The thread of Tarot Blanco

Explanation of the novella Tarot Blanco in a literary context

Feb 10, 2025

It may at first appear that the random collection of short stories is herded together only by the cards of the major arcana. And it seemed that it could the that way when I first started, but there was an underlying connection that just needed to be shaped into a larger picture, at least some of which I am describing now.

The first obvious connection is by the cards of the tarot deck. I will say quite straightforwardly that I do not believe in the tarot in any sense of prediction but it was useful as a device and a nomenclature to tell stories which when added up made for a more unified whole than it at first appeared.

This is why “Death” was the first story because the outbreak of the Black Death is more than just a random disastrous occurrence of a plague, but the start of the modern world. It started with a bang. And the figure which is at the heart of the story, the protagonist if you will, is looking for signs of the impending death of one of the citizens. His opposite number, the apprentice, is still in the mode of superstition and religion. This is why he thought he saw bones.

But really it was the start of the power-driven economy: there were two view people left to manage the society on every level. At first, this trundled along but very quickly, within 100 years in places like Renaissance Italy and the bustling classes of northern Europe, there were things afoot that would make it possible to run society with a much smaller number of people: the input and on the output side. While wind and water had always been with humanity from time immemorial, the idea that one could replace manpower and horsepower with the motion of gears driven by some outside force became practically important.

Within 150 years the New World was rediscovered, the printing press replaced calligraphy, and the transactions associated with buying and selling became more and more important. And crucially, other things popped up as well including clearing out the land from the Netherlands, which was based on wind power. And this is all in slice one.

But this represents a larger literary picture as well: the Spring of a Down is also of the conceit that individual stories create a larger story of a particular time. This means that Spring of a Down and Tarot Blanco, our the first two parts of a triptych, but I do not know what the third part is: “It’s a mystery.”

But diving into the structure of a single slice, there are certain rules that must be defined for it to have structure. These structures are self-imposed and self-defined, and thus other slices from other authors will have different ones for their own purposes.

The first is that each slice must have a date, though of course there will be remembrances of other times which the main character will look back to. Then there is a short fragment of poetry whose first letters spell out something to do with the slice: a main character or some other point. Within that there must be a reference to other points in the pros which link back: that is the poetry encompasses the unity of the prose in very specific ways. The symbology of the terror attack is also interleaved through the prose: especially at the end where the symbology mimics the reality of the prose.

But also part of the subtext is the reality of the situation: for example, the map of London in 1349 is essential to understanding the steps of the characters. The new economic geography of Krugman is important in that there is this long wait that could have been done by anyone except that the very subject was misunderstood and Krugman grabbed it and finally saw there was an equation that mimicked the external agrarian/internal industry. That means that there is a verisimilitude between the literary text and the documented reality in a number of ways. This, not the symbology of the major arcana is important.

Finally, there is an order to all of the major arcana, since I am not mimicking all of the transduction’s of the major arcana, there is no reverse meaning for example, the order is a device. But it also means that different arcana have residences, for example, the man and the woman of Devil and Lovers. Of course, there are personal observations as well as public ones that interleaved between the various arcana: for example the Bruckner boot and the inflationary model. There is also literary references throughout the starting of a war and the collapse of the constitutional order of the United States.

That is why I would recommend that you start from the prologue of Spring of a Down all the way to the end of Tarot Blanco, but realize there is a third part of the triptych yet to come. In the meantime, I may well put together a summary of summaries of my literary works.

Spring of a Down

6 Вечер накануне Ивана Купала

7 се перяха небесните тайни

8 קטרילבקה קידמה

9 Собор

10 І в дорогу далеку ти мене на зорі проводжала