January tarot reading
The reversed Eight of Wands and the upright Six of Wands lead us into 2024.
I dislike the astrology stereotypes for Capricorn maybe more than any other: only wants to be CEO, obsessed with work, love language is money, has no chill, can’t take a joke, wears suits, likes to hike. (OK, fine, I’m a Capricorn Sun, and I do like to hike, lol).
Whenever the Cap memes get rolled out on social media, I always want to reach through the screen and elbow the Gemini witch with whose creating them while using her glitter nails to compulsively pop her iPhone case on and off. Look at the month of January! I want to say, sweating beneath my thrifted Ralph-Lauren shawl collar, Capricorn is full of sap! Reflections on the nature of true will, intentions to change reality, resolutions to love oneself, goals to not be an asshole, a playful ability to dance on the faultline between tradition and change! Double-bodied! Mythic creature! Part goat, part sea-monster! Expansively queer! Excellent at poetry, I want to say, have you read Stacey Waite?
I want to see a Capricorn meme of a goth mermaid reading Butch Geography and writing New Year’s “In/Out” lists as poetry, maybe something like Waite’s poem “Boys in Trees:”
I remember her leaning at the sink,
always the gray wet line on her shirt.
My mother’s cooking begins with peeling:
the dirt skin of potato, the pulling of thick
orange strands, opaque flakes of carrot.After peeling, she cannot bear the boiling
and softening, the smell of the meats
dropped in the pan. It all seems to be dying.
Or maybe she knows her children cannot
help but ingest some element of death.In summer, she pushes hard on the lemons
until they bleed clear. Sometimes,
from up in the red oak beside the house,
we hear her crying. We are boys in trees.
My brother shifts and sighs, we don’t
even need that lemon water. We wait
up in the tree for her to call us. We wait
until the lemon rind has been tossed out
in the side yard. We drink it then, when
there is nothing left of what our mother
had never, not even once, wanted.
In: Opaque flakes. Trees as refuge. Loving our mothers for what they could do. Out: Pretending we don’t know what it’s like to feel ambivalent about what you ended up creating. Pretending we have no control over which elements of death we ingest.
Something like that, and we took a turn, didn’t we? Capricorns are good for that. In grad school, Waite became a model for me on how to write, how to live, and how to be in a world where the contradictions of capitalism were allowed en masse but werevirulently decried when they appeared as the paradoxes of an individual trying to navigate personal pains and aspirations in the face of a civilization in stunning decline. Waite showed me a way through the poles that everyone seemed to lift up as the only options: man or woman, family or estrangement, academic or anarchist, tradition or change, poet or critic, teacher or student, funny or serious. Waite was all of these—not necessarily all at once, but given the time of day, the bills they needed to pay, the students they needed to support, the woman they fell in love with, the children they raised, the corner of the world they felt most called to change, the book they knew they could sell, the book they knew they needed to write.
“What else can we do with our “selves” other than critique and selfishness?” Waite asked me one day just before I graduated, in response to a long-standing question of my own: “when does self-critique just become self-centeredness?” For me, it had been a conundrum. For Waite, there was a Six-of-Wands ease in answering the question: They had survived violence and oppression in their life through reading and writing, and noticing the joy that arose in their body, the love that arose for self and other—poles that weren’t necessarily even real—through the process of reading and writing.
I re-read my favorite Waite books at the top of every New Year. I used to do so because I always taught selected poems from Butch Geography and selected essays from Teaching Queer, a book of narrative scholarship that raises questions about when and how we use personal narrative and our bodies to make larger cultural arguments, in my intro-to-writing classes at the university. Now, I re-read Waite because I need to be a student of how to be a person who is remaking her public self all over again. As someone whose job is based in part on the projection and proliferation of an online self, I am hungry for the careful-yet-playful way Waite’s various roles as writer, teacher, and performer (they’re a renowned slam poet) engage with the vulnerability-opacity matrix of the self caught in the work of public expression.
I drew for January the reversed Eight of Wands alongside the upright Six of Wands. The inverted Eight in conversation with the Six of the same suit acts as a kind of back-and-forth between the smarts of Hermes and the wisdom of Jupiter—this looping between an ability to participate in and go beyond traditional modes of communicating, reading, and being in the world.
I read Waite’s poems in Butch Geography as the best kind of Eight of Wands message: they flirt with both the import and the uselessness of tradition. The reversal of the card is a nod to how easily we can get mired in one or two affective response to our lives—only ever bitter or only ever anxious, only ever on the good-cheer-to-depressed-exhaustion pipeline. But like the Jupiterian Six of Wands, Waite’s verses never limit themselves to any one emotional register as they travel through and beyond accepted, often hushed assumptions about what it means to live and love well during in-between times. Like fleet-footed Mercury rushing to irrigate Sagittarian stickiness with a multiplicity of perspectives, Waite’s lyric voice cajols, prays, cracks jokes. It takes on the trauma of neglect and fear in the childhood home, violence and abuse in the outside world with prosody, which in poetry denotes a linkage sound and meaning, and in life exhibits a tolerance for hopeful patterns to emerge through the stress and rush of paradox.
The wands are about vision. Two wands cards together like this are about re-vision, vis-à-vis Adrienne Rich: “re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.” Or, as Waite, building on Rich in Teaching Queer, remarks: “re-vision is … also the act of acknowledging the present and the act of looking forward simultaneously. And that ‘contradiction’ is not only possible but also imperative … It truly matters how we look and from what ‘critical direction.’”
From one critical direction, astrologers would call 2024 and 2025 the last years of the interregnum that began in 2020, when Jupiter and Saturn formed their great conjunction at the start of Aquarius after conjoining only in earth signs for hundreds of years. It’s the changing of the guard between a world organized by Saturn-ruled Capricorn ideals of structure—household, earth, tradition, scientific materialism, the mythic man, God made flesh, the body as the first text, into a world organized by Saturn-ruled Aquarian ideals of structure—internet village, air, change, scientific “progress,” the mythic machine, God made screen, AI as the first text. One king has died, another will ascend, we’re in the uncomfortable space between. Or so this critical direction goes.
But another, more generous re-vision would look at the space between—this year, 2025—and see such promise, an explosion of poles, a work against all kings from all sides, an aporia where good can leak in from the ground up, or else a lover’s series of questions, “is it enough to say/ I want to see you/ brush lint from jacket,/ straighten my collar,/ as a woman sometimes/ does to a man she takes/ great care in offering/ to the terrible visible world?”
Below are bibliomancy tarotscopes for January, using Waite’s Butch Geography and Teaching Queer. 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 Waite quote, along with a note about what the Sun and Pluto’s double ingresses into Aquarius, on January 20, will mean for each sign. Read for your Sun signs, too, this month!
Capricorn Rising: “And when I say, ‘Gender, you’re going to be all right,’/ what I mean is the heart is the most overworked muscle / in the body, that you won’t drown out there. Forgive / yourself. Write your name in water. I will make you / into God. I will let you answer prayers at last.” You’ve had to rely on the generosity and resources of others more than you would have liked to over the last few years. Maybe it’s time to forgive yourself for thinking this is a crutch. Whatever new relationships to money or self-worth began to be woven in December 2020 are back on the table on January 20. What old habit do you need to sacrifice in order to see yourself and your life as more than enough? Ask for help, give your heart a rest, a 15-year struggle with people projecting shadows onto you comes to a close.