Recently it came to my attention that some folks have made a Knitting Tarot and this set me on a train of thought that I’ll share here, along with today’s advent calendar image. I looked at the cards and the information and thought they looked excellent. The small-scale, domestic production scale appeals to me and I could quite see how the language, the forms, the ideas and visuals of knitting could be appropriated for the purposes of divination. Considering the labour involved in making them, I think they are reasonably priced also – though they cost more than commercially printed decks to buy. I can instantly imagine The Queen of Gauge, for instance, as an archetype not dissimilar to The Queen of Swords or even The Queen of Pentacles, depending on how you read a deck. Meticulous, forward-planning, decisive, mathematical and sensible, this archetypal figure plans ahead, manages resources carefully and sets plans accordingly. I’m sure I could come up with other examples, other parallels, and I’ve enjoyed thinking about them all over the past few days in the same way that I have always enjoyed reading and pondering the Tarot, but I ceased to own a deck several years ago and I’ve been thinking about that, too.

When I used to read Tarot cards I often found that reading the deck provided no more than an occasion or a framework within which to acknowledge my own observations on the state of my life. I sometimes gave readings, but mostly used cards as a private tool for self-understanding. The archetypes within Tarot are not mysterious or esoteric at all once they become familiar; The Hierophant, The Fool, The Tower and all the suits can easily be translated into everyday forms and it is certainly useful to have some imaginative framework for understanding things when one is confused. But over time I have been less interested in applying the grand language of the Tarot to such situations as relationship break-ups, bereavements, loss of direction or any of the other instances that lead people to seek counsel. But it would be dismissive to say I have abandoned all sense of the Tarot. While I wouldn’t find time these days to consult the cards, the sense of symbolism they have imbued my life with remains.

For instance The Fool has always been a familiar card in my Tarot readings, as you may have already deduced from all my posts about clowns and the necessity of humour in life. The repetition of The Fool as a thing I encounter in the world is a rich, imaginative resource for me. But it is never a static thing; The Fool is multi-faceted and presents itself as idea, archetype and inspiration in everything from an amazing performance by an artist to a funny moment with a friend or a joke that soothes a difficult situation. I like the archetype as a mutable thing that can inhabit all situations, and also an accumulative symbol for me, that gains new facets with new encounters. If The Fool was an actual card I owned, it would be grubby, well-handled, dog-eared, stained with wine and the residue of great feasts and greasy kebabs. I like my archetypes messy, non-rarefied, accessible and immediate. A card in a deck, wrapped in velvet and viewed only under semi-religious conditions feels too much to me like stepping outside of everyday life in order to understand it.

The Tarot is much younger than the archetypes that live in a set of cards. The imaginative symbolism that inhabits any deck is as old as mankind. There have always been disasters, love, courageous people, cowards, idiots, situations when it is difficult to decide and situations when it is easy to know what to do. What’s interesting to me now is the difference between finding those archetypes locally and immediately, and finding them somehow externally. Jeanette Winterson writes in her book, Art Objects, Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery about Reality and Imagination and has this to say about our ‘real’ lives;

By unravelling the word ‘real’ I hope to show that it contains in itself, and without and wishful thinking on my part, those densities of imaginative experience that belong to us all and that are best communicated through art. I see no conflict between reality and imagination. They are not in fact separate. Our real lives hold within them our royal lives; the inspiration to be more than we are, to find new solutions, to live beyond the moment. Art helps us to do this because it fuses together temporal and perpetual realities.

I particularly like what she says here about reality and imagination being indivisible and I think this is very much the sense that inspired the Knitting Tarot; in the process of knitting, presumably, the artists who made the deck began to draw analogies between the imaginative, symbolic language of The Tarot and the complexities of knitting. It is certainly a rich, creative undertaking but I won’t be buying a deck because it feels like I already have a 3-dimensional means for divination lying all around me, should I choose to ‘read’ it. As a friend recently said to me when we were discussing the washing-up project, ‘one can tell a lot about that state of one’s mental health by just looking at the washing-up.’

Books like Roger-Pol-Droit’s 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of everyday life have inspired me to look at the most mundane, non-specialist, non-grandiose material that surrounds me, and survey it as a constant repository of meaning and symbolism. This reminds me of my very favourite section in Monica Furlong’s Wise Child, where the subject of housework is discussed;

‘I don’t like cleaning or dusting or cooking or doing dishes, or any of those things,’ I explained to her. ‘And I don’t usually do it. I find it boring, you see.’
‘Everyone has to do those things,’ she said.
‘Rich people don’t,’ I pointed out.
Juniper laughed, as she often sis at things I said in those early days, but at once became quite serious.
‘They miss a lot of fun,’ she said. ‘But quite apart from that-keeping yourself clean, preparing the food you are going to eat, clearing it away afterward – that’s what life’s about, Wise Child. When people forget that, or lose touch with it, then they lose touch with other important things as well.’
‘Men don’t do those things.’
‘Exactly. Also, as you clean the house up, it gives you time to tidy youself up inside – you’ll see.’

Although Juniper does also have a deck of Tarot cards, one of the most striking things about Wise Child is its dignifying portrait of housework as graft, labour, and source of wisdom equally. Much more is learned about magic through the performance of household tasks than in consulting with the Tarot cards. In fact I think the deck in the book is mentioned twice as compared to the constant descriptions of the work involved in being a wisewoman – which mainly involves planting, bottling, cleaning, sweeping, tidying, bottling and preparing – that form the backbone of the writing.

In Household images in Art, Lucy Lippard writes that ‘probably more than most artists, women make art to escape, overwhelm or transform daily realities.’ She muses that women probably make work about ‘floors and brooms and dirty laundry…because it’s there, because it’s what they know best, because they can’t escape it.’ This essay is perhaps a little dated but I wonder if my need to transfer archetypal symbolism into everyday reality – the house, the home, cooking, baking, sewing, mending, making, blogging, writing, thinking and doing – is related to these themes.

I’m certain The Knitting Tarot is an excellent and well-considered deck and I think the idea is an excellent one. I’m certain that owning the deck would encourage me to seek deeper meanings in my knitting and allow me to invest the whole world of crafting with yet more symbolism and understanding. As an art-object, the deck fuses practical and imaginative knowledge in a satisfying way, suggesting immediately the profound nature of something as ordinary and sensible as knitting. But I won’t buy one because I think it is ultimately more empowering to translate the archetypes of the Tarot into one’s own, internal, symbolic language rather than somebody else’s.

This is, of course, a personal choice. But I wanted to write about it because I have found quite a few posts that express vague dismay at the price of the deck or the artwork, and I felt these were rather missing the point of such a deck. Bravo to the makers, but for myself I hope I can find a rather more accessible way of explaining the world about me to myself, and a less segregated means of knowing myself than performing Tarot readings. I hope I don’t need a velvet cloth or a beautiful set of cards to be able to understand the passage of my life in truly splendid or fantastical terms, and that I will be able to translate rich, symbolic meanings in such everyday things as completing a knitting project or indeed finishing a blog post, without props.

Which leads me to an example of what I mean, that is also today’s advent calendar image:

The Knitted Banana. Were this a Tarot card, its meaning would be something to do with stagnation, procrastination and not finishing something I’ve started. I began to knit two bananas in February, spending most of the money I was paid for the job on yellow and white yarns for the project. The lack of a pattern was something of an obstacle for me, as I had improvised the original banana that inspired in the buyer the need for two, and I was anxious about how to make new bananas – without any directions, or memory of what I’d done – from the original one. In the end I reasoned that if I had done it once, I could do it twice more.

I am now in the process of knitting and blocking the peels, which are fussy and tiny little things to be sewing and for which I have thankfully created a pattern. It is an enormous relief to almost be finished. The Knitted Banana will evermore exist in my imaginative inventory of symbols and understandings about the world as something that I just need to get on with, a project that has stagnated and that is constantly nagging me in the back of my mind.

When I think of The Knitted Banana in the future, it will be like getting a card in a Tarot reading that warns against taking on a project I can’t find the time for and a reminder to finish those things I’ve undertaken to do that are outstanding.