Inescapable Cards

By Cartie Whitelaw

I feel as if archaic symbolism always creeps around the corner. Maybe I opened something I wasn’t supposed to, because now, for small glimpses, I see how the arcana bleeds into daily life. How everything follows a seemingly predictable line of logic. How behind our fleshy lives, our crackly branches rest a formidable skeleton. A tower is erected, born from swords and wands. It’s always in our purview, resting upon a darker horizon. Sooner or later, we approach this tower (more times than we’d like). Often it’s in the form of a chariot, one that feels like a fast-moving and uncontrollable. We explore its dangerous halls, rigged with traps and echoes. Then our host chains us up by one foot, and wreaks havoc on the life before the tower. We are forced to contemplate why this bloody tower exists in the first place. What we did to make the said tower exist. Then boom! Our contemplation and reckoning create an escape to a far-off village. Smaller battles emerge, and from that, we are given chalices and coins, filled with a divine liquid, with a value stronger than gold. Our courage builds, and we become a hero, most likely a fool in disguise, and we aim to avenge ourselves. On our journey, we meet empresses, emperors, knights, kings, and queens. Through each interaction, we come closer to realizing a strong life force within, a star capable of supernova and life. As we embody it, we return to the great tower, and we start to realize its crumbling foundation. Somehow, maybe through bloodshed or spectation, we destroy the tower. It crashes down, and everything becomes stone. Stones now resting for centuries, unmoving, frame in a larger cube that has always existed and will always be. I can’t tell if it bores me to know these things, to see it within everything that I watch and read. Maybe I am something beyond an architect, something that is meant to watch life repeat itself, but that’s most likely arrogance, one of the great signifiers of the fool.