March 26 - 5 of Cups

The five of cups, HP Lovecraft. Tentacles and strange wisps of smoke encircle the quote: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” from The Call of Cthulhu, 1926.

One of the most interesting cards to me. A gloomy card representing pessimism and lost opportunities. And here it is the arch-pessimist HP Lovecraft.

Obviously I love several famous pessimists, most notably Adorno, and find it an interesting perspective within a culture where the expectation is that making a claim is to affirm. It can be cutting in the face of a lot of simplistic tech hype and optimism to simply refuse, to puncture all their inflated claims.

But I also find HP Lovecraft's particular strain of pessimism to be a sort of self-centered and childish one. Particular analysts whose work I find a bit silly where it isn't outright regressive seem to love this particular quote (while I, for one, find the conditioned suggestibility that seems to accompany these types to be a far bigger risk than knowledge or information itself), and while Lovecraft as an author seemed to be able to stumble on an occasional interesting image in an ocean of kludge, successors with a smidgen of sensibility have been able to do more interesting stuff with his work.

So this card is kind of a warning to me, that pessimism can become just as facile and serve unexamined ends as optimism. I started doing these tarot draws out of a desire to evaluate my relationship to technology, not to pile up justifications to abandon it-- in that case why not just drop it? The easy initial reaction, whether positive or negative, is just that... reaction. And Pamela Colman Smith gave us two cups still standing in addition to the three that were spilled...