Tarot: Temperance

Fasting

I drew Temperance together with The Tower—an odd combination, it seemed. I’ve always had a difficult time interpreting this particular card, but in the moment, I took it to mean something like “fasting”. The word was at that point associated for me with something like forbidding oneself from indulging in any kind of pleasurable activity, perhaps because of its association with the so-called “temperance movement”, whose naming is ironic since total abstinence is as far from temperance as total indulgence.

The fasting did not go well: for the first few of days, I ate only a small meal each day. By day three or four, I was exhausted and had lost my appetite completely. I stopped eating almost entirely. Over the following days, I became more and more tired, nauseous, and started getting an odd vertigo sensation. I could barely think and couldn’t get anything done. My throat was so dry that I could barely swallow—actually this was the worst part, even though it doesn’t sound so bad. Amazingly, until this point, I had basically forgotten that I wasn’t eating anything. I had noticed that I was feeling much worse, but I interpreted it as having caught some kind of infectious illness.

After unsuccessfully trying to treat my “illness” with over-the-counter medication, it finally occurred to me that this fasting thing may not have been such a good idea, and I slowly started forcing myself to eat real food again, and, indeed, recovered from the illness. This whole endeavor ended up mostly being a useful lesson in what the virtue of temperance is not. (In retrospect, if I were to interpret the card with respect to eating habits, the more fitting interpretation it is not as a strict fasting schedule, but more like taking small, frequent meals instead of “saving up” for one large meal near the end of the day. An irregular eating schedule.)

Harmonic composition

The most basic sense of the word “temperance” is something like “proper mixture”—if something is temperate, then it is composed of different parts in harmonic ratios. There needn’t be any connotation of reduction, scaling back or showing restraint. Rather, the question is one of good taste in composition. Changes are made by increasing the proportion of one substance and decreasing the proportion of the others—increase and decrease are two sides of the same coin.

Loosening fixation

I wonder how true this is of others—But for me, I structure my life according to topics; when I am at a given τόπος, everything that I think and do pertains to it it some way. This is not something that I do intentionally. Sometimes, when such a topic has been fixed, I will, in a sense, “want” to do or think something outside of it. But I can’t. I’m stuck. If I try anyway, it feels wrong. Some time later, I move on and forget all about it.

There is something disconcerting that I have noticed about this phenomenon: The topics tend to come and go in cycles. Why disconcerting? Because I can’t control what I think about, or—especially—how I think what I think. And it’s not like I learn anything from these cycles (that I know of). It just comes, and then I’m stuck with it until it’s gone; then I forget about it, and months, sometimes years later, the same thing comes back. So far, this has been my whole life.

How does one escape these fixations? Well, I’m not the right person to ask. But whatever it is, it might rightly be called “temperance”, and the card will point towards it. Smith’s illustration shows an angel—that is, a messenger god, one who moves freely back and forth between humans and gods—pouring water between two cups. When something dry is soaked in the right substance, it loosens up and becomes malleable again. Which substance, then, is depicted here? Where does the water come from? Perhaps the same Ocean that dreams come from.

The psychosomatic κρητήρ

(WIP)

Etymology

It comes from Latin, and in fact does have a relationship with the similar-sounding words related to time (e.g. temporal). The connection is most proximately that time can be divvied up into periods, especially in the sense of “the right time” (Greek καιρός); something temperate is likewise composed of its parts in the right way.1

The term is the conventional translation of Greek σωφροσύνη. The meaning of this term is the subject of Plato’s Charmides.

Writing

Temperance is a writer’s virtue, since writing is first and foremost a mediating activity, partaking in both the natural and the psychic or divine. It is governed by Hermes and Thoth, who also guide the soul between the realms of the dead and the living.2 Writing is on the one hand wholly human, and harshly non-human. It is powerful, and its power is undirected—in other words, writing as such is perfectly neutral; it doesn’t tend towards anything.3

Being able to let go of good ideas that don’t belong right here: I keep getting stuck on the details, trying to keep every little thing. If it’s important, it will come back on its own—there’s no need to hold onto it by force. Inclusion is not a virtue. Writing something that is not yet ready to be written can kill it. Instead, make space for whatever it is, and let it come back on its own; eventually, it will build a nest there, and when it’s ready, it will write itself.

Sitting down to write, I often find myself stunned. If I write anything, I will be missing out on so much more than what I capture. By not writing, at least the ideas will still live on out there. As though by writing one thing down, I’d have to give up something else, whereas by not writing, I can have both. Then, I’ll say to myself that I “can’t think of anything to write about”. But that’s not right. Though—I think the feeling is not entirely false: By writing something down, one really does take it away from where it used to be. Therefore, some things must be protected from being written about. The perversion is in thinking that it is writing about it that protects it and that one must write down the most important things. As when reading, what we need is to write with a light poise—“like when you look”. Then nothing will be damaged, nor anything lost to exclusion.

  1. Cf. tempero (Wiktionary) ↩
  2. See Death is Just Around the Corner, episodes 189–192 on the relationship between death and writing. ↩
  3. For more on the divinely neutral, see Lispector’s work, especially The Passion According to G. H. ↩