“And those dwellers of the rooms who had no thoughts of visitors, could not know, but might imagine, that anything, any part, of them would survive the holding, the shipping, the water, and the weather, drink those visitors in like violet tea and lemon air.”1 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake

With tarot I am trying to make a small path through the wake. I paddle and I push and I brace. I want the reading to be a livable location, to make it a respite from the violence of the unlivable, lonely world we all endure. I want the beauty in the cards to be offered as a solace for the suffering soul.

In the queered temporalities of a tarot reading one observes a past that is not past. One sits with rupture, ongoing and historical. The phenomenological inquiry maintains a method that is unscientific. The reading is a gathering, a tracking. There’s that grief, there’s the sorrow, the terror, the breathless anxiety. Then that card collects a fragile faith, that one a weathered hope, this one a lionhearted longing.

Catastrophe is quotidian and so constantly are we capsized that only the most defiant amongst us dare to continue dreaming of refuge. But we all want a rescue boat. We are a people adrift. Communion is so far gone when fractured language fractures form more and more daily.

We wade through wave after wave after wave of remembering, forgetting, drowning, surviving. And water, as Gaston Bachelard says, is an element “which remembers the dead.”2 So with a Six of Cups sensibility I wrote to you about the wake work of keeping watch with the dead. The cards can attend a mode of melancholia and mourning, attentive to the bereaved as they offer themselves as bridges, doorways and down-spiral stairways into crypts, and catacombs where the dead rest. A card on this altar assembles bones, blood and candle-light to consult the shadow of our own mortality. The card is a vigil.

But we cannot bring bodies back from a liquid grave. Christina Sharpe asks what is the wake work of grieving an interminable event? Well, the card that comes so clear to my mind is the Six of Swords.