on Tarot Knights

from the Bohemian Gothic Tarot: “A charming, energetic but somewhat feckless man (or boyish woman).  A man or woman of immense charisma, but who lacks commitment.   Emigration, making a major domestic or job move.”

darker or more hidden meaning: “Someone who loves them and leaves them.  A charming manipulator, particularly of the emotions of the opposite sex.”

“She walks in beauty, like the night

   Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

   Meet in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellowed to that tender light

   Which heaven to gaudy day denies.”- from Lord Byron’s, She Walks in Beauty

from the Bohemian Gothic Tarot:  “A creative, sensitive person.  An ‘arty’ type who can be quite impractical.  A great lover who tends to idealize the object of his (or her) affections.  An enthusiastic advocate for all creative and artistic endeavors.”

darker or more hidden meaning:  “A creative person whose energy is sometimes wasted in conflict and fighting.  A tendency to rush into things based on emotion rather than rationale.”

 –  Gabriel Rossetti’s, Beata Beatrix.  Painting of the character of Beatrice from Dante’s Inferno, with the memories of his deceased wife, Elisabeth Siddal, serving as the model.

from the Bohemian Gothic Tarot: “A fighter, who can be a great friend but an implacable enemy. An impetuous person who tends to leap right into things.  A leader with great energy and intelligence.”

darker or more shadow meaning: “A person who has to get his own way.  A person who abuses others.  Using intelligence to dominate and take control.”

“When you see a river, you must follow it to its source, no matter the perils, no matter those comrades that fall along the way. You must know how things work. You must unlock.” – Sir Malcom from Penny Dreadful

from the Bohemian Gothic Tarot: “Following a routine dutifully.  Reliable and trustworthy, but lacking in imagination.”

darker or more hidden meaning: “Obsessive compulsive disorder.  Feeling stuck, unable to move on.   Never losing your head, always being predictable and rather dull.”

 “Whatever happened to Lestat I do not know. I go on, night after night. I feed on those who cross my path. But all my passion went with her golden hair. I’m a spirit of preternatural flesh. Detached. Unchangeable. Empty.”- Louis from Anne Rice’s, Interview With the Vampire

Bohemian Gothic Tarot: Nine of Swords: Nightmares and Visions

“Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer–both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.” ― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exists and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.” ― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

As I continue my study of The Bohemian Gothic Tarot deck, it occured to me that it would make sense to discuss the cards in some chronological order.  However, since I’m not at all a linear thinker, that idea was quickly eschewed in favor of a more  instinctive bent. Hence, I’ll just be writing about whichever card strikes my fancy. And on this new moon, it is:

Nine of  Swords

keyowrds: Nightmares. Visions.  Terrors of the mind.   Delusions. Phobias and hysteria.   Fear of going mad.

Brings to my mind the works of Poe and Jackson. The artistic horrors of Bava and Argento.

Reflections on the card: While certainly most would consider this a negative card (and in many aspects it is), it also invokes in me a singular excitement. No doubt  because dreams and nightmares often fuel my own stories.

“I delight in what I fear,” Shirley Jackson once said.  Her Eleanor vance could have posed for this card.

We all have fears.  They can control us, or we can turn them into our own works of art.

Alexander Scriabin’s Black Mass (Piano Sonata no. 9)

Quotes from Horror Greats: Clive Barker

“Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred. ”- Clive Barker

“Be regular and orderly in your life, that you may be violent and original in your work.” ― Clive Barker

“Welcome to the worst nightmare of all, reality!”― Clive Barker

“Gather experience… Look at what you should not look at. A feeling of anxiety is the sure and certain evidence that you should do this.”
― Clive Barker

“At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn’t there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them.” ― Clive Barker

“Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs” ― Clive Barker

“I don’t like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody’s dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .”― Clive Barker

“The whole point about vision is that it’s very individual, it’s very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts – the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer’s response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer’s condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody’s. Otherwise it’s just ink.”― Clive Barker

“Keep it simple. Trust your imagination. Discover what is unique about your imagination. Don’t simply read a story and copy it.
I go into myself. Then I transcribe what visions I have. If those ideas are original, and you are devoted, you will go far.” ― Clive Barker

“Don’t bury personal obsessions. Capitalize on them. “The connection between personal obsession and the work you do is the most important thing.”

— Be yourself. “Singularity is what you need.”

— Avoid self-censorship: “We are very self-critical in a way that can be very destructive. In our culture there are voices in our head which have taught us to say, `Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’ Don’t ever think about anybody peering over your shoulder.”

— Don’t be afraid to show off, even if you think, “I’m very close to making a complete fool of myself.”

— Don’t be afraid to entertain. “I want to entertain. I don’t want to lose people. I feel responsible as I write to give people the best time I can.”

— “Love your failures” instead of beating yourself up over them.

— “Learn to love the process” of writing.

— Just do it. Barker likes something director Stanley Kubrick said: “If you want to make a film, pick up a camera.― Clive Barker

“My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.”
― Clive Barker

“I really believe that there is an enormous appetite amongst readers for an originality of vision. In other words, be true to your own dreams and there will always be people who want to hear them.” ― Clive Barker

“I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it’s the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the fire blaze on the page / screen is the stuff of your own being. An artist consumes his or herself in the act of making art. I can feel that consumption even now, sitting here at my desk at the end of a working day. In order to generate the ideas that I have set on the page for the last 10 or 11 hours I have burned the fuel of my own history. This is, obviously a double-edged sword. In order to give, the artist must take from himself. That’s the deal. And it’s very important to me that the work I do is the best I can make it, because I know what is being burned up to create. As the villain of Sacrament says: “living & dying, we feed the fire.”― Clive Barker

“I’m an inclusionist. I’ve always divided up (very, very broadly, I admit) the artistic instincts into the inclusionist and the exclusionist. The exclusionist is Raccine. The inclusionist is Shakespeare. I’ve always felt like I’d prefer to throw 45 things into the pot and hope that maybe 36 of them will taste good. You may choke on 9 of them. I’d rather do that than only have half that number of elements and each one perfect. That’s because I know that people choke on different things…. I think that when I was a kid, the experience of things, the experience of just finding words for things, of finding somebody else’s world and being able to leap into it and, like any world, you pick up the geography instantly. You expected the thing to unfold, you expected there to be valleys that upon entering that world you were barely aware of. For me a novel, particularly a large novel, one you put down at the end and think, ‘Hell, that was interesting. I’m not sure I understood Chapters X, Y and Z, but maybe next time I read it or talk to someone about it, I will’… that’s a very different experience to the immaculately formed, beautifully honed, finished ‘art’ thing.” ― Clive Barker

“Even today I keep a Dream Journal. It’s whatever’s going on in my subconscious, or things from dreams or even interesting items that pop into my head. I have thousands of pages of notes which I hope someday will turn into stories, or movies…Being on the road gives me breathing time and the opportunity to think about what to do next. In fact right before I came down for lunch today, I was writing down notes about my feelings. Things that I need to do to keep motivated. I need to be motivated if I am to going to devote fifteen months to writing another book. And I couldn’t write a book just because it’s a commercial idea. I need to have a compelling reason.”― Clive Barker

“People often ask me what advice I have for writers, and I reply that the most important responsibility I believe a writer has is to his or her personal truth. Don’t be misled by the best seller lists. Just do what feels true to you. Speak your heart, however strange or revelatory it is. Don’t be ashamed of how your imagination works. What a reader wants to discover in a book is what you hold uniquely in your head.”I think making stories which touch people deeply is always hard. I’ve been writing plays and books for 20 years and I still go to my desk every morning with a mixture of excitement and dread.”― Clive Barker

“By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don’t feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..?”
― Clive Barker

“Make your own worlds. Make your own laws. Make your own creations, your own star systems. Don’t feel answerable to anyone, or as though you have to create after some preordained model. You don’t have to write like myself, or King or Anne Rice: be yourself. Nothing is more wonderful than discovering a new voice, particularly if it happens to be your own.”
― Clive Barker

“I’m constantly trying to make what Stephen King called head movies or skull movies: things should be playing out on the inside of your eyes, if you will, without you having to think about me as an author being present.
I have no interest in being present, in intervening between you and the work. My job is to be as invisible as possible. My job is to say, ‘Hey, I wrote this book and I’m on the cover, bye bye!’
The story should have its own momentum; it should make its own way. I have no patience for that showy kind of writing, which is all about how clever the writer is. Postmodern stuff just leaves me totally cold. I’m much more interested in being drawn into a book, and I want to create the kind of writing which hopefully makes you turn and turn the pages.”― Clive Barker

“So you can’t please all the people all the time. All you can do is what pleases you, and hope that it pleases other people.
I love my readers, and I respect my readers, but I’m not going to simplify or echo myself, copy myself, just so the sales will be better.”― Clive Barker

“Every day is a writing day. I get to my desk between 8 and 8:30 in the morning and then work through until 6pm, and then normally I’ll take up whatever will be happening in the evening, usually painting or photography.

I do about four drafts total. I do handwritten drafts because I don’t type and I have no wish to type. I mean, I know how to type, but I have no interest in putting the words down that way.
Maybe that’s because I’m an artist and because I’ve always used a pen and so there’s a sort of natural feel to it.

I don’t know how familiar you are with Blake’s illuminated texts, but you know very often he’ll literally make words flower. It’s really this glorious thing in bringing words and pictures into the same place, the same space.”
― Clive Barker

“I want to be remembered as an imaginer, someone who used his imagination as a way to journey beyond the limits of self, beyond the limits of flesh and blood, beyond the limits of even perhaps life itself, in order to discover some sense of order in what appears to be a disordered universe. I’m using my imagination to find meaning, both for myself and, I hope, for my readers.”-Clive Barker”