Writer’s block sounds dramatic. Writer’s pause is just annoying.
When I had a huge unfinished manuscript, I could always escape to another section. If one chapter stopped cooperating, fine. I had 497 other pages to meddle with.
Technically, I still have somewhere else to run. Chapter 3 of Part 2, on the World Cards, is full of words and ideas.
But every instinct I have says: don’t even think about it.
I feel as if I need the Time Cards to become as complete as the Soul Cards are before I’ll understand the shape of what comes next. Once I know that, I can go to that chapter and let the weight of all those words pull me in the direction they want to go.
So for now, I have to “lay down my pen” and leave Chapter 2 alone to percolate until my chef’s intuition tells me I can go back to it.
It’s annoying. And yet, it also seems to be a promise that progress is being made.
I still wonder why writers don’t complain about this more.
I waited on my doorstep for the deck to be delivered and I opened it in the late-afternoon sun. My first reading was extraordinarily clear.
Strength. Five of Pentacles. Seven of Cups. And the Ten of Swords fell out of the deck, too.
The cards reflected a life made up of shards of meaning, glimpses of light, disconnected hurts. Pieces of experience that do not fit together.
In Strength, which of the two figures is strength: the headless woman or the masked woman? Can the headless woman keep the masked figure from expressing inappropriate frustration and anger? Or is she the monster, able to wrap a hand around the masked woman’s throat to prevent her from speaking up for herself?
There is not a hint of hope in this Five of Pentacles. Tiny figures fly through driving hail. The windows above them are open, tantalizing and unreachable. It is a different world in there, and those figures will never know it.
They may never find shelter anywhere.
The punt in the Seven of Cups looks like the canoe that comes to me when I travel to the shamanic underworld. The world I have seen in those journeys is lifeless. No person or animal is there.
If I climb upward into the light, I reach green cliffs overlooking the sea. Farther inland there is a stone structure, later a stone church, and eventually a village.
No people. Only the sound of the wind.
I can fly far out over the sea.
No birds. No fish.
At the foot of the cliff, I can sometimes walk along the beach for miles and climb into caves.
No seaweed. No shells. No spiders or lizards. Only the sounds of the waves.
There is no life there.
Back underground, the river is wide and a canoe comes for me. There are miles and miles of dark tunnels to explore, sometimes opening into enormous caverns. Farther on, some of the water pours from the side of a cliff into the sea.
Except for the sound of my feet on the rocks beside the underground river, or the water lapping against the boat, there is only silence.
The Ten of Swords has been following me for a couple of weeks. Here, the web of meaning through which constructed to understand the world has been disproved and destroyed.
The swords keep killing him and killing him, and still he asks:
What was I supposed to learn from this lesson? And that one? And this other one?
There is no pattern.
No meaning.
There is no love.
It was a waste to look.
Instead of telling me, “Here is the time of the equinox in Greenwich,” and allowing me to perform subtraction like an adult, Google told me it would occur at UTC−0500 in Texas-- and also at UTC−0500 in Connecticut, which I’m pretty sure is impossible.
So: what the hell is UTC?
It is, for ordinary human purposes, the modern successor to Greenwich Mean Time. GMT was based on mean solar time at Greenwich. UTC is based on atomic clocks because, inconveniently, the Earth does not rotate with perfect regularity.
And why “UTC” instead of something intelligible like “Coordinated Universal Time,” abbreviated CUT? Apparently the international timekeepers compromised between English and French abbreviations.
Fine. Whatever.
But this made me wonder why anyone needed to know the time somewhere else before cell phones or even telegraph lines.
I assumed Greenwich must have been important because it was a port. Close, but not quite. Greenwich was home to the Royal Observatory, founded in part to improve navigation. Sailors needed astronomy and accurate clocks to determine longitude at sea.
British navigators carried marine chronometers set to Greenwich time. Suppose the chronometer said it was noon in Greenwich, while the position of the sun told you it was 2 p.m. locally. That two-hour difference told you how far east or west of Greenwich you had traveled.
So Greenwich time had a very practical purpose: it helped sailors figure out where the hell they were.
By the nineteenth century, railroads and telegraphs made standardized time useful on land too. And in 1884, an international conference adopted Greenwich as the prime meridian.
Perfectly comprehensible:
Here is the time in Greenwich, England.
If you live somewhere else, add or subtract some hours.
Then modernity gave us UTC−0500.
And because that isn't complicated enough, most of the United States changes its clocks twice a year. Hawaii doesn't. Most of Arizona does not. The Navajo Nation in Arizona does. The Hopi Reservation inside the Navajo Nation doesn't.
So UTC−0500 can describe Texas in summer and Connecticut in winter, while in the southwest you can change clocks (if you're in the know) every time you cross a border. I once arrived an hour late for Torah study in New Mexico because I didn't re-set my watch on the road.
Britannia, please rule the clocks again!
