I’ve always thought of letter writing as an unbinding practice.
Something peculiar happens to the strange, terrified frame of my life at a given moment when I sit down to address someone else about whatever troubles me or else to steadfastly avoid mentioning the trouble in favor of expounding on some other topic entirely. The suffering doesn’t fall away completely—writing a letter about my fear around money troubles, a pressing personal concern for me these days, doesn’t suddenly populate my checking account with new magic numbers—but it does change shape, tuck tail, mewl instead of roar. It becomes faceable, because I have made it so through a direct and intimate address to someone who will care to read it. I have turned myself into a character, my problem into a story, my emotional register into a range, and time into something anticipatory—I love the bubbly feeling of waiting for a reply to a letter—rather than brutish.
I’ve been writing letters to my husband Kiernan every 10 days as part of my decan walk through the dark-season signs and sharing versions of them here (with his permission) with all of you, too. Kiernan has been struggling with depression after years of being our family’s salvation while I underwent treatment for my cancer diagnoses. We still have to live our lives, pay our bills, so I’m writing letters as a way to reach him across workday and space, the bindings of systemic and individual failures.
In magic, witches perform unbinding practices to extricate themselves from attachment to false appearances of reality, malevolent spirits. These workings almost always contain the important element of vividly describing the appearance or the spirit as a way to pin it down before casting it out. A letter is like this, I think, an act of steadfastness in the face of seemingly insurmountable bad. Although carefully chosen words cannot change genocide or illness or worrying about whether you will lose your house, they can honor and grow the ability to be glad of life alongside the trouble. A good letter doesn’t spiritually bypass so much as offer a spiritual lense, a wider or funnier, a more critical or more absurd scope.
In the letters he wrote to his wife during his imprisonment, Czech playwright and intellectual Vaclav Havel often stressed the importance of absurdity, as well as the need to situate one’s struggles within a larger context. “The sensation of absurdity is never—at least not as I understand it—the expression of a loss of faith in the meaning of life,” Havel writes. “Quite the opposite; only someone whose very being thirsts after meaning, for whom ‘meaning’ is an integral dimension of his own existence, can experience the absence of meaning as something painful, or more preciesly, can perceive it at all.”
I love reading Havel’s Letters to Olga, because they provide a model for me on how to foster a sense of absurd wonder, an interest in the larger world, and a devotion to reading across genres in times of persecution, fear, and bodily trouble. In his letters, he writes about his bad moods and his aching body, global politics and theories of hope; he’s always mentioning the new books he’s reading, the artists who are inspiring him within the confines of his cell. There are also entirely relatable passages like this—
“there’s nothing particularly new in my life; I had the flu, and traces of it remain, so I’m not myself, which will undoubtedly have an unfavorable effect on today’s letter (as will the fact that this time, I have particularly little time for writing).
—that launch Havel into profound reflections on the solitary nature of writing which can nevertheless still produce “a shared experience, mutually understood, [that] evokes the wonderful elation that makes all the sacrifices worthwhile.”
It’s this last reflection that exactly describes what, in my mind, an unbinding practice hopes to achieve, what magic a letter can work, too. Over and over again, through his letters to Olga, Havel undoes the bindings of prison and state on his life, offering stories of a different sky, a future green to his beloved and, in the process, realizing those self-same things for himself, moment to moment, even under lock and key.
This is, of course, the spirit of the reversed Eight of Swords and the reversed Four of Cup, our cards for December. They look kind of somber, and upright, they kind of are. Reversed, though, the entrapment unravels and the offer stands, accepted.
Below are bibliomancy tarotscopes for November, using Havel’s Letters to Olga. The way I do bibliomancy is to use the divined quotes as a provocation to stir up some feeling, or some argument within myself. It’s not about whether I agree with these assertions, it’s more about what does it point me toward that I might need to understand, to develop understanding around? My own suggestions for the month follow the Havel quote, along with a note about what the last full moon of the year, on December 26, will mean for each sign. Read for your Moon signs, too, this month!
Sagittarius Rising: “Perhaps because I’ve been rather nervous recently, it would be best if I were to write about my good moods. My most frequent (and somehow fundamental) good mood occurs when things go my way. I suppose this is true of everyone, and not just in prison. It happens most often when the work I do is going well (which is not always the case; it depends on a lot of external factors too, but also, of course, the condition I’m in).” Your work is going well and your condition is better than it has been. On December 26, you have the opportunity to support your good work and future health through a generous offer from someone else.