LEN: dodalisque reads for Joan Marie

[dodalisque]

Hello, you. The doctor is IN. Do you know Lucy in the Peanuts cartoon? "Psychiatric Help - 5 cents". Please don't choose a question from "Mercurius" by Partrick Harpur or we'll both go mad trying to answer it.

[Joan Marie]

Please don't choose a question from "Mercurius" by Partrick Harpur or we'll both go mad trying to answer it.

I would never do that.
Thank you so much doctor, I will submit my question to you hopefully tomorrow.

[Joan Marie]

Hello, you. The doctor is IN.

I have a real problem.
I come from the poor side of town where everyone struggles and always has. I never expected much from life and I never got much. The only bit of luck I've ever had was meeting my boyfriend. He's handsome and smart and works hard. And because we come from the same place, the same background, I always thought we'd be able to make a life together, that we understood each other and didn't need much from life. Having family, work and a home would be a great success story for us.

Recently we, or really I should say he, got a big break. He's working for a rich relative (very distant relative) out of town. I see a lot less of him now. He seems to make it back home less and less often, but he was home recently long enough to get me in a real pickle.

Well, not to be too indelicate, but we need to get married now, soon. The thing is, he is clearly not thrilled about this. I know it was not something he was expecting to happen right now, but really, isn't this what would happen anyway? Yet for some reason he's so distant and nervous all the time when we talk. And he seems preoccupied with these well-to-do relatives. I guess they invite him to their fancy house and all.

But he's a good man, I just know he'll do the right thing by me. This weekend we are supposed to meet and he wants to take me for a little rowboat ride. I think he's going to make a romantic proposal of marriage to me out on the lake. But part of me isn't so sure.

Could you tell me what you think his intentions are for this meeting?

[dodalisque]

My dear young lady, from your description of your would-be fiancee's recent absences and his increasing involvement with a family of sophisticates, not to mention his lack of enthusiasm when you told him about your pregnancy, I suspect you are being rather naive and...um...innocent if you expect this meeting in a rowboat to result in a joyous proposal of marriage. But let us consult the cards to see what exactly you should be prepared to expect.

Mountain - Crossroad - Tree
Scythe - Rider - Garden
Moon - Ship - Sun

The card that establishes the main focus of the reading, the middle card, the Rider, is a clear depiction of your boyfriend, who has not only been traveling back and forth between you and the wealthy family, but also is about to arrive with his decision about your future together. The reading is clearly meant to give us a portrait of his personality.

The first card laid down, in the top left-hand corner, the Mountain, casts a gloom over the entire reading. Obstacles.

Taking the three vertical columns to represent Past/Present/Future, we see that in the Past your boyfriend either saw obstacles (Mountain) as a danger (Scythe) to his ambition (Moon), or even that he has a history of ruthlessly eliminating (Scythe) obstacles (Mountain) that threaten his social position (Moon). How much do you actually know about his past? Scythe "knights" to Tree and Sun, suggesting this habit of ruthlessness, or even criminality, is long-lasting (Tree) and has previously brought him success (Sun). You say you both come from poor backgrounds. This can often give someone an exaggerated respect for wealth and privilege, and make them desperate to escape their early poverty.

In the central column describing the Present, the Ship must represent the rowboat where you are about to meet the Rider. The significance of the Crossroad could hardly be clearer: this crisis moment will decide the future for both of you.

In the right-hand column we see that your boyfriend will presumably join the wealthy family and flourish (Sun) in established (Tree) society (Garden). I am sorry to say you do not seem to be part of his future plans. However, since this is a portrait of your boyfriend, perhaps this column represents what he would like to happen in the future rather than an actual prediction. So I drew a line of 5 cards to try to get an answer to your question about what will actually take place in the rowboat.

Dog - Birds - House - Clover - Ring
Extra cards: Stars - Bear

Suspicions about his faithfulness (Dog + Birds) find a home or take root in you (House), but then something lucky happens (Clover) that brings you both together (Ring). This mysterious and totally unexpected stroke of luck appears to reverse the generally negative drift of this reading, so I lay down two more cards to try to understand the exact nature of this miraculous event. If Clover means "a little luck" then Stars means "a tremendous stroke of good fortune", and this is even further reinforced by the idea of "power" associated with the Bear card. The cards refuse to be specific but everything seems to hinge on a completely unexpected or even ridiculous event.


Please contact me again to tell me what happens, and if the Ring card does predict your eventual marriage I hope I will get an invitation.

[Joan Marie]

Wow! This is great.
Every way you slice this spread it reveals the plot of the movie.

The story is from the film "A Place in the Sun" with Liz Taylor and Montgomery Clift and Shelly Winters as the luckless pregnant girl. Shelly Winters seemed to have always played the luckless girl in movies.

It's based on the Theodor Dreiser book "An American Story." The movie follows the book very closely, braving some touchy topics for the time. It's a bit surprising really. There is a really difficult scene where Montgomery Clift takes Shelly Winters to get an illegal abortion. The doctor gives her some medicine to take but (if I remember right) she doesn't do it right or it makes her sick or something. Anyway, it doesn't work. This whole part of the film and the book is just wrenching. They try to disguise it a bit in the film, but it's pretty obvious what's going on.

I just read the synopsis on Wiki because it had been a long time since I saw/read this story and I got a couple details slightly wrong, but it doesn't matter. The Boat ride was spontaneous as Shelly Winters had decided to just pop in and ruin everything for him with Liz Taylor and his promising prospects in society by announcing her situation.

He manages to head her off before she crashes the cotillion. Driving around with her he recalls a story about someone who drowned in the local lake and the body never found. He gets ideas.

You were so right about there being a completely unexpected and ridiculous stroke of luck. But oh, what a twist!

He nervously rents a boat and gets her on the lake. She starts talking about their life together and how sweet it will be and his heart melts and he reconsiders his plan to disappear her. Just when it looks like he's going to maybe do right by her, she stands up in the boat, it capsizes. She can't swim. His melting heart must have cooled quickly in that water because he decides to not save her. This is the easy way out he thinks.

Only he isn't very clever about it. Instead of reporting a terrible accident, he decides to try and hide the whole thing. He gets caught and sent to the electric chair. Even though it was technically an accident, he had murder in his heart.

The story is based on a real event.

That Sun card in the opposite corner from the Mountain is so perfect. I won't recap all your insights, just to say you really got them all right, until the very very end! You even got that there would be a surprise, but misread it as being a good thing for Shelly Winters. I think maybe if I had told you it was Shelly Winters you'd have known right away things would never work out in her favour.

Thank you so much That was so fun and now I'm going to watch that movie again.

[dodalisque]

You were so right about there being a completely unexpected and ridiculous stroke of luck. But oh, what a twist!

What a hoot. I had a such a clear picture in my mind - as you do with a reading - you get more and more convinced of the accuracy of your intuition - of a Hollywood happy ending, and instead there is a drowning and a hanging! If only I had thought of the word "accident" instead of "luck", but there was no way around that unless I had given even more weight to the negativity of the Mountain and Scythe cards. The Ring now looks like the two of them trying to swim to safety, or a noose. But that's a sort of tarot observation more than a Len idea.

I think another issue is that fiction and movies DEPEND on the unpredictable (sic) in order to make a memorable tale. We saw the same thing in the reading you did for me. That makes it extremely tough on a reader. Regular tarot readings for regular people are awesomely predictable in comparison. Not to mention the obvious fact that in a regular tarot reading the future has never happened yet so you hardly ever get to find out how terribly wrong your predictions were.

This whole process is very educational. It taught me the wisdom of not being specific in a reading. Instead of saying "You will fall in the water", say something more like "There will be a descent", that sort of thing. Then the client is then free to project the details of their life onto the statement. The Sibyl at Delphi was a dab hand at that kind of thing.

I loved your synopsis of the plot, but what a peculiar story this is. There doesn't seem to be a likeable character in it. I suppose there is a moral conundrum about the actual guilt of the guy if he's changed his mind about killing her before the accident happens. Are we supposed to feel sympathy for this jerk? And it's not a conundrum that seems worth solving. His intent was to kill her but then his intent changes. The legal system obviously can't infallibly look into the mind of everyone at every moment the way God can. But it's hardly news that God's justice doesn't have much in common with the legal system. Is it about the folly of desperately trying to get above your station in life? I'll have to watch this movie now.