Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, Knight of Swords by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. Behind the card is a window, a wood floor and a snake plant in a terra cotta pot. In the image, a knight is armored and charging forward on a gray horse with his sword out. There are jagged clouds. The horse is looking to the side as if to question the knight’s direction; it is a reminder of the horse’s agency.
Sometime last year, I came across a paper published in 2010 that suggested humans have a largely unconscious drive to maintain meaning, and will “automatically defend against” any threats to it. I’ve thought of it a lot, since.
I think about my love for stories, for the swords suit in Tarot, and the grail story with all its sharp weapons. The meanings we make are clashing all the time against the meanings of others. It’s one the most exciting things about life, and it can also be one of the ugliest.
In a common confrontation, for instance, you’re going about your life and maybe doing just fine with the meanings you have and your stories. Suddenly the spear of the other pokes in and it pierces the valley between you. It exclaims: Hey! see it my way!
Of course, this can unfold in all sorts of ways. The merging of horizons can be expansive, illuminating, and exciting. It can also be painful, traumatic and unspeakably violent.
I journal a lot, and I try to pay attention to what stories and meanings I fixate on. I’ve had the idea lately to go through the last six months or so, and highlight recurrent themes—the words that I say over and again, the phrases.
In my work with other people, I’m doing something similar. I’ve become somewhat of a scribe. I take tons of notes, their words only, a record. Each week, we go back to the last week’s pages. This helps us to notice ongoing themes and meanings, which can otherwise be easy to miss.
When someone’s saying something that it’s clear they’ve said a hundred times elsewhere, there is a palpable sense that if we intend to challenge it we should do so with care.
But there’s a difference between threatening meaning and thickening meaning. I’m not trying to take anything away from anyone, including myself. I don’t believe that telling the same story over and over, or returning to something again and again uniformly signals a desire to stay the same. Sometimes I repeat myself because I haven’t been adequately heard. In this way, repetition can be an act of faith, that something will be seen that was not seen before.
These last two weeks I’ve been fixated on a piece of a story that isn’t mine; a scene in Perceval where he’s sitting on his horse in a trance, staring at bloodied snow and dreaming of his lover.
There’s an energy about this scene that I feel and know well because there are things in my life that do something similar to me. Something happens, and I go somewhere else. And once I’m in that place, it can be quite tough to get through to me.
Maybe it happens to you, sometimes, too, or to someone you love. It’s getting fixated on something that feels absolutely, indisputably real and true, to the point that one cannot see beyond it.
In Perceval’s case, he was fixated on something pleasant, images of the woman he loved. For me it’s sometimes that I’m convinced I’m not safe, positive that I’m right, certain I’m bad or a raucous combination of the three.
One of the big questions in situations like this is what it would take to open up to something other than the thing one is fixated upon, for the sake of arriving to an understanding that’s more vital, more multi-storied, and ideally, more useful.
So I was thinking about this and revisiting Perceval’s trance scene and I was reading more closely than I have in the past because, again, I’m after thickness.