November tarot reading
Reversed power, the Four of Disks, and bibliomantic 'scopes with help from Jordan Tannahill's THE LISTENERS
A high-school English teacher is not doing great but she’s just fine. Her suburbs tract-house is cookie cutter, but her contractor husband knows how to fix the shoddy ills of capitalist mass production. Her teenage daughter is angry, but what 17-year-old isn’t? Her best friend started going to church after she remarried, but is still down for lunchtime conversations about Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Claire, the English teacher, doesn’t believe in God, or therapy, and even large book clubs stray too closely to group think for her taste. But she enjoys the work of reading, analyzing, and teaching difficult literature—she’s even roped her “bear of a” husband to listening to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain on audiobook in lieu of the sex they used to have. At the start of Jordan Tannahill’s The Listeners, nothing is amazing, but Claire prides herself on having a healthy respect for just how “good enough” good enough actually is.
Then, one night, before she and her husband switch the lights off to go to sleep, she begins to hear it. A low hum she doesn’t have words for.1 It’s in her ears, but also in her gut. It’s inside of her, but she knows, somehow, its source comes from without. Her affable husband makes jokes, but she can’t sleep. Not that first night or any other that follows. She finds herself stalking out into the neighborhood in her pajamas, cutting the power to their house, peering into the backyards of other homes, chucking rocks at a new cell-phone tower on another dark street. The Hum2, which she begins to capitalize—out of frustration? out of reverence?—in her first-person account of her (and the town’s) unraveling, persists.
She answers its call, searching for the origin of something no one else hears, much less believes in. Her marriage falls apart; her daughter would rather she not show up to her sports games. Her job is on the line, even before a student shows up after hours in her classroom. I can hear it, too, he says. She doesn’t think twice, then, about spending evenings driving the student around in her car, the two of them united in a quest that will of course be misconstrued when the boy’s mom discovers their companionship. At this point, Claire loses everything “just fine” about her life. But in the process, she and the boy find others who can also hear what they hear. They begin to meet weekly in a neighborhood house bordering the desert. It’s not long before the group members stop trying to investigate The Hum and start trying to “tune themselves” to it, instead.
The Listeners is far from a perfect book. The dialogue is uneven, and there are whole pages where Tannahill’s characterization of Claire’s decision-making falls flat.3 As a former crime reporter (or just a person living in a post-George Floyd United States), I knew where the material details of the story would fall when the cops show up outside of the house where the group members are tuning to The Hum.
But what makes The Listeners worth reading, I think, in spite of its failures, is its faithful rendition of another trajectory I know well, many of us probably know all too well, which is what happens when two impossible things arrive in a life at once, at the same time, as the same thing.4 When you lose your grip on everything that mattered up to that point.
What’s the difference between losing something precious and consciously letting it go? What new structures and relationships emerge in the void? These are some the questions presented by The Listeners and also by the reversed Four of Disks, our card for November. Crowley called this card “Power,” writing in his Book of Thoth deck that “the essential point is that it expresses the Rule of Law.” But what is that exactly, and who says? The weirdness of Lady Frieda Harris’ geometric painting for the card is, my artist husband points out, how Harris messes with perspective. Everything on the image seems to adhere to a single-point perspective—everything, that is, except the abstracted fortress itself, which refuses the rest of the card’s tilt. It just sits there, imposing its square self on the world, power as brute presence rather than any authority, spiritual or otherwise. Power as violence deferred.5
Competing perspectives, a lost or sacrificed grip on reality, both are themes presented by the astrology, the politics, and certain patterns of this particular time, where the “Rule of Law” seems amorphous, bendable, unmoored from any grand or unifying point of view. Reversed, the card asks us collectively to consider the nature of power in the society in which we live. The tarot is laughing at us, I guess, because most everyone I know is already doing this. Individually, the draw offers more workable questions, maybe, including: How do I want to approach power, the loss of it, in my own life? What rushes to fill in the void left by loosening my grip, denying the brute force of “just fine?” What would I like to subsequently embrace, to keep out, to explore, to get real quiet and slow about?
For my part, I’ve found it comforting to spend time with the presocratic philosophers in recent weeks, where logic and law are not divorced from prophecy, magic, and the exercise of “learning to die while still alive,” so much as inextricable from these practices.6 Irrational practices for unreasonable times, a mantra I’ve adhered to quietly in myself. No wonder I like the absurd trajectory of the protagonist in The Listeners, however ruinous she finds the path of faith, however reluctant she is to walk it. It’s worth noting that Claire never turns her back on the mundane world, either. All of its pleasures and fights and injustices and discontents still matter to her. It’s the others, her family, her friends, her colleagues, who ultimately turn their back on her for listening into something beyond the din of routine.
This weekend a Mars-in-shadow opposes Pluto in the last degrees7 of Cancer and Capricorn, the latter associated with the Four of Disks in the tarot. It’s a transit that lasts longer than the weekend, pointing to a resonance that will linger over the next nine months of our lives as these planets enter this same configuration twice more over the course of the end of this year and beginning-to-middle of the next. In astrology, Mars is often read as “anger” and “conflict” and Pluto as “underworld journeys” and “power struggles.” But Mars, I’ve found, is also a signature for enlightenment. Ancient sculptors sometimes carved baby Pluto in the arms of goddesses of health and prophecy, supposedly signifying life’s true gifts of power and wealth. It seems pat to end on a statement that links madness to insight, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll let the random passages below work their sympathies, hum their tunes for all of you.
Below are bibliomantic tarotscopes for the month, using The Listeners as inspiration.
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 Listeners quote. Read for your rising sign.
Scorpio Rising: “As the ten of us sat there I became aware of the fact that The Hum—for it was now capitalized in my consciousness—was the loudest thing in the room. I felt this realization slowly occur to the others. Here we all were, sitting in what anyone else would perceive as total silence, tormented by a noise that only we could hear” (99). A realization dawns this month about the camaraderie you share with a few particular friends. You’re called to travel or to make good, in a big way, on this new awareness. You learn to advocate for your own needs in friendships and communities by creating space for others to do exactly that with you. This can be a pleasure as much as it is a responsibility!
Sagittarius Rising: “My discomfort was probably rooted in a disdain for religion and self-help and group therapy, which I knew was rooted in my own arrogance. And maybe in my fear of being vulnerable. That’s just how I was raised. I inherently mistrusted people seeking to be healed or helped or enlightened. To group dynamics, group think, group activities. I’ve always been wary of shared, collective experience” (95). The backlash in recent years against vulnerability online and with “unsafe people” is well and truly deserved. And it’s also true that this month is a good time to do away with your own reservations, arrogances, and mistrust of shared, collective experience, particularly the role you’ve found yourself playing in group after group. Talk about the thing you’ve been disdainful of speaking up about. The parent or old pattern or “support” structure that used to inhibit you is now gone. Your heart is on finally learning how to find the right words, might as well start talking!