Why don't I like modern deck of cards and wandering.
In my vast collection of tarots, put together from second-hand Vinted sales, interesting indies and various mass-markets alike, one particular category seems to be missing.
Tarots which depict modern life.
This is not exactly, true in a strictest sense. There is my beloved New Choice Marseille, which has modern clothes, but remains almost frozen in time, just people with updated dresses. Other than that, Supernova tarot is full of 20th century, bravado and camp. And yet, none of them ping against this category.
As person who collects queer decks, even they are RWS, this decision to exclude modern decks seem strange. My negative reaction to it baffled even me. There are many queer decks which use this modern imagery which I at least stopped at - Gay Marseille comes to mind as the clearest example of a beautiful deck I simply cannot use.
At first I chalked up my distaste to the fact I myself don't live in this life. I am stuck in rural nothing-place, my collage days behind me. There is nothing about the modern life that feels transferrable in a workable way. This thread of reasoning was one more strike against me - oh, stupid Aurel, clinging to fantasy or past, refusing to face the present! The common folk of today! Oh he'd rather stare at kings and angels and skeletons.
To kick my self-hatred in the curb a bit, this is only a very small bit of a reason. To explain. I need to use the example of common Marseille Tower and the Tower from Gay Marseille.
The Tower, in Marseille Tarot is simply that, a tower crumbled to bits. Old and medieval. Decayed. Destroyed by ambigous cloud or storm - God's wrath, an ever present threat in the 18th century, or a simple force of nature. It was possibly based on a specific story or allegory, most likely of biblical origin.
In Gay Marseille, the Tower is similar, but it depicts Stonewall instead, fully with a policeman thrown out and falling like those poor figures in the decks of old.
And I think, this is my problem. It's this. Because while the old image CAN suggest Stonewall, if question and implications go that way, and it can suggest something of similar magnitude, Stonewall to me only suggests Stonewall. And how can I look at the face of Martha Jones and see corruption, decay, orgasm (I blame Jodorowsky for this one), imprisonment, freedom etc.?
The age of the images work in the favour of how I work. Forgetting the stories allows these images to be blended, to become more than just the suggestion of historical event. It allows to become a language of symbols. Modern events have no such luxury. They fill the whole body of work with their present-ness, their impact still hitting our skin like a whip. Another example was a deck whose name I don't recall, where Justice was protestors against oil companies.
How can you see balance in that? Or blindness? When I read I look at patterns similarities, etc. The modern imagery makes for a crude club. When I squint at the old, or ambigous, I see so much. Perhaps this is a problem with my perception.
Another problem is, I don't really read for others. I don't read for stuff like love between people NOW, work problems NOW, family arguments NOW. This makes any deck that promises itself to be relevant and modern a capricious beast that insists on its own existence. Yes, you do need me, something that turns these dusted off symbols into shiny modern machinery. But I don't need a Porsche - horse is fine enough for me. Thanks.