Art Rosengarten in Tarology...

1
tongue exercise:

1.

L F L
L B T L R
L P NC S
L M P R R
MP R TR S
L P P
L M R
L CH R R
ST C
L RM T
L R D F RT N
F RC
L P ND

T MP R NC
L D BL
L M S N D
L T LL
L L N
L S L L
L G M N T
L M MD


2.
el ef el
el bee tee el ar
el pee encee ess
el em pee ar ar
empee ar teear ess
el pee pee
el em ar
el ceeaitch ar ar
esstee cee
el arem tee
el ar dee ef artee en
ef arcee
el pee endee

tee empee ar encee
el dee beeel
el em ess en dee
el tee elel
el el en
el ess el el
el ge em en tee
el em emdee



la conspiration alphabétique (Appendix)
(This appendix is brought to you with limited commercial interruptions by the word ‘befuddlement’)


Those who already have a husband, wife, or partner (and won’t surrender to the temptation of shuffling the deck again), could apply our table of correspondences to the name of a significant other. The resulting card-sequence will accurately predict an imaginary fate for that relationship. The ‘pataphysical nature of the tarot-as-machine cannot be overlooked, for it allow us to make all kinds of predictions as if reality* were supposed to mirror the imaginary solutions we propose. Even so, it would be important to note that every single idea posed to us by the tarot gets automatically disclaimed by the tarot's artificial nature. The tarot is not 'reality', but an alternative to reality. It doesn't stands beyond that what is real, but asides of what is real (slightly to the right, we suspect). It will be of foremost importance to keep in mind that, by telling a future 'as if', instead of telling a future 'as is', the tarot always disclaims itself.


(befuddlement = bed-melted fun)

Translating a sequence of cards into a word may seem limited or limiting, but turning the procedure the other way around offers limitless possibilities. Any word can be translated into a sequence of cards, and therefore, any word can be expanded into many other words. If we understand poetry as the realm where language is re-created, we will see the tarot as the ultimate poetical machine, for it allows us to operate outside the frontier of language by decomposing words into images, so the semantic field of our original words get expanded by absorbing the semantic fields of all the words included in these images, once we translate the images back to language. As Italo Calvino rightly wrote: "the most artificial of mechanisms is capable of awakening in us the most secret and unexpected poetic demons".

For example, the proposed methodology would expand the word LOVE into this card sequence:

(L) Lermite + (O) Ace de Batons + (V) La Maison Dieu + (E) Ace de Spees = A lonely man, stuck on the memory of his past, is offered a blazing branch that destroys his rational boundaries, giving him a new will to live.


(befuddlement = feet blend mud)

A tarologist searches for that anomaly where chaos makes perfect sense. The aim of our mechanistic methodologies would be to provide viable alternatives to what Mallarmé called “spiritual anarchy” and we know as ‘inspiration’. By denying inspiration -illustrated in this case as the serendipitous calling of Love- and by substituting it by a whole new set of constrains, we hope to arrive at the same results chance would produce-in this case, a "happy ever after" marriage- by feasible means. Even so, it must be clear that finding love is just a secondary application for this poetic device.


(This appendix was brought to you with limited commercial interruptions by the word ‘befuddlement’. Let us know if these commercials were useful to you)




e. e. new york, 2010




* In order to get the most accurate perspective, it would be useful to understand reality as "everything else but me". This makes more likely for the tarot-as-a-dream to overlap reality-as-a-dream.



tarology updated:

a conversation with Art Rosengarten
(http://tarology.wordpress.com/2010/08/1 ... sengarten/)
What’s honeymoon salad? Lettuce alone
Don’t look now, mayonnaise is dressing!