At this moment, I’m thinking about work.   Not just my work, but that too.  My work is pleasing to me, I feel like I am of value to the organization and I have a certain amount of pride invested in the organization so that its fortunes are something I care for whether they impact my ‘fortunes’ or not, only because I want to participate in victorious enterprises.  Who doesn’t right?  Still, my work doesn’t pay me as much as I’d like and there are things that I want for, foolish unneeded things no doubt, but I am flawed and thus want.
But I’ve been thinking more about work as a principle, a phenomenon.
Say you’re a bushman, you’ll work, sometimes.  You’ll hunt and gather and endure strange privations and make unconscionable choices, you’ll be a bushman.  You’ll exert effort.  An observer could say that you are working - because it’s by the expense of calories in sweat and thought that you persist.
Say you’re a businessman, you’ll work.  You’ll strategize and plan and though you’ll endure not too many privations, you’ll make unconscionable choices, you’ll be a businessman.  You’ll exert effort.  An observer couldn’t say exactly what you are working on – because it’s by the accumulation of unused calories that you are dying prematurely.
Say you’re a workingman, you’ll work.  You’ll follow a pattern, obey regulations and you’ll endure strange privations, you’ll make no choices, you’ll be a workingman.  You’ll exert an effort.  An observer could say you were working because you pursued tasks singlemindedly for a scheduled interval and you were compensated in turn – and it’s by these accumulated hours that you’ll pay your rent.
Say you’re a thinking man, you’ll work.  You’ll wonder why you have to work, exactly, you’ll be satisfied to get the steady work when it’s available, but you’ll think a bit, not obsessively mind, but still, you’ll think in your solitary moments about what it means that you’re working.  You’ll think of the bushman and the businessman and the workingman – you’ll place yourself somewhere in a venn diagram that describes them all.  You’ll be familiar with Marx, you’ll have some sense of your own value and consider why and how you parcel out the surplus.  You might develop strange cares and exotic needs and thus you’ll work, though your heart’s not in it, your heart’s in thinking, you’re a thinking man and so you’ve a sense of Smith and how capital accumulates.  You’ll look at your increasingly sophisticated computer and cleverer and cleverer tools and realize that it’s only a matter of time before you’re marked as an expense that can’t be justified by a businessman.  You might have some nostalgia, misplaced or no, for the heyday of the workingman – having come from such people, you cast around and wonder where they’ve all gone.  You’ll take the work you can get until you can’t and then you’ll have to catch as catch can and maybe go be the urban sphere’s version of a bushman.  Maybe you’ll hunt opportunities, or suckers or victims, maybe you’ll gather cans or copper or unemployment.  A shrewd observer can tell you’re working, you’re doing something and it’s somehow helping you to keep on living, it’s keeping you indoors anyway and heck – winter is coming.  Winter is always coming and the wolves are always near the door.
It’s not that laziness is rewarded, it rarely is and idleness, whether a virtue or a vice, is its own reward – these aren’t the points to be made here, not the ideas this is meant to address.  Put aside your suspicions about the people in the office next door and the good life that they may or may not be getting without working as hard or harder than you.  Let’s think instead about working, but more to the point, about jobs.
Work, you do, like a machine – whether you get paid or not, it’s work just thinking, just sitting, just existing, there’s exertion.  What I mean to speak about is the job.  More to the point, I mean to speak about the weird serfdom that’s so commonplace as to be an assumption rather than a wonder.  I follow my congressional delegation and local politicians through the various social media channels that they use to get their points across and their points are often, curiously focused on the matter of jobs.  “Training!  A local victory!  A factory retained!  Jobs kept!”  There’s a lot of variation on this particular theme and I have learned something in my observance of politics and it is this:  Whenever the parties that amount to the American leadership are in complete agreement on a matter – that matter is the rotten core that pollutes the otherwise good world.  Save the financial system! (though most people might be net-debtors and beholden to it rather than served by it) – Conquer the fertile crescent! (though the expense in righteousness won’t be justified by the gains of the already morally suspect, though the results might be unconscionable and utterly ruinous, though such conquest might undermine the whole of society and tip us all into darkness) – Provide and sustain jobs! (though the tasks we set people to might be without merit and their spirits might be crushed by the weight of colossal misanthropy of the world of commerce).  Really, it’s rather worth noticing when members of the different parties are in lockstep because this circumstance naturally indicates that their constituent members are being swindled the most thoroughly.
So Sherrod Brown and Mike Kasich and Rob Portman all tweet to me that they are attempting to retain or keep jobs – this in between their various anecdotal, almost human interactions with their environment, I am told about sports victories and classic car enthusiasm and wedged in between these hokey slices of almost plausible Americana is the tattletale insistence that jobs are the matter of utmost significance.  Arbeit – it seems – Macht Frei.
Sure I was raised in an ostensibly protestant household and made to consider that famous ethic of work as a sacrosanct demonstration of True Character – punching the clock, showing up early, staying late, seeing it through till Friday and showing up, ready to work come Monday, the latter-day sacraments of a faith with precious few sacraments.  Arbeit – I was raised to believe – Macht Heilig.
Which is an uncanny sort of nonsense.  Work is fine, the Bushman works, the businessman works – everyone works, the ant and the grasshopper, each in their turn and season – but of these – which has a job.  Sure, sure – it’s right and proper that idle hands be turned to useful labor and it’s right and proper that useful labor be compensated.  Not fairly, mind, but according rather to the ebbs and flows of market forces, and cursed be he who seeks to unfairly tamper with that marketplace!   No-no, you live and die by your competitive merits, and never, even ever, think to rig the system in your favor by enlisting the help of those who you’d otherwise contend with for jobs.  No, you live by your own offerings – the union, you see, is a sinful aberration, a wreckage of the free market – which after all is certainly free enough to dispense with your job if not you – yourself should you prove to be somehow redundant.  It’s not that markets aren’t efficient, you see, or that they are purely wicked or purely good, but it is a fact that wage competition is a losing game and that an employer knows that paying anything is paying too much – because in the marketplace the employer is likewise bound up in the death struggle of competition.  All very sinister.  All very banal.
 Mechanization, electronic infrastructure and the steady progress of the machine world make you much less valuable than a machine, it’s only that you didn’t notice that it was happening.  When you made car parts you didn’t notice and now a robot does what a dozen men once did.  In the office you didn’t notice what was happening and now a computer does what a dozen men once did.  In short order the higher functions of management and finance will be handed over to the more powerful minds carved into silicon channels by cleverer machines still.  It’s not that the marketplace is wicked or that markets aren’t efficient, it’s that they just work better without you.
And yet, my political leadership tells me, cheerfully between choreographed missives regarding the state of Ohio State Football – that the solution to these matters is jobs.  Jobs, will solve it all, nevermind that there are too many asses and not enough seats!  Jobs will solve it, in the brief, fading interval in which jobs are things that could be had.  Never you mind that the efficient market acts with a swiftness to obviate the need for jobs.  Save for the few remaining instances where a man is called upon to do something less expensively than a machine might, for now, for this moment.  Security is a luxury, and you can’t afford luxury, neither you nor the Bushman, you’ll be wolf-eaten and winter-struck, soon enough and the markets will operate efficiently – until the time arises where there are goods produced and no one to afford them, where there are services rendered and none to make use of them.  But idleness, idleness is efficient, ask the Bushman – who doesn’t hunt when he’s not hungry, who doesn’t gather when he’s got no mouths to feed.  Idleness is the most efficient of the various postures, the return on investment, calorically – is the best there is.  Nevermind if it’s suicidal.
And yet, I’m told that jobs are the solution.  Jobs.  Eliminate all taxes on businesses that come to the state, to the city, compete, poorly, incompetently with the other states and nations and cities, give away everything and accept nothing in return!  And do this, for the fulfillment of that most essential American commodity – the job.
It took me a minute.  I’ll admit it, I’m clever but not usually smart, sometimes I get there though and I put it together.  I was preparing my taxes you see, and I put it together.  The politicians, who have some agency and thus, will never be put out of work by machines, have to calculate some source of income.  They’ve agreed that no business should have to pay, lest it uproot itself and move far from their constituency, and they’ve determined that financiers needn’t trouble themselves with consequences, let alone contributions (to anything beyond political campaigns that is) and yet they’ve a need, to keep some, their most loyal voters (pesky things, always looking for handouts) at least fed, at least secure enough to show up in November – and so they offer a corrupt bargain – “I’ll try to make sure that you can have a job,” Says my imaginary politico, “And in exchange you can pay the various payroll taxes and income taxes that, when cobbled together from the massive and increasingly desperate population are somehow sufficient to pay for all of our various, collective misadventures”  Jobs, are useful because it’s by jobs that wages are paid, but more to the point, it’s through them that taxes are gathered .
Here, I think of the Pyramids.  A wonder of the world – mankind’s first, great monuments and which will be, most likely the last of the great works of mankind left standing.  So why build your own mountains in a cemetery?  It’s not a very obvious thing to do – to build a mountain in a cemetery in the desert.  You don’t see a lot of people thinking that’s a good idea and there are a lot of very, very rich people out there now, who could, if they wanted to, have a mountain built in a cemetery in the desert.  Likewise there’s enough hungry, wanting people, that there wouldn’t be a shortage of workers for the project.  And yet you don’t see it.  Now, reckless thinkers will go on and on about strange externalities, about uncanny superstitions and solemnly held beliefs – but you know people with solemnly held beliefs, and so do I, we all do- and they all have something interesting in common and that is – They Don’t Build Mountains In A Cemetery In The Desert.  In fact, the only people who build crazy monuments without purpose are governments and their contractors and they do this, and we all know it (and it’s rather likely that the early agriculturalists of the 3^rd Millennium before Christ likewise had this wisdom) because you have to give people something to do, or else they’ll figure out how to something for themselves and down that path – if you’re a politician, a ‘leader’ – lies unemployment.  So find something for people to do, find a job for them, and then – sometime, early in the 20^th century, you can figure out a way to profit from that, you can figure out a way to create an enormous regulatory bureaucracy staffed with sycophants if you are willing (and who isn’t) to slip a light yoke over every one of your constituents and tax their incomes, and link forevermore the fortunes of the state with the fortune of the state’s class of employers.
It’s ahistorical to call the builders of the Pyramids at Giza slaves, they weren’t.  The writing that survives in those handmade mountains is all of the sort that appears still in lines of code and on bathroom stalls, graffiti extolling the virtues of the craftsmen involved – not slaves, not any more slaves than you are, or I am, but certainly – absolutely, bonded in servitude.  Take some pride, do your work, fulfill the protestant sacraments and keep the wolves as far from the door as you’re able, and remember that there are rulers in this world whether elected by consent of the divinity and they care for you only so long as you retain some utility.  

Hello! Remember this? Yeah, yeah, I'm still going pretty strong but I had this thought that life is maybe not long enough for me to finish everything I want to do, so I've been working kind of hard on all of my other projects too.



But I still have a lot of love for my own Tarot and I'm working on it all the time.   Even if I'm not exactly painting it.

You may recall that the Phones - my iteration of the Wands - relates to the condition of servitude you and I call work. Some other time I'll get carried away with politics and beliefs and care to express this all to you - but for now- yes, the industrial/commercial subsistence worker is the same as the agricultural serf. That's just so - we can go into it another time, but yes - the wand, staff, stick = the contemporary Phone. We all have phones, it's sometimes part of the job.

My job gives me a phone, and I got my job near to when I started painting the phones arcana here - it's been a good fit. Later, I'll run-through the whole suit of Phones and explain that journey - for now, I have to tell you about this one thing, so that I can absolve myself of responsibility and avoid getting written up.



Yep - I'll build the hedge against blame that you probably (if you have a job) know as Covering Your Ass. That's this guy here. He's building up the wall of separation, putting himself ahead and apart from his coworkers - it's on them if it all fails, not him! Why, he's almost... It's almost as if he's immobilized by his efforts to insulate himself!

Not by accident do I tell you this! I want you to know that I DO NOT believe in trouble. As in - you can't get into trouble. You can make mistakes- I do, often - that's the consequence of being bold. But when you try and remove yourself from the fray - when you quit all real participation to hedge yourself against blame and trouble - then you're taking no chances, you're afraid.

And hey - no blame. I've been there too, you might hate your job but you need it too - this is what this card is about, in some respects as well. You can fortify yourself in your cubicle so no-one will ever, ever know what it is you even do, no one will question you because you're hedged up and in - beyond reproach. Truthfully - I think a goodly portion of the hierarchies that exist in employment exist and are pursued because someone says - "Well if I'm in charge then I can't be in trouble."

They're forgetting and maybe you are too - that they/you never really could be in trouble either! It's being afraid of trouble that makes you strive to keep your ass Covered - but it's not gonna make you a million dollars - you're not going to be valued for your efforts, you're not going to be respected as a peer. You're going to be in the lonesome castle of finger-pointing shenanigans.



And really this one goes beyond the workplace - this is the card, and you can tell I don't love it's message right? One of emotional preparation - distance yourself from the possibility of blame - caution - this is the card where you withdraw from cooperation so that you can put the blame for all the failures on someone else.

Don't do that- in life I mean. Don't be that person.

So right away you can tell I will never-ever be a civil engineer. Or a traffic-engineer,or a car designer or an aeronautics-designer. You can tell, and I concede. Someone tries to offer me those licenses and diplomas and I scatter them on the ground and say: "Nasty old Fishes."

So! The Chariot. This one was a little tricky, to think about. I was debating my processes a little today and i mentioned to an interested party that I don't actually plan these out. The meditative painting-act is fairly sublime and I kind of make what wants to be made. Without being too gross or mysterious - that's what I do. I start painting and try to have a fugue state or something. Then I step back and fix everything that's gone wrong whilst I was fugueing. The Chariot itself isn't easy to interpret. It has a meaning of war and strength - probably lost on contemporary generations - something filthy, something there is that doesn't love a war, or strength. Romantics you know? They have a faith in the more sensual conflicts - can't see the muscle on muscle violence for their fixation on the glorious dead. The Chariot - to me - implies victory. It's... Antique. More than the other cards so far, they're rooted in their time - the Chariot bespeaks an elder age, of martial cruelty, of danger and an intimate conflict. That's a strange strength.

But too, I wanted to move away and out of the personal. I'd tackled that, the personal and the innate, the Self - I did that. So I wanted a step out of there. The Duke of Zhou was helpful with that - the 6th Hexagram being THE ARMY. See there. Public works, the strength of the united public, of the polity, or the social order - all pulling together to exert a profound and effective influence.

The Army - a good start. I went to the Infrastructure, and I've painted up a highway or... Something suggesting a highway - and that bespeaks the power of the many. Denies the significance of the few or the one. There are cars on it, trucks, buses - and those don't arise from a vacuum you know - there's a profound potency in the world - that allows these things to come to be - that then demands that they exist, that builds roads and bridges and a whole unseen, forgotten world to house them.

I had thought that my Chariot might end up being a fighter plane, or some kind of racecar. I thought about it. But Power, a strange and hard to define or understand strength - to me this speaks of the unity of society, of that strength - which is fearful and beautiful and altogether the best part of being all together. I'm writing this to you on the internet and McCluhan was right- the medium is the message. We make the world together and the world is made for us. My Chariot -the Infrastructure - it's meant to suggest that. To imply us all being in this together, to accomplish amazing things, and then to regard those things as commonplace.


Of course the infrastructure gets rusty, it gets graffitied upon, it gets used in novel ways and ignored in depressing ones. This power requires maintenance and unity to hold together. Energy, Success, Wealth, Bravery, Command, Discipline. These are identities that go with the old Charioteer -but I see them in the highway and the bridge and the structure of the world that we inhabit. In the best version of the world, no doubt these things are constantly refreshed -but in the meantime they're made so powerfully that they'll last through the ages.


The chariot is traditionally pulled by a black and a white Sphinx - and they've got abstract and unfamiliar provenance. I went with the airplanes - because they provoke a sense of dread - menace - they could bomb the whole thing to pieces, they could. They could erase it all - but if they do, that's the conquest of one infrastructure over another. The plane builders who had the iterative capacity, built over and over and developed through development to overwhelm the underdeveloped. But they are reassuring too - these images of mastery, of a strength over the nations - of motion and speed - we have those, we have it within us to make those. To exert that might. Which is a great thing, a great mastery that sprouts from the shoulders of all the generations before.

So continuity and the threat of ruin, of motion and unity, of the recklessness of disunion and the folly of individuality, and self-seeking. That is The Infrastructure.