subtext

You are the Hanged Man

Self-sacrifice, Sacrifice, Devotion, Bound.

With the Hanged man there is often a sense of fatalism, waiting for something to happen. Or a fear of
loss from a situation, rather than gain.

The Hanged Man is perhaps the most fascinating card in the deck. It reflects the story of Odin who offered himself as a sacrifice in order to gain knowledge. Hanging from the world tree, wounded by a spear, given no bread or mead, he hung for nine days. On the last day, he saw on the ground runes that had fallen from the tree, understood their meaning, and, coming down, scooped them up for his own. All knowledge is to be found in these runes.

The Hanged Man, in similar fashion, is a card about suspension, not life or death. It signifies selflessness, sacrifice and prophecy. You make yourself vulnerable and in doing so, gain illumination. You see the world differently, with almost mystical insights.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

We have always lived
among the ruins

civilization’s continual cascade
a spring wells up again
and flows away recursively

pick up that fallen stone
see fragments of figures
dancing in half turns

we can make something
from the scraps of nothing
remaining

“Language is a virus from outer space,” William Burroughs wrote. The panoply of symptoms this virus produces determines how we create and view the world we inhabit. Language, like a virus, replicates itself and mutates as we attempt to control it, or perhaps, adapts to our attempts to control it. More often language controls us; and, we let it.
Sitting in an aisle of a local bookstore in Austin, I read, in a book on Derrida, “Meaning is Fascist.” I laughed out loud. Totalitarian perhaps, but fascism is not the only ideology meaning takes on. Ideology, whether political, religious, social, academic, or poetic, controls through cliché. Cliché controls through limitation of thought; self-satisfied set pieces that defy interpretation, interaction and interpenetration with a reader. Tom Raworth said he did not write down to his readers because he was one of his readers. I prefer my own clichés, a totalitarianism of myself. I rarely set out with any direction in mind; meaning manifests itself without my help. I place two words in proximity and meaning appears, despite myself.
Meaning is ambiguous; ambiguity is attractive. In ambiguity, the poem is opened to multiple readings, depending upon which facet sparkles the reader’s eye. As it comes forth, the multiplicity inherent in ambiguity dazzles like light through a prism. Which half of a metaphor is being compared? The subject/object dialectic fuses rather than divides. Infinity unfolds in a grain of sand. Meaning is never set; it shifts, not evasively, but transcendently: transcendent of any one reader or writer. Variant readings occur simultaneously; each brings depth and complexity to the other as strings in a piano create and sustain resonance.