Unmortifying oneself

Offering for June 30, 2026

“Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair: a narrow escape into faith. It believes in a universal cause for delight, even though knowledge of the cause is always twitched away from under us…Somehow the characters have to unmortify themselves: to affirm life and assimilate death and persevere in joy…not by a vulnerable optimism but by a hard-won maturity of delight…” —Christopher Fry, “Comedy¹”

Dear Reader,

Thank you to so much to those who extended kind words and support after last week’s letter, in which I shared a bit about the reading and writing process that goes into these things and the confluence of needs and desires that have been shaping the project. Thank you to Mindy (of Read Once and Destroy) who reminded me of Roland Barthes, whose special manner of working and teaching has been an inspiration to me since his Neutral lectures came on my radar some years ago.

Reading others’ descriptions of how Barthes taught, it feels possible to work in a way that is rigorous, that honors the aesthetic beauty in the texts that one loves, that respects those who’ve come before, that is not overly precious about referencing and cross-referencing without expertise, that is driven by “no motor other than desire” and that aligns with the vow Barthes himself took, of “‘always placing a fantasy’ at the origin of his teaching.” Which I think was to say that the work must be and stay personal. As to the fantasy at the origin of my work I’m not sure. So that’ll be something to sit with.

This week I did a close(r) second reading of theologian Catherine Keller’s chapter on Job from her book Face of the Deep. I’ve been incorporating her “theology of becoming” into the series of talks that I give on the major arcana twice yearly since I first read the book two summers ago. I offer that the Magician, as archetypal creator, can be considered alongside Keller’s Creator, who makes the world not from nothing but out of the deep. From there, we are lured into the High Priestess’ primordial waters, who stands for potential. Not only what we desire, but the ever-present possibility that our creations will go awry despite our best efforts. This past Sunday, we revisited Face of the Deep alongside the tenth arcanum: Wheel of Fortune.

I’ve been minding my process in hopes that I might discern where I’m headed, and particularly how iterative my work is. I look at the major arcana again and again in the same order, and I read and re-read Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom and Anonymous’ Meditations on the Tarot each time. The thing I like about these repetitions is that it never feels like a closed circle. There’s always an opening, a spiral that swirls all on its own because change is constant. Even something as static as a text has a life of its own, but that life is lived by being looked at. This is also one of the themes of the Wheel, which Anonymous writes is the same “good news” of religion: The circle is open, there’s an entrance and exit, thing are added and subtracted, miracles do exist.

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So in this round of looking at Pollack and Anonymous’ interpretations, I’ve been noticing some of the overlaps in the questions they each seem to be asking and trying to address in their readings. I have been tempted numerous times to interpret the major arcana through the lens of grief, loss and mourning, but have settled on the broader lens of transformation which encompasses life experiences that involve both subtraction and addition. Losing, but also falling in love. Most of the cards will make a fool of you for trying to pick a side and settle, so I’ve learned to approach them with lenses as wide and hospitable to contradiction as they themselves are.