are good, but we live right at the edge. Making these decisions is how we get from place to place in our lives.”

Again I say nothing. When she looks at me I make the slightest of nods towards the piles of cards. It’s the smallest intervention I can make, but she takes it as a cue.

The next card is The Four of Swords, which has appeared in every reading I’ve yet done. For everyone it’s been a sombre card, and Neesha puzzles over it for a while, breaking silence with a single declarative statement. Such declarations will be her signature during the reading.

“Three deaths,” she says, “two by choice and one not.” She begins to tell me about a family friend who had Lupus, something she describes as a ‘senseless death’. She switches midway, and tells me about her best friend’s mother, a woman who by rights she tells me should be a role model for all women — a female CFO who started a nonprofit, and advises startups whilst simultaneously raising two kids. Like her own family, she says, this one “struggled with adjustment.” In dealing with death her language becomes euphemistic. I get hung up on “two by choice”, but I don’t prod further, and we never get there. She switches gears, telling me about the third death — her Grandma’s sister — a woman who was well-educated but who had a hard life, and never ‘found a husband’. She describes this third woman’s life in contradistinction to the second; a spinster recluded from the world, who didn’t want to participate. Neesha frowns and tells me, breathlessly “You make your own happiness in the world. For her [this older woman] to be educated, intelligent, and not to do anything…” She pauses, and I assume a criticism of this third woman; a fundamental belief on Neesha’s part that if we’re smart, if we’re educated, we should contribute to the world, and to other people.

She looks at me in silence. For the first and only time during our conversation I am awkward. I say “cool,” to move the conversation on, and instantly feel like a jerk.

“What is that? Who’s the dude?” Neesha has drawn the Nine of Cups, and I see repulsion on her face. As before she pauses, and then declares, “I’m sorry, this is a cliché, but he’s The Man.” I smile, and she continues, “Look at him, he’s happy, he’s getting exactly what he wants. He organizes the system.” In each of my readings the subject of authority and order has been broached — my participants, it seems, are an unruly bunch. She begins to tell me a story, about meeting the COO of Patagonia (the outdoor clothing brand). Flying in to speak at a talk she helped manage, she tells me that he’d landed late, without time to grab food, and had eaten someone else’s half-eaten leftovers at an airport restaurant whilst on the way. He told her this was a judgment call. He’d been to far sketchier places than San Francisco, eaten at far sketchier places than airport restaurants, and been fine, so he reasoned this would be ok, too. When her face had failed to mask slight disgust he turned to her and said, “Look. We’re only participants in the system. What’s important for me, especially in business, is an ability to be outside of the system. To not be caught up on nonsensical things other people just do, like abandon perfectly good food. “What you’re so embarrassed about,” he said to her point blank, “is that you don’t own your own beliefs.” This phrase, despite the questionable philosophy and mixed metaphor, had clearly stuck with her, and she frowned again.

I said nothing, reflecting on the fact that as different as my first two readings had been from one another, Jean and Lucas had told me stories that started and ended with themselves. With Neesha each card became a referent to other people in her life, and the influence they had had upon who she was. I stifled a lazy desire to put this down to her gender.

Next came the Four of Wands, which I have in my head now labeled ‘the wedding card’. In a deck of cards full of abstraction it has had one universal meaning, and when Neesha says “It just looks like Indian people getting married,” I nod agreement. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever get married,” she says, “but there’s something amazing about the Hindu tradition; one person making you their priority.” The thought trails off — she can tell I’m disinterested — and I nod my assent again.

Since talking about ‘The Man’ she’s become more playful, maybe now registering and enjoying the unusual power relationship that the reading creates between two people. Without asking, and with a fleeting glance my way, she starts to take cards from the bottom of the piles, maybe trying to undermine my authority, and be subversive. “Well, ain’t that a pair?” she says, and places The Nine of Pentacles next to The King of Pentacles. “She’s picking sides,” she says of the women on the card, “doing good, but knowing there are different ways of getting there.” She turns to me, with her finger on the card, and says, “You choose to be loved,” referencing, I guess, her Grandma’s sister — the spinster — from before. She tells me “The universe conspires to give you what you want, Picking is important”. Bound up in Neesha’s pithy statements I start to perceive a subtle, maybe subconscious description of her own moral compass; a belief that our outlook and actions define the world around us. It’s not only deeply spiritual — in terms of the karmic wheel and the interconnectedness of the universe — but also deeply American; rooted in the idea that we forge our own world through our decisions and actions.

In light of the exercise she is going through, taking abstract cards and giving them meaning, it seems doubly relevant. “There’s another cliché here,” she tells me. “That bird, it’s like my spirit guide; the hawk. I know it sounds stupid, especially in the context of what we’re talking about; mysticism, superstition. But a bird has always been present at these pivotal decision making times in my life. So it’s funny that it’s here now.”

She turns over the seventh card and laughs reflexively. It is Death, perhaps the famous tarot card. “What is it in that Simpsons episode?”, she says, continuing to smile, “Death is actually good and The Happy Squirrel is actually terrible?” [the reference is here]. “Well”, she says, “Things are ending. You know, I believe the conspiracies are right. In a way, the world ended in 2012.” I say nothing and she continues. “By this point we were supposed to have a reason for doing what we’re doing, or at least some kind of faith we could all believe in. But that didn’t happen, and now it’s too late.” I start to sense in Neesha’s monologue an age-old paradox core to religion —free will and ownership of our own destinies married uneasily with the desire to believe there is some overarching, definitive meaning.

“Women and children,” and she points at the bottom corner of the card, “that’s the future. The great thing about kids is they’re not bound by dogma.” She continues to tell me about the battle in the US over the right of companies to hold a religious preference, and the way that is being used to marginalize women. “Assholes,” she says, and looks me right in the eye, “There really is a war on women, you know? You know we’re told growing up that in the beginning when we were hunter-gatherers the men did all the hunting whilst the women stayed inside, and that’s the basic nature of things? Bullshit! Look at all the big cats; the rest of the animal kingdom. Who do you think does all the hunting?”

‘Death’, I think to myself. It’s so interesting that the first of the cards Neesha has drawn that carries it’s own labeled meaning has inspired an order of magnitude more emotion and commentary than the others.

“Can I change this one?” she says with a serious face as she draws The Five of Swords. I shake my head. “I Don’t like it. One guy has all the power.” I ask why she wants to discard it, recalling Jean’s prior, poetic description of this card (“People trying to fuck me”). Neesha says, “My grandfather was a freedom fighter. He said, ‘If you want to change something do it yourself. Believing someone else will is stupid.” She pauses, “How many more cards do I get?”

Next is The Lovers. Over time I’ve become attuned to a reader’s tendency to downplay cards that affect them, so I notice when Neesha says, academically “Well, this is very heteronormative.” She tells me she hates the Adam and Eve story, and all that dogma, but gives away her uncertainty about the card. “I don’t know where it’s supposed to go,” she tells me, placing it away from the other cards, “It can connect to so many things…Can I come back to it?” I tell her sure, let’s do that.

Next is The Moon, and Neesha tells me her name means night; that night is when she’s most romantic; that when the first time she went to Yosemite was the first time she saw the Milky Way. “Only human beings,” she tells me, “would be narcissistic enough to think their existence had a purpose.”

Neesha might not realise, but she’s playing with The Lovers card as she talks, and becoming less coherent with the story she’s telling. “I’m constrained by the rituals I make for myself,” she tells me, and turns over The Empress.

“I suffer from delusions of grandeur. It’s a lot for a woman to identify with,” (looking at the card) “but I definitely like this one. Her face is serious; responsibility weighs heavy on her. I’m glad the King in this deck has an Empress and not a Queen.”

She stops suddenly and returns to The Nine of Swords, her first card. “It’s not 9 lives,” she says, reflecting, “It’s things that keep me awake at night. It’s literally What. Keeps. Me. Up. At. Night.” She continues to arrange and rearrange.

With that, she’s switched from being passive storyteller to being ‘in the cards’, attempting to discern a pattern. For The Nine of Wands she gives it only cursory study. “Pretty self-explanatory,” she tells me, as I look on with the opposite impression. “Robin hood, men in tights, I like it. Rebuilding after a war. Finding happiness without things. There’s only so much stuff that can actually happen, but today there’s this overwhelming desire for shit. I gave my friend Alex a leaf as a gift when he got back from his travels, and he immediately started welling up with tears.” I think of Lucas’ reading, and how he too saw pastoral bliss, and a positive escape from the complexity of the world in the ‘Wands’ cards. As I note this down Neesha starts to make a 4th pile from three on the table. Or does she? No, she takes her final card, and moves the three piles into one taller tower, made out of the three piles at right angles to one another (you can see this below).

She turns over Judgment and tells me with a laugh, “Ha, it’s all been leading to this, hasn’t it?” I cock my head inquisitively, and she continues, “So, a week ago I decided I need to start dating again.” She touches The Lovers, and then looks back at Judgment. “Gray area. Grey clouds.”

In arranging the cards — seeking meaning and creating the story — she is reinforcing a very human desire to ‘make sense’. That desire has now become a belief that there was always a narrative here — all she had to do was tease it out.

“Just don’t make me talk about that one,” she says, pointing at The Lovers.

“I didn’t make you talk about any of this,” I respond with a smile, and she moues at me as we look down at the table:

Neesha takes up all the cards back into her hand. She re-orders them and tells me “I don’t know how to order them. Well, I do but I don’t.” She takes everything off the table except Judgment, The Lovers, and The Nine of Swords, which she now only refers to as ‘what keeps me up at night’. She takes a photo, and ‘makes’ the story for me.

“The lovers are on top,” she says with a wry smile. I think about the performative nature of what she’s doing; who she’s really doing this for. “Obviously that’s what’s keeping me up at night…It’s funny,” and she cuts to the core of what I’ve been feeling, “I’m like a 5 year old, really. I go through this with you — all existentialist, thinking deeply, all these lofty ideas — and then the second I get The Lovers I just don’t know what to say…”

For the first time since I started doing these experiments I go through what I’m thinking right away. I ask Neesha, maybe obnoxiously, “Could you have done this yourself?” and she responds accordingly “The whole point, right, is that you’re here, and we’re having this as a dialogue?” She’s right of course, and so I ask a slightly different question, “If we’d just been having a regular conversation, do you think you would have shared as much as you did with me?” She says, “No,” but adds that if I’d asked her direct questions point blank she would have answered plainly and honestly.

I tell her that when I did this with Lucas he was resentful, and felt that I held all the power in the relationship; I told her the truth, that once we’d finished he said we had to switch places and do it the other way round. He wanted to restore a balance he felt had been violated. Neesha smiles, and tells me that she sees the ultimate creative power — in defining the story and conversation — lying with her. She tells me that the cards are a catalyst, and having a human to engage with a necessity, but that in the end she is calling the shots.

I tell her what I think I’ve learned so far. I tell her that I was interested by the way she saw a coherent narrative in the cards before she realized that it was she who had created it from nothing. I tell her that unlike Jean and Lucas she built her story predominately from interactions with other people, rather than beliefs or concerns she had about herself, and I also tell her that, like the others, she saw in some cards an ‘obvious’ single meaning, based in her experiences, but which had been obscure to me.

What I tell her I’m beginning to learn, though, is that no-one I’ve met has anyone they feel that they can talk to regularly with as much candour and honesty as they display with me during the reading — interesting because I’m far from being any of their closest friends. What I’m beginning to see is a strong desire to explore deep anxieties and inner thoughts with another human, stymied by an environment where we sabotage our ability to be honest with our friends. Acutely in the US, but especially in San Francisco, our reflex action is always to say that we are ‘crushing it’, that things are great and that we’re very happy and definitely fulfilled. Constructing and reinforcing this shell means that when something bad does happen, or when we want to be candid, our friends’ perceptions of us are so distorted that just to be honest forces us to shatter the illusion we’ve created, and confuse and disturb those around us. It is here that using the tarot cards as a proxy for our conversation can help.

Epilogue

It’s a week later — the first night of September in which the fog has fully descended on San Francisco. My friend Laura and I are walking back through Fort Mason in the dark, as the light from the lighthouse on Alcatraz strobes through the fog-dense darkness of the bay across the city, and the boats in the aquatic park bob silently between the fingers of mist hanging in the air. She’s asking me why I’m doing this; telling me implicitly that it’s not just about spreading self-discovery amongst San Francisco’s techies; telling me that it’s about me, that it makes perfect sense that a liberal arts INTJ in Silicon Valley would find solace in running rationalized ‘mystic’ experiments — in ‘fixing people’; making meaning and power-tripping as observer and orchestrator of these readings. She helps me acknowledge that the relationship is two-way, and that there’s a reason a therapist, a psychiatrist or whomever has chosen to sit in that chair. She makes me wonder whether if I want to make this selfless —something bigger than just me and my cards — I might have to relinquish the control and personal involvement that made it so interesting in the first place.

The experiments continue. Follow the collection here if you want to read more stories as I publish them, and if you’re interested in being part of a reading just tweet me @BANGwallace