The Bridge to Nowhere and Nowhen

I had occasion to write a friend concerning the Tarot and my uses thereof. Suddenly it clicked that this might be the more useful venue for my essay.

I like Sylvia's line from ST:TOS "Catspaw": "You like to think of yourselves as complex creatures, but you're flawed." but then I give it a twist. Emotions..., seem to date back to reptiles; it's not clear that their predecessor amphibians felt aggression (however, I don't know of any carnivorous frogs, that could have something to do with it...), but it's very clear for reptilian predators. And mammals definitely display the tender side, motherly love and so forth. My cats love me. Much of that is our mutual touching; they'll nuzzle me for affection, and I'll _pet_ them because I love them.

What I'm focusing on is that emotions predate humanity; they've been around for a very, very long time, have been, if you will, thoroughly "debugged" by evolution. They're the "truest" things that I know of in my mental landscape. I _trust_ my emotions. If I spot my beloved in an apparently compromising position, I may become depressed, angry, jealous, or another emotion or mix of them. I may have misinterpreted the situation, perhaps made an erroneous assessment. But I _can_ trust what I feel.

Let's contrast that. Calculus dates back about three hundred and thirty years. When I was in college it was easy, indeed the foundation for much more. But now, I can only see the action, remember the images, but not have a prayer of "turning the crank" on a problem. So how much do I "trust" my own calculus? And there's a similar but not so well dated argument for the much larger skill of logic itself (more than a thousand years back, but more than ten thousand? a hundred thousand? certainly it doesn't go back a million years). These are for the most part products of the conscious mind, relatively recent inventions. They're hard to grasp, hard to retain, and untrustworthy even in the most skilled of hands. It's easy to imagine another checking your logic, but just try to remember the last time a friend offered to "check" your emotions.

I see emotions as manifestations perhaps agents from the subconscious, the "ground state" that underlies each and every mind; they're totally trustworthy. Then that's overlaid by a superstructure of intellect, shaky logic with a shaky ego as captain. The rats have taken over the holds, the crew is mutinying below decks, the captain's taken to the bottle, but at least s/he still holds the wheel of the ship of state. :)

 I see the Tarot as bridge from subconscious to conscious. You start with a question, then you lay out the cards in a spread. The choice of spread, and the specific meanings to each position and each card, they're all arbitrary but chosen in advance to give a framework. And the _meaning_ is in the eye of the beholder.

Almost all of music is written to fit one or another template. J.S. Bach's music may be compared to mathematics, was written to a very strict template. Few want to listen to a kid hitting the piano with a hammer.