#11 on the 29th

One thing that's tricky is that I don't consistently paint on the same stuff. I run out of one paper or board and go and buy another but I buy based on what seems price-worthiest. As it is, back to watercolor-paper. It's a little bigger size than what I'd been using too, so big pictures.

I am up to #11 Which has been called Strength and Fortitude. Both of these are admirable, but somewhat indistinct in our contemporary time. We've all had the slightest dose of smallpox you know, the lightest case of polio. We've all been toughened by the inoculation, stronger, better, more durable than our forebears. So what is strength now? A strong man is a Hercules and the strength card was associated with Hercules at one point, the lion as well. I find that I don't have much call to tame a lion, and should matters between a lion and myself degenerate to the point of blows - I think as a potentially heavily armed American I bet on me. Do I hate the Lion? No. I don't hate the Lion, but I pity the fool.

But back to my point - Strength, abstractly matters - but it means a different thing - to me. We had dinner with my mother and were talking about my old schoolteachers, I remembered my special-ed teacher very fondly as someone who very likely rescued me from myself. I had to have that teacher because I was the very first kid on my block to get the ADD diagnosis. Very first in the school as well - a dark thing, a black mark then, maybe now as well, but I was a first! Pioneer. Anyhow - I was thinking about concentrating and how it's a thing, a matter, that I wrestle with. I'd rather fight a lion than have to do 10 hours of spreadsheeting, is what I am saying.


I had a vision. This happens, sometimes, and it's not exactly mystical, it's linguistic. I'm of that school that says you can't think without words, a comfortable school to be a part of, parochial as it is. But I was thinking, I was lying in bed post-coitally and I was thinking of concentrating. I was trying to concentrate really hard about something distant, some other idea, another project. I had it in my mind and I thought- make it as real as you can, in your thoughts, make it absolutely completely real. And I tried concentrating.

Now I often think of this and think of an idea, a scheme, what have you, I think of it as a slip of paper, something that I try to grasp and hold. I. Hand. See. It's very disjointed and I had another, competing, winning sense of what it is to concentrate. Like a juice or your fire on that super-star-destroyer. It's not a matter of holding firmly, it's a matter of putting all of your parts into it. And so I did that. I had a vision of a cup, a glass, and my hands, my eyes, my thoughts, history, plans, ideas everything, every door I've walked through, every room I've been in (Here is a valuable thing that I reccomend, if you can't sleep, or need a hypnotic aid - try and remember every room you've been in. Try it). I gathered these and I put them all into the cup, concentrating all of these - Together, all together, Concentrated.

It didn't help me much with my plans, I have a roommate and can't be noisy late at night and then there was some requirement for post-coital coitus too - so I let it go. But I have that, a tool. A strength.

This picture flows out of that.

The figure is a woman, womanish anyway.

I've no interest in being all that explicit, it's embarrassing to paint, really. But she's got the 11 other faces, the distractions, the feelings,the senses ideas, those things that go in front of your eyes and break your concentration. She's got the 8 extra arms - all going everywhere, something to do, something to touch - the 4 extra legs all guiding her elsewhere, taking her away - apart. 11 faces for the 11th card, 8 arms for the 8th card (Strength and Justice are sometimes switched) and 4 legs for the 4 suits. Now - did I plan that out? Or did I see it after the fact? Or is it both. It's both. Here's the image though - she's pulling all those things, those selves inward, to herself, to her core self, who is calm, self possessed, Concentrated. It is not a matter of eliminating these distractions, these other elements, but of calling them home into the whole, concentrating them and taking them into yourself.

Here's the journey.

Competition begins the second pass through the Major Arcana, the next wave. Where the first pass 1-9 addressed identity, self and questions of origin and a path through the developing self - this pas starting with 10 - deals with more material, more physical reality. The Competition begins, the origin of your gains and losses, what you've won and what you can win, early on. You turn from that, pull yourself together, and concentrate, pursue goals, chase your fortune.

There. That's it.