Tidy, Little Packages
March 18th, 2007
I’m a fan of oracles. I myself use the Tarot, and have been reading cards for about ten years now. Recently, I tried to do a reading for myself and discovered that I was too close to the situation and I needed a more unbiased view. I summoned a friend who reads the runes, and she cast a spread for me that was eerily, eerily accurate.
That’s what’s so appealing about oracles: on the whole, they are strangely accurate. However, they are not usually particularly precise. The distinction might be subtle, but it’s important. Oracles like these are accurate in that they can depict a situation in a grand scale and hit upon archetypal themes that we all experience from time to time. Every throw of the runes of lay of the cards reveals truth; the consistency is part of the accuracy. But the cards or the runes themselves can’t be precise: that ability lies solely with a very good reader. She can’t rely solely upon the “meanings” of the cards in question, because in my opinion, individual cards don’t really mean anything. They themselves can’t tell a story. Narrative requires relationship and context: between other cards in the spread, and where they fall in the reading. Moreover, the cards can’t speak to the querent without the voice of the medium. She has to find the connections herself. She has to find the story. She has to rely upon her intuition to look at those archetypal cards and say, “You’re going to be pregnant within the next three months. It’s going to be a boy. And even though you’re not dating anyone right now and you’re freaking out just a little, when it happens you’ll have made peace with it.”
Context is everything.
This is part of my problem lately. Finding the context, specifically when it comes to relationships and love. I remember when I was a child learning that Jesus loved everyone, and I remember thinking, “Jesus loves me like he loves killers? Either Jesus is an idiot, or that love doesn’t mean anything.” The way we feel about people doesn’t have any meaning unless we can compare those feelings with something else: how they feel about other people, how they treat us in response to those emotions, etc.
We use words like “love” because they are supposed to be neat, tidy little packages that are intended to convey an archetypal emotion that we naturally feel good about. But the way that word gets used and abused, a lot of times, “I love you” is a lazy phrase. It’s easy to say, “I love you”. It’s harder to say what you really mean. And if I don’t have the meaning behind it, what am I supposed to take away from it? How am I supposed to know how you relate to me in your heart?
Context is everything.
I’m sure that when most people say “I love you”, the statement is accurate. But I want more than accuracy; I want precision. I want to know if you think of me when you lie in bed at night. I want to know if I’m what you think about when you wake up in the morning. I want to know where you want to go with me, and if the sound of my voice sends shivers down your spine. I want to know if the idea of waking up with me in your bed in thirty years scares you or makes your heart melt.
Of course, sometimes a little accuracy is all you need. I still read the Tarot cards frequently. I don’t always need to know the name of the next-door neighbor of the guy my daughter is going to marry. Sometimes it’s enough to know that love is “in the cards” so to speak. Hell, sometimes I don’t even want to know something with such a degree of specificity. I don’t need or want to know when I’m going to die, for instance. So I want both at my disposal, accuracy and precision. But lately I want more of the latter. I know you love me. I want to know more.