LEN: Joan Marie reads for dodalisque

[Joan Marie]

All right Lenny for Laughs friend. Whenever you are ready fire away.

[dodalisque]

Please, ma'am, my name is Jack and I am 11 years old. I live in a little cottage with my mammy and 8 brothers and sisters. Of course we are very poor like everyone else, but on my last birthday my godmother Mrs. Piercy, who keeps chickens, gave me a special present so that I might have something that I could think of as my own. It was a gilt medal with a date stamped on it, Sept the 12th, 1663, which happens to be the day on which I was born. And on the back there was a figure of an angel and a Latin motto Desideratus, which Mrs. Piercy tells me means "desired as necessary", which perhaps may have been a little joke since my mammy would surely be better off with fewer, rather than more, children.

When Mrs. Piercy advised me to hide it to keep it safe, I was amazed that anyone should think that anywhere could be out of the reach of little sisters. I carried it everywhere with me at all times in the pocket of my breeches. But anything you carry about with you in your pocket you are bound to lose sooner or later. And sure enough one evening before bed after having run an errand that day for my mammy to another village I discovered that my medal was missing. I asked my brothers and sisters but they were no help. What brother or sister likes being asked such a question?

I retraced my steps and searched everywhere without luck all that autumn and even into winter. Then one day towards the end of March while walking along with my eyes fixed on the ground as usual I saw something glinting in a little depression or puddle that I passed by. It was indeed my medal, clearly visible beneath a foot thick layer of perfectly clear ice that proved impossible to break. I decided to wait for a week or so until the spring thaw had melted the ice. But when the streams began to trickle and I went back the medal was gone.

I noticed that nearby there was an earthenware pipe that led straight down the side of the hill, by way of a drain, that most likely carried off the water from the frozen puddle. The pipe ends down below in the stableyards of the great manor house in the valley and I suppose my medal has been washed down there. I am very afraid to approach the great house to ask about this, so my question is: What will happen when I do?

[Joan Marie]

I am very afraid to approach the great house to ask about this, so my question is: What will happen when I do?

All righty Jack. Normally I would ask your mother's permission before doing a reading for someone so young, but I will make an exception for you. Mostly because with 9 kids you're mother clearly has her hands full.

Let me have a look into my cards and I will let you know how you can proceed to retrieve your your medal.

[Joan Marie]

Well Jack, I'm finally able to get to your query.

And here is my draw.

At the very center is a child. That would be you my young friend. Had I thought to select a significator I'd have chosen the child, but I didn't and it just landed there naturally as I laid the cards in order, left to right, row by row.

An auspicious beginning.

The first thing I notice is an absence of any truly negative cards. That's kind of remarkable I think in a 9-card spread.

The first card, The Crossroads, is interesting. It's the beginning of this Journey and it starts with a decision, a fork in the road.
I think it's pretty clear you plan to proceed.

The last card is The Lady. Could this be your mother? Would she maybe not approve of your decision and prefer you not visit the manor? It's understandable.
Diagonally, you appear between the decision and your mother.
Or, Is she the Lady of the Manor?
I think I'm going to go with that due mostly to the positive nature of the other cards. So you stand between this Crossroad and the Lady.
My first thought is that meeting her will be significant. And positive.

The other diagonal also looks good. You stand between the Key and the Moon. There is something about you that the people of the manor (the Lady?) will find endearing and recognise and reward you for it.

Up and down the middle row, you, the Child, stand between the Sun and the Bouquet.

So far, every way I slice this spread it comes up roses for you kid!

Across the middle is the most interesting part though. You, the Child, stand between the Lily and the Letter. Hmm.

I'm going to make a big jump here and guess that the lady of the manor wishes to adopt you, relieving your poor overburdened mum a bit (in a brood of 9 kids you won't be missed, not really, unless you're an earner!) and bringing her (childless?) self much happiness. And it looks like a good move for you too.

It just occurred to me that the first card, The crossroads, is the medal. Look at the shape of the image on that card.
Losing that medal changed your life. Like some kind of sentient talisman, it made it's way and will draw you to your destiny.

So, I say go ahead fearlessly kid. You have nothing to lose but your your siblings' sticky paw-prints all over your stuff all the time.
And maybe in your newfound position you'll be able to help your mom.

Good luck!!!

[dodalisque]

...The first card, The Crossroads, is interesting. It's the beginning of this Journey and it starts with a decision, a fork in the road.
I think it's pretty clear you plan to proceed.

...The last card is The Lady. Could this be your mother? Would she maybe not approve of your decision and prefer you not visit the manor? It's understandable.

...Across the middle is the most interesting part though. You, the Child, stand between the Lily and the Letter. Hmm.
I'm going to make a big jump here and guess that the lady of the manor wishes to adopt you

The 3 predictions above are excellent but the last one is genius. The owner of the big house does indeed want to adopt Jack. But not in a good way.

First of all let me tell you the story, then we can try to find it in the cards. It comes from a short story by the great English writer Penelope Fitzgerald called "Desideratus". It's only 10 pages long but is one of my favourite stories ever. It's a fairy-tale, but it's also a sort of socialist parable and a ghost story too.

The name of the pre-pubescent boy Jack is the first clue that we are entering fairy-tale country. We think of all the other fairy-tale Jacks. (I also notice that the inset card on the Child card in the spread is the Jack of Spades.) Mrs. Piercy is Jack's "fairy godmother" giving him a magical symbolic gift of a medal with the date of his birthday on it. The medal must symbolise Jack's soul, something that for all of us round about the age of 11 has a good chance of getting lost along the way. Sure enough Jack does carelessly misplace his soul - frozen perhaps under a foot thick layer of poverty and misery.

When the Spring comes, his medal is swept down a drainage pipe leading to the local entrance to the Underworld, the manor house at the bottom of the valley. (Perhaps recalling the Valley of the Shadow of Death from the Lord's Prayer.) Jack, like Aeneas and Odysseus and Dante and Orpheus feels compelled to enter the Underworld in order to reclaim his medal/soul. Usually the descent into the Underworld is in search of a woman, the conscious masculine ego reuniting with the feminine unconscious. But here the reunion is with a coin-like medal. Carl Jung would have a field-day with this story.

Jack knocks timidly on a side door of the kitchen of the big gloomy house. He's afraid to knock at the main door "in case he is mistaken for a beggar". That's a beautiful line. He's not begging but asking for the return of what is rightfully his. Our outward poverty should not lead to us being treated like someone without the dignity of possessing a soul.

This is where the story starts to take on a nightmarish, Alice-in-Wonderland quality. The door is opened by someone dressed like an old schoolmaster, who asks Jack a series of surreal, impertinent questions. Then a cook leads him along several dark passages in the cellar in order to take him to meet the owner of the house Mr. Jonas, who is in effect the Devil himself. He is wealthy, so symbolises materialism itself. Jack asks if anyone has found his medal.

"I daresay you would rather have a sum of money than whatever it is you have lost, " says Mr. Jonas. There we have it - the choice between material wealth and our soul. Jack thinks about it for a while but is determined to get his medal back. Mr. Jonas leads Jack by candlelight further and further into the labyrinth-like house - along narrow corridors with many closed doors on either side, up and down winding staircases, and across enormous rooms lit only by tiny windows high above. "I am a long way from home," thinks Jack.

They stop eventually in a distant part of the house in front of a small open door. "Am I to go in there, sir?" asks Jack. "Are you afraid to go into a room?" Mr. Jonas replies. Inside they approach a bed on which a crumpled pale child is laying on its side facing the wall with one arm hanging off the side of the bed. Jack notices that the hair of the child on the bed is the same colour as his own, and when he moves around to look at the child's white face, it is his own.

"What do you make of his arm hanging oddly like that?" asks Mr. Jonas. "You may touch it if you like. You and your friends and your brothers and sisters must touch each other all the time. Touch, touch!"

"I can't touch the skin of him, sir."

Mr. Jonas snorts and roughly turns over the hand of the child on the bed, twisting it so that the fingers open, to reveal Jack's medal. Jonas takes the medal and gives it back to Jack. "You have what you came for. Note that I don't deny it was yours." Jack takes the medal and races out of the room, scrambling along corridors blindly until he luckily finds a back staircase leading to a door beneath the sculleries with double bolts that he pulls aside and bursts out into the sunshine. He runs home to his family.

The story has a bitter sort of ending. "Jack often wondered how much money Mr. Jonas would in fact have offered him, if he had had the sense to accept it. Anyone who has ever been poor- even if not as poor as Jack Digby - will sympathise with him in this matter." What price our soul?

Looking at the cards you pulled, it's great that the middle card is the CHILD. It could be Jack or the child on the bed gripping the medal. I actually think the medal itself should be the SUN, round and glittering and brilliant like the soul, which is at the top middle of the spread. The presence of the MOON card in the spread might give us a clue about the idea of a split between the Overworld and the Underworld. The Moon is also round like the medal but cold and pewter-coloured like actual metal.

Jack is like a knight in an adventure, so if we knight from the SUN card we get the MOON and the LADY. The lady is either Jack's mother or his fairy godmother Mrs. Piercy. There is the choice - the medal at the top of the reading can either be a symbol of the soul (LADY) or and image of money (MOON). The MOON in the Lenormand usually means "renown, social position, career, job". Do we sell our soul when we follow money into the world of work.

I'm not sure how this all hangs together but the BOUQUET mirrors the SUN card so is the gift from Mrs. Piercy. The KEY brings doorways to mind, with ideas of things locked away and revealed, and of entrapment and freedom. The CROSSROADS, another round design, with lines resembling the labyrinth of passageways in the house, is the decision Jack has to make. The LETTER is the writing on the medal, the motto "Desideratus". The soul is "desired as necessary" but so is money. The LILY can be a symbol of death - the flower of funerals - and also reminds us, in combination with the CHILD card, of the deathly passivity and paleness of the child on the bed, as pale as the Moon.

[dodalisque]

Penelope Fitzgerald is a very erudite, understated writer with an exquisitely deadpan sense of humour. She has been called "the master of the hint of the hint of the sublime". So even though I have read Desideratus about 20 times I am just noticing now that the mention of the "stableyards" of the manor house must be encouraging us to compare Jack's adventure to one of the tasks of Hercules, the cleaning of the Augean stables. Hercules redirects an entire river to sluice through the gigantic stables full of horseshit, but Jack only has a little frozen puddle. I think it's a comment on the build up of corruption and filth in the world of politics, business and economics.

It seems there are subtle echoes of dozens of myths and folk tales in this simple little story about Jack's medal. The medal also, I suppose symbolises the dangers of worldly fame as well as material wealth. She has a rigorous moral and religious sense but holds out very little hope that those values will ever find a permanent place on earth. In her way she's as pessimistic as Samuel Becket. In one of her novels two precocious young sisters are talking about something they have just seen in the street, someone begging for food. Even though they have no money or food to give, the younger one says, quoting from the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament: "Blessed are the kind."

"No, you've got it wrong," her sister replies. "It's, 'Blessed are the meek'."

"Well, what happens to the kind?"

"Oh, they get kicked in the teeth."

I also wouldn't be surprised if the way the medal is carried down through the pipe to the manor house is Penelope Fitzgerald's comment on Ronald Reagan's notion of "trickle-down economics".

[Joan Marie]

I just finished reading The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald.

What a co-inky-dink!

Yeah, she is so deadpan I bet a lot of her humour just goes right past people. I'm sure I missed a thing or two.

I'd love to discuss her more but I am so exhausted right now. Maybe I can come back to this soon.

One thing about my reading I don't quite get is that the cards seemed uncharacteristically positive, like every card in a 9-card spread.
Like, where was the warning, the red flag (there should be a "red flag" card in a Lenormand deck, the 37th card.)

I mean, I was going through a health crisis with my pet rabbit a couple weeks ago and every day, the 3-cards were always the bad ones. I couldn't believe it. Every day I thought, "today they have to be better" and they weren't until finally one day some hope. I have to say they were pretty accurate. (Bunny is fine now- like new.)

So when I saw 9 positive cards, that seemed remarkable, BUT, our stories never really have happy endings, do they? I doubted you would be relaying a story of Charles Foster Cane but he gets to bring Rosebud along to the rich man's house.

I do like that I got the adoption thing right.
YES! (victory lap...)

But I don't quite know where the horror of that story is in those benign cards. Although, the Lily is about pleasure but it can also be perversion, something a bit twisted.

I'm gonna go off topic a second, and maybe I should take this to Plato's cave...But I used to wonder what possessed people to be so against wearing a mask where it's required that they allow themselves to be thrown out of stores and dragged off by cops and security, kicking and screaming, getting tased and losing shoes and all. I thought it seemed like a weird hill to die on, you know? Then it occurred to me that maybe its a kink. They like to be humiliated and manhandled in public like that.

Ah, the Lily. Maybe that was the red flag. A deadly lure.

[dodalisque]

But I don't quite know where the horror of that story is in those benign cards.

You're right. The spookiness of the Pen Fitz story is nowhere to be seen in the cards you drew. Still, Jack was asking about his medal not about the trials he might face, and I suppose the story does have a happy ending - he gets his medal back and escapes. Card readers don't have to see the whole story to extract what's important to the client. I think that's an important lesson to be learned from this type of exercise.

I'm so, so happy to hear you read The Beginning of Spring. Go back and read it again in a few moths or so. I guarantee it will be richer and funnier each time you read it. There is so much happening in that little book. How does she compress so much into such a small space? That chapter near the end when Dolly and Lisa wander at night out into the forest is so magical and strange. It reminds me of the famous "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" chapter in "Wind in the Willows". What is going on there? Are those shadows in the trees fellow revolutionaries she is meeting or spirits of the dead or visitors from outer space? A friend recognised the scene as bearing a close relationship to a section of the Stravinsky ballet "Rites of Spring". Who/what is Lisa? I think she is meant to symbolise the mystery of the Russian soul or something like that. Pen Fitz is a bit of a genius for making glancing references to other novels and poems. I'm sure I only get a fraction of what's going on beneath the surface. She needs a very erudite critic to annotate her novels and stories. In her way she's as allusive as a TS Eliot poem.

The mask thing...I am kind of a mask resister myself but I wouldn't kick up a fuss about it. Why do I do that stupid thing? Well, for one, where I live on Vancouver Island we have very few cases, so it seems alarmist. I might be more amenable if I was living in a big city. I just find them uncomfortable and sinister, I suppose. Do I feel like an anonymous robot in them? Do I feel like an unmanly scaredy-cat? Do I feel like someone who does what I am told, like I did when my mom told me to wipe my nose? It might be a good question for Plato's Cave. It's a bit like climate denial perhaps: bad stuff can't be happening because then I would have to give up things I like and I would have to change my view of the world. It's egotism. It's being a spoilt child. I think too that enemies of masks are mostly right-wingers who think that shutting down businesses to stop Covid in the cause of public safety is actually a commie plot, using some rumour about a pandemic as strategy for undermining capitalism. Something like that. I wish.

[Joan Marie]

You're right. The spookiness of the Pen Fitz story is nowhere to be seen in the cards you drew. Still, Jack was asking about his medal not about the trials he might face, and I suppose the story does have a happy ending - he gets his medal back and escapes. Card readers don't have to see the whole story to extract what's important to the client. I think that's an important lesson to be learned from this type of exercise.

....
The mask thing...I am kind of a mask resister myself but I wouldn't kick up a fuss about it. Why do I do that stupid thing? Well, for one, where I live on Vancouver Island we have very few cases, so it seems alarmist. I might be more amenable if I was living in a big city. I just find them uncomfortable and sinister, I suppose. Do I feel like an anonymous robot in them? Do I feel like an unmanly scaredy-cat? Do I feel like someone who does what I am told, like I did when my mom told me to wipe my nose? It might be a good question for Plato's Cave. It's a bit like climate denial perhaps: bad stuff can't be happening because then I would have to give up things I like and I would have to change my view of the world. It's egotism. It's being a spoilt child. I think too that enemies of masks are mostly right-wingers who think that shutting down businesses to stop Covid in the cause of public safety is actually a commie plot, using some rumour about a pandemic as strategy for undermining capitalism. Something like that. I wish.

Very good point about staying focused on the question. I think that's especially true with Lenormand. I just always find it to be so straightforward.

BTW- I did a reading on Trump's health today, asking for the result, and I got Ship-Coffin-Tower which I took as he'll probably live, but the party is over- his long-term health is compromised and he won't be do much of anything anymore. On the bright side for him, his bad health might keep him out of jail. (I may, very carefully, start a thread on this.

Regarding masks, I don't mind wearing a mask so much (as long as it isn't for too long) but I do find it weird to look up and see evrybody wearing them. I mean I'm glad they do, but it is hard to get used to.
One thing that might improve it is if people up their mask game a bit, get a little more stylish and fun with them.
I have a friend who has dozens of them. They're like t-shirts for her, with decorations, glitter, slogans, band names, it's really kind of cute.

[dodalisque]

One thing that might improve it is if people up their mask game a bit, get a little more stylish and fun with them.

Maybe everyone should have a mask with a picture of their own face on it, the lower half of their face, so it would feel like everything was getting back to normal. The first month or so was quite exciting, I must admit, but now that the second wave is gearing up and no end in sight it's getting pretty boring. Plus the place where I work has had to close down, so looming poverty is an unpleasant prospect. I've always been a bit of a loner but some people must be going up the wall.

Here in Canada we're bracing ourselves for the US election. My political friends are anticipating a close election with Trump hanging on to power come hell or high water. Bringing in the military - public disobedience in the south - states seceding from the union, etc. We're imagining a civil war with thousands of gun-toting Americans carrying the conflict north over the longest unprotected border in the world. Over 85% of our food comes from the US so some I know are stockpiling food before Nov. 3. Let's hope it's a huge Biden majority so there is no possibility of questioning the result. Sanders might have achieved that but I can't see much enthusiasm for Biden. If Biden kicks the bucket - and he doesn't look well - I dread to think how Trump supporters will react to Kamala Harris - black and a woman! I'd love to see that but it would be kryptonite for the Trumpistas.

On more important matters, the reading I did for Rachelcat in this month's TdM section was pretty funny, so you might like it. I had been tearing my hair out for a week and then, out of last minute desperation, I took it in a different direction and it wrote itself in 20 minutes. I wish it always worked out like that. I think that's why live readings generally are better - you are flying by the seat of your pants and don't have time to overthink it. Looking forward to the new-look Weimar Tarot. I don't know how you find the time to do all you do.