arc d’x, continued

“the queen of wands is the card of passion.  her throne rises from the rubble of the fallen wall, and the sands of the american plain blow over her from the east.  in this way her passion rises from the american earth; she’s a thing of the earth and the passion’s a thing of her.  at her feet is a large black cat.  a round white sphere rises behind her against a dark blue sky.  the rod in her hand intimates magic but the magic’s really in the hand and not the rod.  her brooding beauty cages the very breath of every man who lays eyes on her and blasts loose the underpinnings on which he’s confidently and foolishly built a feeble life.  she is without true malice.  at her moments of greatest fury the rod may take on the appearance of a knife; that she always fails to use it isn’t a sign of weakness but of a goodness she can’t overcome.  rather her powers of destruction lie not in hate but chaos, just as the antithesis to god is chaos; and her chaos blows across those in her realm like the sands that bury her throne.  she’s fickle and will betray, without reason or warning, the one who loves her most.  she’s hungry for whatever love any man can give her and because she doesn’t trust either love or herself she’ll abuse both, and rush to the next man who might give her a love the previous man could not, in search for the love that somehow raises her above her own throne, for which she has contempt.  she doesn’t believe in what she deserves and she deserves more than she’ll ever know.  though georgie imagines her as fair and golden the queen of wands is dark, her beauty understands that white is not the color of illumination but emptiness and that black is not the color of the void but eternity.  though the rings of her regeneration grow paler in time the core of her memory becomes the glowing ebony of a collapsed star:  in the american tarot she’s not the queen of wands at all but the queen of slaves.”

steve erickson, image from the vertigo tarot (gaiman/mckean)

arc d’x continued

“From the beginning Sally Hemings had been laced with her own doom.  In the web of the iceflies her transcendence had begun.  In the dark delirium of her black fire she’d already started the journey.  What Etcher saw as degeneration was the first leap upward; as she seemed to him to be plummeting downward, she in turn watched him fade and disappear from whatever her existence was in the process of becoming, as that existence finally surrendered her beauty.  For all of her life her beauty had taken away with one hand the freedom it offered with another; for all her life it had unlocked with one hand the chains the other had bound to her; and she didn’t want to be beautiful anymore.  She had never believed in it anyway.  She believed every man who had called her beautiful was a liar or a fool, either not to be taken seriously or to be taken seriously only for how he meant to possess her.  She didn’t want her body anymore, she didn’t want her face; she would happily leave her witchy incandescent eyes on the pillow, her watery dreamwracked mouth in his hand, where he could hold it like a coin or a plum or a small animal and believe its kiss was a gift of the soul rather than a twitch of the nervous system.  She would leave behind the bits of her beauty like souvenirs, and she’d leave the shell of herself to the thing inside her that could devour what she was but not who she was, while she went to a place where the static of love meeting freedom was not to be confused with history.”

steve erickson