Masha and the Tarot card readers

Hope is a hard lesson to learn. But I’m trying.

I keep listening to the song Masha posted yesterday, “Thieves Like Us” by New Order, a healing song out of my own past that sounds to me like something pure that floats outside of time, a song of the past and present and future, and as I’m listening to it I’m remembering that love belongs to all of us. Love exists outside of the market; it is not a commodity to be bought and sold, and I have no less right to it or claim to it than all those who have the kind of love I often feel is missing from my life. It is easy to forget that, and good to be reminded.

*****

OkCupid was never how I wanted to meet anyone. I thought (and actually still think) that if I’m ever again going to have a serious relationship with someone, it will probably be someone I meet through my work (not at work) or through friends or in some sort of organic way that starts out with a foundation in at least some sort of overlap of our interests or our ideologies or something.

I hate the way that on OkCupid you’re presented with a slew of people to sort through, like browsing for a good movie at a video store. When I think about how there are so exceptionally few people out there who can make something inside me vibrate with a desire to know them better and be close to them and be a significant part of their lives, and how so few of those would want anything to do with me, OkCupid starts to feel like playing the lottery. Astronomical odds. Almost pointless. 

I don’t consult the Tarot but I like that Masha does. In her post 21st Century Blues, she quotes the filmmaker and Tarot historian Alejandro Jodorowsky: “The Tarot will teach you how to make a soul.” And that’s sort of how I feel about my relationship to Masha’s work. It’s something I consult, a kind of reflection, a kind of guide, something that helps me see my soul and shape my soul more clearly, something that validates me and challenges me, that gives me perspective on where I am and where I’m going.

And as I was thinking about my recent experiences with OkCupid and my feelings about those experiences, and whether I should take a break from it or give it up altogether, I also recalled something Masha wrote about an interaction with a Tarot reader, so I picked up my print copy of her book Love Dog and started looking for it. The passage I was looking for was this one, from her entry As Seen on TV:

 Last spring, for example, a male Tarot card reader warned me that as a woman artist simply wanting anything other than a writing life was impossible and would lead to a lifetime of suffering. It wasn’t enough that I told him that I don’t want children, or even marriage necessarily, or that I “suffer” precisely from feeling like writing is all I am allowed to have. Being anything other than one thing as a woman (no male artist is told this, even though it is no secret that male artists have historically not been able to balance their art with their personal lives either. However, they continue to believe that they can have both, without actually having to attend to both, precisely because they are not expected to do both) is perceived as unrealistic and greedy—the source of all gender trouble. When I told the Tarot reader that in addition to my writing I also want true and lasting love, which is radically different from simply wanting a man or a relationship, he was dismissive. Real love as opposed to just being in a relationship means that no one gets to just be or have a man or just be or have a woman. Real love is about being radically opened up from the inside out, not enacting roles. If it were just about having a man, I would already have a man, as just having a man would reduce me to just being—playing— a woman.

It’s not that nobody ever expresses an interest in dating me. Plenty of people “like” me on OkCupid. But what can that even really mean? What do I do with that? I thought of this passage because I think that perhaps if I just wanted to “have” a woman, I might already have one. I probably could have one. But that’s not what I’m looking for. (“Know how to choose. Know how to wait,” Masha posted the other day, quoting Baltasar Gracián, and a few weeks ago, “Someone’s someone. Not anyone’s anyone.”)

But as I was flipping through the book, I stumbled upon this section from another entry, about a different encounter with a Tarot card reader that seemed even more relevant to what I was feeling, this from the great entry I am the writing on the wall:

In the preface to All About Love, bell hooks writes: 

“When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered.”

Like hooks, I’ve always believed that life is not worth living without love, only I came to this conclusion for the opposite reason. It was because of love’s presence (in my family, between my parents); because I had always known love growing up, that I could not bear its absence.

(On “Thieves Like Us” Bernard Sumner sings, “It’s called love, and it’s the only thing that’s worth living for.”)

Masha continues:

Last Sunday, I was finally able to watch the Ayrton Senna documentary, Senna, in its entirety… 

As Senna demonstrates in the scene with his father, sometimes we are so sensitive to love, to the one we love, it allows us to know exactly who we don’t want love from. In a series of lectures for children called God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues, Jean-Luc Nancy explains: “We are captivated by this person because of his or her absolute uniqueness…What I receive in love or what creates passion is what we call the uniqueness of the person. It’s him or her, and that’s all that matters. There is a word for this, the beloved [l’élu]. Perhaps you’ve heard of the expression, ‘the one my heart has chosen [l’élu de ma cour]’…But the élu in love involves a choice that is not made by a majority. Choice means that a person is chosen, distinguished or set apart from all others.”

A Tarot card reader once told me: “There are 200 hundred men, right now, in New York City, who you could fall in love with. Who could make you happy,” which fundamentally goes against all my core beliefs about love. How can so many people all do the same thing? And, according to the Tarot reader, at the same time and place, no less. How can so many men all make me feel the same way? And if that’s really the case, if love is one-size-fits-all, what makes love so rare, so unique, so hard to find—so difficult to recover from? If there is something that makes someone singular and unique—for you—then the inverse must also be true: everyone else cannot be singular and unique—for you. Having a beloved, that is, knowing who is beloved, means that one is also acutely aware of and sensitive to who is not-beloved. That the beloved and not-beloved are not simply interchangeable or reproducible. That the beloved is outside the economy of the love market, or love as market, as Zygmunt Bauman notes in Consuming Love.

This may also be the difference, as this same Tarot card reader pointed out, between love and soul mates. “You want a soul-mate,” she scolded gently, “and soul mates take fifteen years to recover from.” Soul mates are hard, if not impossible, to find; impossible to shake, forget, let go of. Whereas love is something you can have with 200 people, right now. All the time. Love is something you can go in and out of, unscathed—an economy with concrete value. Value you can manage, control, and exchange.

There might possibly be somewhere near 200 women in San Francisco who would be, to echo the entry I quoted previously, women I could “have,” women I could just be in relationships with, if that’s what I wanted, but I’m certain there aren’t anywhere near 200 women with whom I could form connections that would open me from the inside out. And while it’s possible that someone who would be extraordinary to me and someone to whom I would be extraordinary might be lingering on OkCupid, I hate the way it makes love feel like a marketplace, an economy, diminishing “the uniqueness of the person.” They’re just another profile, one of hundreds or thousands you can click through, and if things don’t work out with this person, maybe you just didn’t click through enough, maybe if you’d gone just one profile further, or one past that, but don’t worry, there are always more. There are always so many more.