Posted by:
Human
(
)
Date: September 26, 2022 08:34AM
On The Tarot
“The Tarot consists of 78 cards, which means that the number of different ways in which a deck can be shuffled consists of a one followed by 115 zeroes: roughly one quadrillion times larger than the number of subatomic particles in the universe.”
The essay that is from is a wild, bewildering ride. It takes you from the Tarot to Walter Benjamin and Hermann Göring to Sebald to Rorschach to the US army to IBM to Madeleine Scudéry to Freud to Gnosticism to the Grail legends to China to Cromniomancy and Ololygmancy and Cephalonomancy to gambling to the Urim and Thummin to Lévy-Bruhl to Lucretius to Plato to etc etc etc. And extra points for using “Baxbakwalanuxsiwae”, of course.
https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/the-roaring-of-things-a-guest-essay?r=b83x9&utm_medium=iosA few Snippets, at random:
“Many of the oracle bones are still being deciphered. Five thousand characters have been identified, and only three thousand are understood. But of the inscriptions we can read, quite a lot of them seem to be about human sacrifice. “Should we offer ancestor Ta-chia and Tsu-i ten beheaded men?” Another: “Should a man be burned at the stake? Will rain follow?” Oracle pits tend to be sited near mass graves.”
“Benjamin distinguishes between bourgeois and mystical linguistics. In bourgeois linguistics, which is Saussure’s theory, “the word has an accidental relation to its object.” Names are determined by convention. You could say that in semiotics the relation between word and thing is like the relation between money and commodities; they can be exchanged for one another. In mystical linguistics, meanwhile, “the word is simply the essence of the thing.” This is an aristocratic linguistics: everything is fixed and timeless and in its proper place. But Benjamin’s linguistics are proletarian; productive and insurrectionary. Each word recalls the creation of the universe; the highest form of language is the giving of a name. “The proper name is the communion of man with the creative word of God.” This is why the first act of Adam was to name every living creature in Eden.”
Human, too too human
*Sam Kriss is a favourite of mine. Somehow he was swept up at the tail-end of MeToo and disappeared for a while. He has resurfaced at Substack. I’m very pleased he has.