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This week I dipped into philosopher Gillian Rose’s memoir Love’s Work again, in which she makes the incredible statement that “there is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.” Rose wrote Love’s Work after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which she later died from. In it, she describes the immense satisfaction of writing, “that mix of discipline and miracle.” Writing, she says, “leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control.”
Writing does satisfy, but for Rose it is no substitute for “the joy and the agony of loving.” A radical take for a feminist philosopher, perhaps, she asserts the great importance of romantic love. She even goes so far as to say that to lose the desires and glories and surprises of loving and being loved is “the greatest loss, a loss for which there is no consolation.” Anticipating critique, she doubles down: “The more innocent I sound, the more enraged and invested I am.”
I don’t think Rose meant to say that romantic love is the be-all, end-all. I think she wanted love to be given its due for the force that it is. The potential for unprecedented pain that we subject ourselves to when we love must be acknowledged, because as mythologist Joseph Campbell has said “the pain of love is not the other kind of pain, it is the pain of life1.”
I take Campbell’s statement to mean that in romantic love we come into contact with something that’s true of interpersonal relations more broadly, which is that, as Rose writes, “in personal life people have absolute power over each other…” Whereas in professional settings there are constructs and contracts through which we lay out and describe our modes of relating, this is just not the case elsewhere, argues Rose.
“In personal life, regardless of any covenant, one party may initiate a unilateral and fundamental change in the terms of relating without renegotiating them, and further, refusing even to acknowledge the change…Yet each party, woman, man, the child in each, and their child, is absolute power as well as absolute vulnerability. You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself.”
In today’s meeting—which is the twelfth in a series of twenty-two sessions on the major arcana that began in the spring—we’ll be looking at the Justice card. This is the third round of these meetings and while I find all the major arcana to be pretty tricky I find this one especially so. I always find it helpful to revisit the entries on whatever card we’re exploring in the books that most influenced my understandings of tarot: Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom and Meditations on the Tarot.
On Justice, Rachel Pollack writes that “the psychic laws of justice, by which we advance according to our ability to understand the past, depends on seeing the truth about ourselves and about life.”
The anonymous author of Meditations couples the card with judgment—a concept that appears again later on in the sequence with the twentieth arcanum, and is often understood interchangeably with Justice in readings:
“It is the domain of judgment that the reality and truth of justice manifests itself. Because to pronounce judgment with respect to anything whatsoever amounts to an action having as its aim the finding of justice…All of us, in so far as we are thinking beings, are judges…”
Once I’ve grounded myself a bit in those texts, I try to bring in ideas from elsewhere that seem related. This week, I’ve been reading theologian Matthew Ichihashi-Potts’ chapter on accountability in his book Forgiveness, in which he retells Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. It is a tale about grief, memory, revenge, and the harrowing quest to recognize and accommodate2 unspeakable losses, which I’ve come to understand as central aspects of grieving.
The story is based on an Arthurian legend about a group of people who’ve been shrouded in a pandemic forgetfulness. They can’t remember recent or distant pasts, which creates lots of confusion and running around. But they’re aware of a shared sense of loss, and a sadness they can’t seem to shake.
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