Jessa Crispin and the Art of Tarot

Writer’s tool? Dowsing the unconscious? Rectangular cardboard muse?

In part 1 of this series we looked back at when Italo ‘And for my next trick!’ Calvino used the Tarot to compose a novel, The Castle of Crossed Destinies. A champion of intellect and mental order (see him on the like-minded Borges), he was nonetheless open to using an occult system like the Tarot and knowledgeable about its history and potential. After all a nice analogy for a novelist’s relation to their characters might be a deck of cards that tells or ordains their future through a mixture of luck and fate…

Yet, as I wrote previously, the novel he generated got only two out of three things right:

First, he featured the Tarot as content in the novel; second, he used only the rows, columns and preordained paths around hands of Tarot cards to construct it. The third thing missing was a point beyond the patterns. For a writer to use magic-inspired creativity effectively, with internal cohesion and not arbitrariness, they have to, maybe not be a full believer, but at least be a make-believer.

Perhaps Calvino’s problem was his M.O. had been avowedly rule-bound and rationalist. He once favourably contrasted writers like Raymond Queneau and himself to the surrealists, with all their dependance on chance and the unconscious. To make the case not for depending on those but at least acknowledging and harnessing them in your creative work, I spoke to Jessa Crispin.

Jessa is a critic, editor and author; her books include The Dead Ladies Project, a sort of combo of literary biography and travel writing in the spirit of one of the said dead ladies, Rebecca West; and Why I Am Not a Feminist: a Feminist Manifesto - Janet Radcliffe Richards meets Dawn Foster, say. Currently she is serialising a novel, The Spinster at the End of the World.

Back in 2016 Jessa published The Creative Tarot, and with artist Jen May designed their own ‘Spolia’ Tarot deck, which was funded by Kickstarter and fast sold-out. Jessa for a time also ran her own Tarot-reading service. For some of the reasons why she stopped, and more, read below.

ARTLESS: In The Creative Tarot you write, regarding mystic T E Waite, how “magical systems were not about imposing your will on a situation... or about telling the future... but for elevating the soul and for bringing what is unconscious conscious.” And in your interview with the Chicago Review of Books you discuss the artist as god-like, big ego, ex nihilo creator versus the artist as conduit. Is your own art and Tarot practice about foregrounding the conduit side? Or synthesising the two: will and intuition, the unconscious and conscious? 

Jessa Crispin: I would say it’s about getting both sides working together, the ego and the conduit. You have to use the ego as a tool of discernment; you know, is what I am picking up right now useful or valuable in any way? When I’m using the tarot, I’m still making choices about what to pay attention to, how to think about what I’m seeing, how to act on my feelings. I don’t know if you can do that without the ego holding everything together, unless you’re like one of those mushroom zombies in The Last of Us show. 

Think of the Chariot card, the conscious and the unconscious yoked together to move forward. They both have to come to some kind of agreement about where they’re going, or else your cart is going to crash. And in that sense, they both have to be in equally good working order, you have to use, nurture, exercise, and feed both sides.

You also mentioned Norman Mailer in your Chicago Review of Books interview. At the risk of mentioning one big ego, I remember he called writing “the spooky art”. He meant the way your mind can problem-solve ‘by itself’, without you being conscious of it, and how, if you keep spurning your subconscious (for example by sitting down to work but then procrastinating) it’ll spurn you back. Do you find writing spooky? How much do you reckon writer’s block is having a fall out with your subconscious? 

Listen, he’s unfashionable right now, I know, but I love Norman Mailer’s work. But you can see when the ego is ruining his shit, it’s on the page. When he lets it be spooky, it’s great. But the quality varies wildly at times, and a lot of that is insecurity. Ego is ruling things. 

I do find writing spooky. You can be very certain your idea is right and then you’re making a cup of tea or washing your hair and it’s like a thought is deposited within you out of nowhere and it changes everything. Or you write something you don’t remember and come across it five years later and it’s exactly the thing you needed to know that day. 

I think there are a lot of reasons one might be blocked, so I’m not going to make any definitive statements on that. But I do think you have to give your subconscious space, you have to pay attention, or it’ll turn the volume up in ways that are unpleasant. I once lived with a man who would yell in the night. And I would ask him what he had dreamed about and he would say, oh I never dream. Sir, you are literally thrashing and screaming in your sleep, I think something is going on. “No, I don’t dream.” I thought, but didn’t say, you know, maybe this is why your last two books bombed. There’s some information you’re ignoring. His books are still bombing, so I’m assuming he still thinks he doesn’t dream.

Norman Mailer, author, ego

How much is Tarot an under-the-radar way for letting artists trust their intuition where they wouldn’t otherwise if they had to deliberately?

I don’t know that tarot is that under the radar, and I also think there are a lot of ways to be intuitive in your art.  

Do you see Tarot in art as a reaction to craftism, all those books about writing technique? Or just another, if more esoteric version of it?

You can use tarot however you like, and I definitely have met people with a ‘craft’ approach to tarot. They have a very rigid idea in their head of what the cards mean and there are no surprises with them. I don’t think picking up a deck is going to immediately make you more intuitive or give you access to your subconscious. The tarot is a deck of cards. It can only help you bring out of you what is already there. You have to build a capacity for that kind of stuff, you can’t force it. It takes time. (Someone complained to me, “The cards like you, why don’t the cards like me.” I don’t know, maybe because you’re searching for answers from them like you would Google?)

Some artists see their mission as using magic to restore the, I guess, Romantic spiritual weight to art (contrary to their critics who might think of them as dishonouring art by substituting something else for it). How much is your Tarot practice about restoring a spiritual weight to art, and do you see yourself as a Romantic?

I don’t know that I would ultimately label myself as a Romantic. Do I think art is magic? I think it can be. You know, when I go see a Mozart opera I am filled with the absolute certainty that this is why god made humans, to make music like that. Because the divine can’t make music like that, it needs something fucked up and weird to get to create something like that and the divine is only perfect. So art is magic when it’s a marriage, of however you want to understand it, the divine and the human, the ego and the subconscious, whatever. However your brain needs to conceptualise it. But there’s a lot of magic-less art in the world, man. Where the divine is obviously off smoking a cigarette. 

I really think as a culture we are intuition-impoverished. That’s why everyone who calls themselves a witch is doing spells to make more money, like, they are trapped in a materialist, rational worldview while pretending to be super spiritual and navigating other realms. There’s basically nothing in our education, in our art, in our religions, even, for the irrational, the intuitive, or the mystic. Shamans are lifestyle coaches. Even most of tarot culture is not about how do we approach god’s realm it’s how do I get a publishing deal. This is why I had to stop reading tarot professionally, like, the clientele was not spiritually sophisticated. Someone asked me once in a reading how they can build their brand and I wanted to gouge my eyes out with crystals. 

I’ve been thinking about the I Ching and Rorschach tests and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies but in relation to ChatGPT. I’ve heard of writers who get themselves out of snags, some by asking the A.I. to write a whole book for them, others a page or two. How do you feel about ChatGPT? Is it a degradation / profanation, just another tool? Can a bot be a conduit, or is the fact that it was designed by coders make it inimical to creativity?

I don’t really find the A.I. stuff interesting. I guess because it’s only pulling from what you feed it. Even if you feed it the entirety of the world’s knowledge, it’s still just us but smaller. I guess that’s us playing (or trying to) the role of the divine in the equation. Here’s the inspiration, now put it together for me. But I don’t know that the world needs even less interesting, more limited versions of people.

Someone I know made a chatbot that was fed the known works of Sappho and then had it make conversation. They found it very charming and spooky, but I’m like, do you really want Sappho giving you dating advice or do you just want to read her work? Why make her mundane? Call me when it’s sentient I guess.  

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So what might art look like that wasn’t, in Jessa’s words, intuition-impoverished? That used magical systems like the Tarot as not just a useful prose-generator, literary device or tricky gimmick but as something integrated into the artwork’s overall vision?

In part 1, I mentioned how Alan Moore, to justify his use of magic in composing comics, would sometimes explain it in non-supernatural terms: if you force yourself to think and write within a restricted, preexisting set of symbols, you make your imagination work harder and more originally. (Like the introvert playing charades who surprises everyone including himself by becoming a master of improv and mime.) But this justification was a rhetorical move on Moore’s part: he actually believes in this stuff. Or make-believes, which, to an idealist like him, is one and the same thing. As same as art and magic…

Which takes us to part 3, and an artwork that succeeded where Calvino nobly tried but failed. What was it again? Log in next week to find out.

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