The Roaring of Things (A Guest Essay from Sam Kriss)

Adventures in the Tarot

Dear Readers, I ultimately decided against featuring regular guest contributors in this space, in part as a result of your input following my “survey” some weeks ago. But I must make an exception for the London-based writer Sam Kriss, and this for two reasons. First, I confess I can’t help but think that some considerable cachet will flow my way from associating myself with such a distinctive and daring voice as his. Sam writes with his whole being, so fully that sometimes I wonder how he even survives the process of transferring his words out of him and into the world. Yet he keeps doing it. I first read Sam in 2016, when he published a remarkable piece on Silicon Valley apocalypticism in The Atlantic. It was the first time I’d ever considered the fashionable metaphysical speculations of the tech world as a sort of “neo-Gnosticism”. That insight never left my mind, and it has informed much of what I myself have written since, not least in my most recent book. Second, and less selfishly, Sam has recently started a Substack of his own, Numb at the Lodge (if you don’t know that’s a reference to a song from The Fall, well, you’ve got some remedial listening to do), and I want to make sure my readers know about it and subscribe to it. I am your beneficent human algorithm and you must trust me when I give you this “You May Also Like” recommendation. Subscribe to Sam’s Substack!

Sam is writing for us today about tarot — something I’ve never dabbled in, and for a long time would have thought I would want to hold at a considerable distance from myself. But learning is really just widening. Back when I was still writing for the New York Times’s “Stone” section, I was asked to contribute a few words for a forum on the occasion of the death of Michael Dummett. I couldn’t think of much to say, and so began to look into the very well-regarded philosopher’s own interest in tarot, about which he even wrote a book. It is only then that I learned that there are in fact “two tarots”, as Sam also notes — one a divinatory practice like chiromancy, astragalomancy and all those other arts, and the other a trick-taking game like whist or pinochle. Dummett always insisted he cared only about the game, while Sam primarily cares about the ritual practice by which we can sometimes convince ourselves we are catching glimpses of the future — though he always maintains an equilibrating ability to step back and to doubt, and with a range of references so vast as to call to mind Gershom Scholem’s work on the Kabbalah, which, as he explained to Walter Benjamin at one point, was, of necessity in our secular age, a sort of mysticism sublimated through the rigours of scholarship. What has struck me for a while now, in any event, is how untenable the sharp distinction that Dummett wants to maintain really is in the end. The boundary between game and augury is ever porous, and wherever you’ve got a good athlete or gamesperson you’ve almost certainly got someone inhabiting a world of wild superstitions and tics on which the fate of at least his or her world appears to depend. The reasons for this dual nature of games are surely part of the deep anthropological bedrock of what we are. With Sam, anyone who wants to know what we are should be prepared to say, pace Leibniz: “Je ne méprise rien, ni même les arts divinatoires.” —JEHS

When I was younger, a friend and I had a tradition: wherever we went, whichever city we ended up in, we would have our Tarot read. For a while we lived halfway across the world from each other, so we tended to meet up in unfamiliar places. In Prague we had our Tarot read in a Gypsy wagon. In Tokyo we had our Tarot read by an AI waterfall in a holographic forest. In New Orleans we had our Tarot read by a Santería practitioner who incorporated the knuckle bones of a pig into the rite. He told my friend that she was represented by the orisha Iansá, a chaotic female spirit of storms and lightning and madness and change. He told me that I was basically a decent guy but I needed to stop posturing so much. I didn’t like that reading. I wanted to be a spirit of chaos too.