Enthusiasm (Gr entheos, possessed by a god)

MADY SCHUTZMAN

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Enthusiasm (Gr entheos, possessed by a god)

guilty pleasure

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anyone remember Phil Ochs—the topical singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan contemporary, political lyricist and Trotskyite who performed his famous 1970 Carnegie Hall concert channeling Che Guevara and Elvis Presley simultaneously? The concert ended with Ochs leading the chant “GIVE US THE POWER, GIVE US THE POWER” with a sold-out house of nearly three thousand joining him for over thirty minutes in the dark. Union technicians had turned off his mic and all house lights when Ochs purposefully went overtime, gyrating his way through “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” and “Draft Dodger Rag.” When Ochs first came out on stage in gold lamé, not all the fans were happy. Many just wanted their reliable, easily legible, folkie troubadour and not this apparent sell-out whether it be to conspicuous consumption or irony. But Ochs was thinking that if he could get Middle America— Elvis country—behind the anti-war movement, then real change was possible. He was also desperate for commercial success. A skillful raconteur and trickster, Ochs was playing the political left (responsible for whatever fame he could rightfully claim) against the glitz of his wannabe status. “I’ve been living in Los Angeles for three years now,” he told the audience. “I don’t think it’s had any effect on me.” I’ve been living in Los Angeles for over twelve years. I cite Ochs to myself often as I sit on my redwood deck beneath the avocado tree and pull out my collection of tarot decks: the Rider Waite, Secret Dakini Oracle, Osho Zen, Medicine Cards, Triple Goddess tarot, the Kabbalah deck, Marseilles tarot, Golden Dawn tarot, Mythic tarot, Sacred Path Cards, and the collector’s double-axe lesbian deck. I tell myself that my aggressive Coney Island street-smarts, radical feminism and The Nation continue to divine my sensibilities, not these impractical picture cards. I shall not be confused with self-proclaimed modern day sages and their infantilizing new-ageist pabulum. With that clear (to whomever might be listening), I shuffle the deck, bidding my hands transmit to the cards an ache in my soul for my very own cosmic troubadour, some ethereal but preferably lefty being that appreciates an atheist with divine aspirations. I’m not religious but I’m spiritually bereft. Is that an oxymoron? Isn’t everyone? It is not only brainy quantum physicians and complexity theorists that teach the wisdom of paradox. Yogi Berra, by no means an erudite scholar, is known to have said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” This is a smart joke, an amusing reminder to keep the eyes just slightly crossed so that the seemingly unified vision we perceive through our two eyes is

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fractured, as it should be, into a blurry but far truer picture. An irreconcilable one. Thinking of spiritual practice in terms of jokes is comforting, in part due to my Jewish upbringing amidst frustrated Borscht Belt comedians who frequently cited famous quips bearing some profundity beneath their apparent silliness. “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.” “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” This is my heritage, dinner-table paradox to doubleup over. Turns out, as I write this, we’re in a very funny year—2005, the year of the Chariot. A young man surrounded by maps is ready to take off on his journey of self-discovery but his carriage is a block of stone and his two horses are sphinxes, one black pulling to the right and the white one to the left. I have driven this Chariot for months now, grooving in the split, bones and blood training on cosmic laps as I remain down here undecided, going nowhere. “When is a car not a car? When it turns into a garage.” Yogi, Groucho, quantum physics, paradox, and tarot. I feel the tickle of belief in my gut. I lay out the first card of the standard Celtic Cross spread. The Hierophant. I call upon the funnier Jew in me to continue languishing in the paradoxes that are refreshing my spiritual self and forego the grating associations with Popes and crosses. I lay out more—a very few quiet pastel cards, but mostly heralds of tragedy, stare back at me. The good doubt is going bad, spanking new fruit rotting suddenly on the vine. The litany flows: Why do you have nothing better to do than share your most challenging quandaries with a deck of cards? Don’t you have any friends? What kind of creepy simulation of a séance are you pretending to minister, communing as if in prayer when you have no one to pray to? This blabber is sorely interfering with my enthusiasm; perhaps it’s revenge for my enthusiasm. The cards sit there flat and lackluster as a dryness in my throat portends a colossal waste of time. Am I a lazy dolt? A bat mitzvah run amok? I order myself to stop—stop playing with cards or stop condemning myself, I’m unsure—but I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to stop playing. I try to justify this to the unbridled rationality loosing its most tyrannical side, predictably, just as I exercise the spiritual muscle. The truth is, I long to dive into the cups of memory spilt or full, meet the souls arising from Judgement’s coffins to heed some barely audible call, flail my seven swords against my imagined enemies, meander away from the trophies and accolades of the everyday, glow in the halo of the Hanged Man tied upsidedown by the feet and forced to wait, all action disastrous, all attempts to save one’s self doomed. Willfulness, I tell myself, is a last ditch effort of the dualistic mind to maintain order in the face of emergent phenomena. I speak softly, in a tone one might use to divert a tantrum. I don’t want to encourage a backlash of self-control. For all our exhortations of free will, the Chariot is torn asunder, the double-riddle clinging like maggots to a rock. Chance couldn’t do worse. Perhaps chance, in its inimitable way, will divine a wacky maxim to unsettle the entire edifice of prescriptive thought and save us from our misguided intellect. I want to keep playing. Do all rituals of surrender feel like folly? I take solace in the elevenheaded Joker of the Tantric deck who wears the sign of the labyrinth. Paths are so winding and deceptive, he seems to suggest, one must give up paths altogether. I am already in joyous mourning—the familiar too familiar, the old shore disappearing (finally) but before the new shore is in sight. To survive, I must evolve very quickly, tolerate all this liminality, quiet the

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anxiety long enough to bleed as I want to bleed beyond the borders that bind, that keep body and soul apart. If this is what people call faith it is a perilous undertaking indeed. I turn over the last card in the Celtic spread, the final destiny position – Death, a skeleton with scythe in hand walking through a field of decapitated heads (eyes wide open), feet, and hands. Thinking my life clearly unblessed in the eyes of the divining spirits and believing (suddenly) that there are no accidents in games of chance, I am inconsolable. I am disgusted with myself for being inconsolable. I have played my cards like an impostor, a critic, so why now am I wanting, an amnesiac begging to be filled with something more merry? I fail to notice at the time, that symbolically read, the Death card might refer to a moment when everything solid melts into air, that it might in fact completely render an image of the state of spiritual collapse I am both experiencing and defending against. Beside myself, a wicked sense of humor hands me a book of matches and says, “Burn them.” Mortified by the suggestion and yet wasting not a beat, I hold a flame to Death but the card is laminated and while it slowly browns it won’t burn, not fast enough. What kind of soothsayer has possessed my imagination and gotten all my fears lined up like obedient children, like hungry pilgrims? Beside me now is a pair of scissors. I accept their offering and cut Death into four parts. I cut every one of the seventy-two cards into four pieces with ecstatic defiance, as if overthrowing the absurdity of God itself. And then I sit there paralyzed, waiting to be struck down for blasphemy. Where did all this enthusiasm come from? Like filling an urn with a loved one’s ashes, I tossed the remains of the defunct tarot deck into a cookie tin and set it upon the fireplace mantel of a Los Angeles apartment. I was a student of anthropology I learned about Quesalid, the Kwakiutl Ph.D. student from northern Canada who wanted to demystify the practices of traditional shamans, to reveal their tricks as common legerdemain, those phony sorcerers chewing on pungent roots until slimy and green, then dramatically disgorging them as material evidence of their patients’ intestinal pain, or respiratory congestion or brain tumor. The patients would convulse in sync with the sorcerer’s expulsion of the disease, only to stand up miraculously healed. Quesalid wanted people to discredit this magical practice and the blind faith that accompanied it. As part of his fieldwork, he became apprentice to a renowned Kwakiutl shaman, and when this old man suddenly fell sick, he asked Quesalid—who had been studying his ways, however critically, for several years—to take his place. Quesalid responded to the call, at first shame-faced to perform a practice he was determined to expose as unscientific balderdash. But patients continued to be healed! They came back with their friends and children. He decided to improve upon his former teacher’s techniques; after all, when called to perform, one ought to put on the most enthusiastic show. Instead of the “bloody worm,” he wanted something even more false, more mystifying. At the critical moment, he decided he would simply spit a little saliva in his palm, drooling ever so slightly for effect. People praised him for his ingenious new ploy and Quesalid’s reputation grew exponentially. (Apparently, designing healing magic is something of a community art form among the Kwakiutl—a sport unto itself—proving, BACK WHEN

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I think, that knowing how a trick works does not necessarily detract from its effect. In fact, it just might enthuse the fans.) Quesalid became a great shaman. He did not become a great shaman because he healed people, he healed people because he had become a Great Shaman. Good spectacles are their own magic. Even bad ones. 1995 Joan Osborne came out with the song that put her on the pop charts, “One of Us.” (“What if God was one of us, just a slob like one of us?”) That same year, Amber Tamblyn was cast as the first Emily Quartermaine, the adopted granddaughter of Lila Quartermaine, on my favorite daytime soap, General Hospital. Tamblyn left GH in 2001 and I missed her. I identified with her perpetually forlorn state. But then, to my delight, she reappeared two years later in the CBS drama Joan of Arcadia, playing Joan Girardi, a high-school sophomore confronted by God in various guises—waiter, construction worker, bus-driver, fellow student, slob on the bus. Unsure what God wants from her, questioning her very sanity, Joan reluctantly follows God’s cryptic directives while trying to retain a normal teenaged existence. Osborne’s song is the drama’s soundtrack. The TV family lives in a fictional Arcadia, California, which is a real city twenty miles east of Los Angeles, not at all far from my home. “Lucky” Baldwin bought the land that became Arcadia in 1875 for $200,000, $25 an acre. As the story goes, when Lucky first saw the beautiful foothill landscape, lush greenery and fertile acres full of potential, he declared, “By Gads! This is paradise.” If Lucky could see Arcadia now, he would be in seventh heaven, this land rich with everyday deities ready to spout divinatory wisdom to anyone ready to listen—that is, anyone like Joan Girardi endowed with the metaphysically enhanced genes of the French maid of Orleans, Joan of Arc. These are genes I try to cultivate. The Hebrew word thorah, or “law,” means “to cast lots,” so perhaps these Jewish gambling genes are ready to roll. I toss, and today I must find wisdom in the Devil, the Hermit, the pastoral children of the Six of Cups. Joan Girardi meets her God in the lunch lady at school, the bus-driver, a misanthropic piano teacher. I turn over the cripples passing unnoticed beneath the church lights, a man faced-down pierced with Ten of Swords. This Friday night, Joan is happy to find God in a cute boy her own age. I grow ethereal tentacles to discern from the High Priestess an explanation for yesterday’s loss or today’s deceit. Joan thinks she’s going crazy. Fighting every step of the way, she does what God tells her and it doesn’t always turn out for the best. She tries out for the cheerleading squad to the horror of her bohemian friends, takes a job at a day-care center and discovers an agonizing secret about her father. I see how Joan wants to light up a torch or grab some garden shears and maim these apparent gods. Sometimes she does. And then she, too, waits to be struck down for blasphemy. I love Joan. Obedient, driven by moral righteousness, helplessly prone to the indeterminate, humble, prophetic, and plagued with guilt. If Joan and I could be Nietzsche and declare the death of God, in spite of the risk of regret, we wouldn’t do it. IN

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ONE EVENING , after teaching a course on that other French mystic Antonin Artaud, I returned home and meticulously scotch-taped together all the cut-up pieces of the Oswald Wirth deck that had been sitting for

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years in the tarot coffin. It was time. Since the day of their demise, the Trade Towers were blown up, the Kodak Theater in Hollywood was completed, my mother died, Hilary Swank won an Oscar, and I expanded my collection of decks to include the Aleister Crowley Thoth tarot, the Vodoun deck, and the Victorian tarot. It was an entirely gratifying couple of hours, the disjointed pieces spread like hopeful ruins anticipating the reunion that awaited them. Or so I imagined. As I was putting Death back together, Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” (is have some fun) was blasting from a neighbor’s radio. Thank God Death spooks the here-andnow, gives us a touch of Nothing. I didn’t love Death back then when I cut up the deck. But now I know, like Queen, like Madonna, that “nothing really matters.” I’m thinking how Groucho would deliver that line. I line up the lemiscate of the Magician’s hat, get the fingers of Strength inside the lion’s mouth where they belong. “You ain’t seen Nothing yet,” said Al Jolson. “Nothing is real.” The Beatles. I’m on a sick vaudevillian roll, while Artaud, I hope, is channeling some visionary madness. Once rejoined, the cards showed their nasty scars and remain far too fragile to shuffle. But I figure it’s appropriate for an oracle to have survived a near-death experience and bare the wounds to prove it.

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