Obliquity

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I woke up this morning with the oddest thought and figured I had better sit right down and capture it before it escapes.

What if there were no “right angles” in the world and instead only oblique transitions? (I think my contemplation of reversed cards may have given me nightmares). In astrology, only the 90-degree square aspects are consistently stern; everything else is more tractable so maybe that is the root of my dream-world meditation.

In such a universe there would be no squared-off “left-hand” or “right-hand” turns but only gradual merges, and if every street-corner was 45 degrees or 135 degrees instead of 90 degrees it would take half as long or twice as long to get to our destination depending on whether we can “cut across” or must “circle around.” Changing direction would only be a matter of schedule, not a source of navigational angst, and of course there would be no “four-way stops” where we can’t figure out who goes first.

We wouldn’t have to make difficult choices at any juncture, only compromises. Reaching agreement in any argument that demands nimble shifts in position would be a meander involving “fancy footwork” instead of a series of crisp, logical side-steps.There would be no “square deals” or “square meals,” only vague approximations of such.

However, the dream that woke me up was the vision that stair treads would not be built on square-cut stringers but would be tilted off-level at either 45 degrees (up) or 135 degrees (down), guaranteeing that our feet would have had to evolve differently in order to use them; in this altered state of affairs our current anatomy would either dump us on our backsides or give us severe leg cramps as we try to climb or descend, which I demonstrated with the prototype. (In the dream I was an inventor trying to sell this idea.)

There are notions attending the practice of divination that can certainly give us “mental cramps” if we aren’t serene about them and instead try to meet them head-on with immaculate reasoning. Reversals are definitely the non plus ultra of tarot-reading challenges; I sometimes think of them allegorically as detours or “double-backs” on a journey where a sign on the barricade reads “Road Closed Ahead. Find Alternate Route.” On the other hand, this departure from the map can send us down interesting byways that we may not have discovered on an uneventful straight-through drive. (Just don’t watch any of those cheesy horror movies about travelers who get trapped in backwater towns full of degenerate ghouls.)

Another, and perhaps more common, example is the “intuitive insight.” When overused, these observations can be all too symptomatic of the evasive turn-of-phrase, and they are often couched in impressionistic language that must be translated into practical terms relatable to the context of the reading before a querent can hope to understand what we’re trying to say. This is the visionary domain of the psychic, not of the pragmatic minimalist and literalist who “just reads the cards.” (W.C. Fields would have said meanly that such flights of imagination are only trying to “baffle them with bullshit” when brilliance is not forthcoming.) Free-association from the images is not a “license to kill” that owes no allegiance to past experience or established wisdom; it is best used to expand the narrative in creative and colorful ways without distorting it beyond recognition. Breaking the chain of prior assumptions may be stimulating for the reader but it isn’t necessarily germane to the purpose the querent brought to the table, and that is really what we should be trying to serve. Anything more extravagant could be construed as mystical “grandstanding.”

Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on July 31, 2023.