It's been ages since I wrote, since that wonderful holiday that brought me back to myself again.Now, I am Hanoi, or what I think Hanoi is, once more.
And I'm feeling the tiredness that used to define me in Australia. Where the day felt like torture, like all I was was work. Sucking in the coffee, sluicing up the green tea, keeping myself awake with imported chocolate.
It's all temporary, of course. My commitments have just been met, I've decided to push myself less, the old "do nothing" mission. And in a couple of days, I'll detox, feed myself some Vina chocolate - it's so unpleasant that I didn't have a craving for three months after I had my first piece. Swap the caf with the decaf, and suddenly everything will be under control again.
So now you know why I haven't been in touch. There have been a few very nice moments recently, although, staying up all night chatting with my Viet Kieu housemates, all social sciences academics. They've actually read Foucault, and not the comic strip version, like me. But my excuse is that I am a professional generalist, or at least, a dilettante.
Besides the buen xe lay, I've also enjoyed the odd reading with the Siamese tarot deck I bought in Bangkok. My friend Suzi loved it so much, this deck that is a gorgeous fusion of Oriental symbolism into a filing cabinet of Occidental mysticism. So I gave her a deck of her own, and we are both honing our skills.
Tarot is most useful when you want to understand the present, rather than predict the future. After all, do you really need to know the future, or just identify what is best for you to do to advance your goals? I believe in self-determination, so the future changes. It is far too slippery for us to grasp until it is past.
And considering how adept we are at lying to ourselves, even understanding the present can be difficult. That's where tarot comes in. It's also a great cure for writers' block, particularly if you're not sure how to advance the plot. My re-embrace of tarot in Hanoi, after years of post-university scepticism, coincided with the end of my writers' block. But was it just a coincidence?
I've been reading tarot, on and off, mostly off, since I was 13. Working at Camberwell market, doing my best to ignore customers, the little Goth girl that I was. Thinking it was cool to live in black, as soon as I could get rid of my deliberately tattered school uniform. And coffee, dark and minimalist, was the only accessory I needed.
Despite working at my father's bookstall at the market, I hadn't yet discovered Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath. I partially subverted cliche by combining a fondness for Jean Cocteau and Francoise Sagan with shoplifted Sweet High Novels. The latter is a terribly shaming admission on many levels.
I'm a little prouder of the tarot story, one of many of the interesting things that happened over the five years I worked at Camberwell Market.
As soon as I hit my teens, I devleloped a curiosity for the arcane, which my atheist parents encouraged. I read whatever I could find: Castaneda's "The Teachings of Don Juan", Linda Goodman's Sun Signs, and many books about astrology, numerology and palmistry - shallow or otherwise.
I was so hungry for something to make sense, I guess, but I didn't make sense of any of it at the same time. Until I was around 20, I only had a very tenuous sense of self, and astrology helped fill in the gaps. I am a good example of my sun sign, Gemini, and I often wonder if all that reading influenced me away from who I was. Persona-wise, yes. But I am essentially still the same person I was when I was six years old, before I got worried about the world.
My introduction to tarot was an example of a significant encounter with a stranger. You know, how you discover a new concept or learn to forgive your worst enemy after a random conversation with an oddly wise street sweeper.
My father, who ran the Camberwell Market book stall, came back from his brunch break with a tarot book for me, "78 Degrees of Wisdom" by Rachel Pollack. "It was only 50 cents," he said, the woman was surprised that someone so young would be curious about tarot". Half an hour later she came to the stall. I briefly remember that she was plump and tall, with dark, longish wavy hair, wearing burgundy velvet. In hindsight, she looked very "tarot". She had olive skin and alive dark eyes and she carried her tarot cards wrapped in wine-coloured silk.
"I've been looking for someone to give these cards to," she said.
"Why?"
"Because you must be given your tarot cards, you mustn't buy them yourself." I was surprised at this. Although I was interested in tarot, I knew nothing about it.
"You must keep them on the silk," she told me, as I unwrapped the Rider-Waite deck. "Otherwise you'll lose the energy."
And it's true for me; the only reason why tarot works is that you build up energy through meditating on the cards. The ancient symbols are a wonderful conduit to naturalistic meditation, and each of the 78 scenarios capture an essential aspect of life. We can learn so much from them, as humans can from myths, psychology and other disciplines which explore life through archetypal encounters.
I want to thank that anonymous woman. Not only did she introduce me to a wonderful tool for self-development and creativity, her kindness helped me learn to be generous myself.
For more information about the tarot, check out a review of the tarot books I learned to read from: 78 Degrees of Wisdom (Books 1 and 2), by Rachel Pollack at http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/books/78-degrees-of-wisdom/
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