Tarot and Turning 65: Does Medicare eligibility entitle me to alternative medicine?

 Tarot, Fate, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Reading Tarot, aging, reflection 

Rider Tarot Cards

This past weekend, there was a celebration of my transition to Medicare eligibility which, in the United States, occurs when you reach 65.  This also used to be the retirement age here – and therefore it is considered an important landmark.  So, my mother, who is over 90 and commented that hosting a party for a son who became Medicare eligible was not something she expected to be part of her retirement plan, invited a few people from my home town as well as my nuclear family to a small celebration.

I was the only person at the party who knew everyone there, so I had a notion that I would provide nametags along with the identifiers F, T, and E on them and would, as a party game, ask people to figure out what the letters stood for.  Fortunately, I thought better of that game, but I did describe it to the group, once they were assembled, to let them know about this crazy idea, but also to introduce them to each other. 

I explained that F stands for foundational, and I offered my Mother and siblings as examples of foundational influences.  T stands for transitional, and I talked about friends from high school who helped me move into a broader world, as well as friends from graduate school, mentors in the community, and also my first (reluctant) wife, who helped me transition to being a father, and friends who had helped me transition after my divorce.  I finished by talking about E – enhancements.  These included people who “came with” my second (reluctant) wife – my two stepdaughters and my brother and sister-in-law.

In talking about my son and my second wife, I noted that the FTE system collapsed, because they both belonged to all three categories – as did everyone who was present.  Our relationships help define us, and I have been lucky to have people in my life who have been foundational, transitional and enhancing and have thus defined me in ways that have allowed me to grow as an individual and as a member of a sometimes very disparate community.

After the guests left, the eldest reluctant stepdaughter, who is finishing graduate school in the family business of psychology, offered to do a Tarot card reading for me as a birthday gift.  I was pleased and happy for her offer.  She normally does readings based on the past, present and future.  I have had Tarot readings done (and dabbled in doing them) in a variety of ways, and I was looking forward to this progression; however, at the suggestion of her uncle – my brother-in-law – she did the reading based on a card for Foundation, a card for Transition, and a card for Enhancement. 

Dali Three of Cups

The first card was the three of cups.  The card deck she was using was one that Salvador Dali painted and it was unfamiliar to me.  We had purchased it when we were together at the Dali museum in Sarasota Florida – and she has been working from this deck, but it is mostly novel to me.  She asked for my thoughts about the card as I looked at it.

The card has three women on it.  It has been a couple of days and I have lost some of the visual details, but there are many.  My first association to it was to a recent book that I read, These Ghosts are Family (that I posted on last week).  In that book, three girls are stolen away from a funeral at the beginning of the book and at the end of the book they haunt the ancestral plantation on Jamaica from which the family at the center of the story originates.  I concluded that the card seemed, indeed, to be related to the early components of myself.

What I didn’t recall in the reading is the psychoanalytic importance of the number three.  This is an indication, for psychoanalysts, of the movement from pre-oedipal (dyadic) relating – Mommy and me, to Oedipal level relating – Mommy and Daddy and me have to figure out how to be in relationship to each other – I have to include a third in my understanding of how I relate to you – both in the family and in the world out there.  It’s not just me and you, but us.

The reluctant daughter pointed out that cups are a suit that indicates emotionality and love in particular (there are four suits in Tarot, just like in playing cards, but instead of face cards there are Major Arcana – what Jung would call archetypes).  This led us to discuss the ways in which my foundation, despite my being reasonably smart, is, somewhat confusingly, emotional.  I didn’t say this at the time, but it explains my primary professional interest in the relationship between feeling and thinking – I frequently find that my feelings override my thinking, which is confusing.  Psychoanalysis has helped me have my feelings inform my thinking – though I still cry at Coke commercials…

Dali Two of Cups

So, the second card, the transitional card, was the two of cups.  This card had a picture of a cupid rising out of a bed with a woman lying asleep (or perhaps satisfied) on her back.  I noted that this looked like the card in the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) with a man standing, leaving a woman in bed – perhaps to work.  This card is generally interpreted as being related to romantic love and connection.

The Rider deck shows two people in balance with each other.  The Dali deck, with cupid leaving, seemed particularly apt to me.  I entered into a marital relationship and left it – I failed to achieve the kind of idyllic connection promised by the idea of a soul mate.  That led me to a second marriage – one that has been more complicated – and one in which I have learned that soul mates are forged in the context of relating to each other, not on the basis of some kind of received, preordained connection.  Though some are lucky enough to find magic, in my experience, magic is made, not discovered – and that was an important transitional discovery for me.

Dali Two of Pentacles

So, the enhancement card was the two of pentacles.  This card was a dynamic, vibrant card with all kinds of elements in relationship to each other.  One of the thoughts about the pentacles versus the cups that my daughter offered was that this suit was more focused on things than on feelings.  The two of pentacles is often seen as related to juggling various obligations. 

What I came to was that having both an academic and an applied career has meant that I have been juggling a lot, but one of the enhancements that has emerged from that at retirement time is relative financial security – something that has addressed a central concern of a child of depression era parents.  On the other hand, I was concerned that my devotion to my profession had interfered with my being as available to others in my life, especially family.  (The FTE (usually short for Full Time Employment or Equivalent - something that I have usually been at between 1.5 and 2 FTEs in my life) seemed symbolic of this).

At this point, my daughter suggested that sometimes she will include a fourth card if there are questions that have emerged from the reading.  My concern that the reading was suggesting that I might have betrayed my emotional foundation a bit by pursuing the pentacles/ money/ multiple obligations in my life seemed like a legitimate question.

Rider Five of Cups

So, I drew a fourth card.  It was the five of cups.  This card includes three cups that are empty, or upside down, and two upright, or full cups.  On the Rider deck, the person on the card is looking at the three spilled cups and ignoring the two full cups behind him.  The message here seemed pretty clear: there have been losses based on choices I have made, and I can dwell on them if I want to, but I will miss out on what has been accomplished and fail to celebrate the ways in which I am a good representation of myself – something that I am very prone to do, all in attendance agreed.

This reading was, then, a high point of the weekend for me – along with many others.  Just like in a marriage, I don’t think the message was in the cards, but in the use that we put to them.  I was particularly impressed by the clinical skills that my daughter is developing – and that were on display in this interaction.  She was present to the cards and to me, and she offered support and interpretation without determining the interpretation.  We worked on the interpretive work together.  She brought what she knew about the cards – and, to a lesser extent, what she knew about me, and I brought what I knew about me, but also what I perceived in the cards – my knowledge of them has waned in the many years since I had a passing interest in them, but they are powerful symbols that interact with what I know about the human condition – and she and I used our shared knowledge about that condition to sympathetically explore hypotheses about the psychological space that I am occupying on the eve of a transitional moment in my life.

While the reading was, on the one hand, private – it was an interaction between the two of us (like the twos of pentacles and cups), it was also public (the three of cups) – the family gathered to observe and, occasionally, comment on the material and the interaction.  The reading felt like a microcosm of the weekend – a celebration of us – those of us who have been able to hang out with me (including myself) – as much as it was a celebration of who it is that I am.  In a word, it felt like a three of cups event – a return, if you will, to my foundation.

As to the reading itself, I have often found myself in readings being fascinated by and hoping for the major arcana to appear (those face cards that are archetypal).  Though the cards go up to ten, this reading’s highest card value was five, and the other three cards were two twos and a three.  In poker, I would have had nothing – a pair of deuces.  But the value of the reading was not in the cards, but in the interpretation of them – in the connection between the reader(s) and me and in connecting them to the life I am leading.  And while the reading was apparently not about the clash of the Titans – the big things that determine our lives – that did not make it any less relevant and consequential.  Perhaps our lives are as meaningfully constructed out of the smallest components as they might be by the big flashy elements. 

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These Ghosts are Family: How the past continues to reverberate in the present.

 

These Ghosts are Family, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Maisy Card, Brutality, Trauma, Memory

 

Hans Loewald characterized the psychoanalytic goal as “turning ghosts into ancestors.”  In her debut novel, Maisy Card clarifies how, without some kind of intervention, ghosts go on influencing us for generations.  Though the novel ends with a Jamaican ghost story that is incredulous to us, even after our immersion in Jamaican slave culture and its after effects, the ghost stories, and the way they are intertwined throughout the novel induce (in at least this reader) the experience of being disoriented, confused, lost and, in a word, haunted by what has gone before.

Card begins the book by asking us to imagine ourselves as first one person and then the next.  These are people who are briefly introduced, people who will all become minor characters in a novel where it is the family – the composite picture – perhaps even the culture, that is the major character.  As we are asked to identify with first this and then that character – on the day that a father will finally meet his daughter; the day of his death – perhaps, he wonders, at her hands – we are misled into thinking that the novel will reconstruct this man’s life and we will be led back to this moment with greater understanding.

O.K., we can return to that moment and it will be much richer for having read the novel, but the point is not to understand this man – in fact he, and perhaps all of the main characters, remain somewhat mysterious.  Those who are written about most distinctly – the white descendant of the slave trader who ends up marrying into the slave side of the family – are clear, but also somewhat cartoonish in their clarity – those least tainted by the brush of the collective trauma are the least mysterious and therefore the least interesting.

If the story were told in a straightforward, linear fashion, it would be a much easier read.  An Evil Man, a slave owning Englishman in Jamaica, running a sugar plantation, is presented with a lily white 14 year old wife from Iceland who produces a daughter and then a son before killing herself.  The son dies at a young age and the daughter grows up believing she can do no wrong – her best friend from next door gets blamed for all her transgressions.

The best friend, it turns out, appears to be white and is a ward of the neighbor, who is employed by the slave owner to keep the books on the plantation which, unlike the townhouses that the central characters primarily live in, is located deep in the bush of Jamaica.  After a slave uprising, when the plantation is burned, the girls get caught up in a plot to kill the plantation owner – a plot that is based in part on the anger of former worker for the plantation owner – and this former worker is, perhaps, the father of the neighbor girl and he is certainly the one who reveals to the neighbor girl that she is not white. 

And already things are starting to get murky.  Why would a daughter want to kill her father?  Could it be that the two girls are sisters?  Part of what unites them in apparent murderous rage against their father(s) is, for the acknowledged descendant, a hatred of the man who never really sees her, for the next-door neighbor, the realization that she is not white – and then disgust that her caregiver, who was rebuffed by her mother, has now proposed to her.

As confusing as that last paragraph is, it actually makes more sense when we finally arrive at this information in the penultimate chapter – in between we have seen the impact of the slave and plantation system and its dissolution on the family – and on the little town that emerged around the destroyed plantation, and on a wide variety of characters, many in the present, who are dealing with the impact of what happened almost two centuries ago. 

That said, the threads connecting those long-ago events with what is happening currently are as fragile, disjointed and unintelligible as the lives of the people affected by them would be if we didn’t have the backstory to make sense of who the people are now.

This house of cards is built through a series of short stories – or chapters – that center around one or another member of the family, and the reader is constantly referring back to the rather sketchy and confusing family tree at the beginning of the book as an essential means of keeping some kind of balance and orientation in a book that is incredibly well planned and executed and is, I believe purposefully, completely confusing.

The reader is confused, on purpose, as a means (I don’t know whether intentionally or simply through artistic voodoo) of inducing in that reader the lived experience of being this or that character in the novel.  To pick a character at random – the son of the man we are asked to imagine ourselves to be at the beginning of the novel (the man who is about to die) – his son (the person I am referring to now) was born and spent the majority of his life in Jamaica.  He assumed that his father had died long ago, in part because he was raised with the money that came from the life insurance his mother had taken out as well as insurance from his father’s job when his father was working in England to send money home to the family, and was reported to have died. 

Not aware that his father was still living - that the death occurred to another man that the white owners of the company confused with his father, and his father, believing he was releasing his wife from a husband she despised, took on the identity of the man who actually died; the son went to Brooklyn – where his father now lived – after his mother died.  He discovered there, on the streets, the man who, when he was a boy, had performed an exorcism on his mother – and the son only now is able to recover the memories of that horrible event.

Did I mention earlier that this is a brutal book?  It is…  And the brutality is essential.  The slave owner was cruel beyond belief to his slaves.  Enslaving others in the Jamaican fashion and that of the American South was brutal.  The exorcism was brutal.  We are subjected to those brutalities – both in the exposure to the descriptions of them, but more essentially in the confusion that we feel, just as the son does, about who did what to whom when.  This patchwork experience of remembering the book mirrors the patchwork experience of memory that these and other trauma survivors experience.  And being essentially foggy – about who it is that I am, how I have come to be this way and what will happen next – does not allow us to turn ghosts into ancestors – it preserves the ghosts as ghosts, and we feel haunted by what occurred, it lies outside of our consciousness, but impacts our actions, and also what we inherited, unseen, from our forebearers and their experience – their being haunted by their own ghosts.

So the ghosts at the end of the novel – three little girls who run away from the funeral of the mother of the son, the mother who had an exorcism and claimed in the middle of it that those around her saw her as possessed because they couldn’t recognize what a free woman looked like – those three little girls ran back to the place from which all of this brutality emanated – the plantation town, now a little bit of rural nothing in the middle of nowhere.

The girls, two sisters and a cousin, lured away by the lover of the exorcised mother – a man who felt spurned by the mother’s denial of him as her lover and a person who was disposed of now that caring for the mother was of no use to the family – took these members of the family back to the ancestral home to forage on their own – and they transformed into the ghosts of Jamaican folklore.  Cared for by everyone and no one, not sustained by meat and vegetables, needing blood to survive, these vampiric creatures preyed on the townspeople until they were forced to kill them – but, of course, you cannot kill ghosts… they are family.     

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