A woman drinks her tea on a terrace in the city, a cat perched on the chair back beside her; above the roofs, a barque passes through the white light.

The everyday

reading the cards

The quay at Mélaïde, at the slack hour. Phil and I, legs hanging over the edge, watching who goes by.

“You see, there are people whose matter you know at first glance. Falna, over there, bringing in her flour: she burns with the to do better than yesterday. Orace, my necrolic professor, speaks of the dead with the tenderness of still water. And the old ferryman, the one who moors down below — he has the edge of air.”

“And me?” asks Phil.

“You, my brother, are patient and serene like the earth that lets the seeds germinate.”

The everyday is what plays out when you have kept a minor at the . has not come in; the stays level with the world. This is where almost the whole game happens, and it is made of the matter of the four suits.

◆ A scene of the everyday

Do not trust the word: the everyday is not the small. A scene can be descriptive and nothing else (a market at the slack hour, rain on a bridge, a tea going cold), and have no office but to put you somewhere. It can be light: two questions, three sentences, and you close it.

It can also be dense, tangled, harsh, with a negotiation turning sour, a farewell, a betrayal being prepared under the . Nothing prevents it, and nothing there will be any less strong for it. What makes the everyday is not the calm of what happens in it: it is that nothing is put at in it. You risk nothing there that you have named in advance; fate has not sat down across from you.

So play them as they come — spare when the day is spare, full when it overflows. Some of your best pages will come out of a scene in which nothing was happening.

◆ The four suits — the matter

You have already drawn cards: you have therefore met the suits without anyone explaining them. Here they are for real: not what they mean (that, you read freely), but what matter they are made of. This matter will serve you twice: to read a card, and to say how you act (part 5).

Hands pass a glowing staff above an open palm; embers rise into the night.

Wands — Fire. What cannot . Living wood, cut: the wand was a tree, it grows and it burns, sap and ash. The heat of a forge, the smell of smoke on a garment the next day, the second when the match catches. Fire has neither memory nor patience. It is wholly in the instant in which it consumes. In a body: the pulse rising, the hand that goes before the decision. When a Wand falls, something is pushing; it wants, it leaves, it overflows. There is no lukewarm Wand. In its light, the one who kindles others; in its shadow, the one who burns everything, his own people included.

Ace of Wands — Wands — the Ace, then the Page, the Knight, the Queen and the King.

Page of Wands — Wands — the Ace, then the Page, the Knight, the Queen and the King.

A pale cup filled with light, alone in the blue of the night; the figure one can be made out above its rim.

Cups — Water. What takes the shape of whatever holds it. Rain on a window, the weight of a full cup, mist, the glass of water set down by the bed at night. Water has no shape of its own: it is the cup that gives it one; a feeling with nobody to address it to is nothing, it is the that gives it form. And water turns: tide, rain, spring, it always comes back. What a Cup brings is rarely new: it is what rises again. In a body: the throat tightening, the warmth in the chest. It binds, or it drowns, and water finds the crack, and wears down the stone, not at a stroke, over time. In its light, the heart that unites and heals; in its shadow, the love that imprisons, the cup one drowns in.

A bare sword held up in the clouds; the blade catches the light, and the sky parts on either side of the edge.

Swords — Air. The line that separates. Steel, cold, a winter sky, breath made visible in freezing air, the sound of a blade being drawn. The sword is forged air: the edge is a line, and a line does only one thing: put on one side what was mingled. No duration: the instant of the cut, a before and an after. In a body: the sharp intake of breath, clarity, and the sleepless night. A Sword names, and to name is to separate: the true from the false, but also people from one another. The truth that frees and the word that wounds are the same card. In its light, the clear-sighted judge; in its shadow, intelligence in the service of a lie.

A disc engraved with a five-pointed star, set down in the half-light of a garden; coins gleam at its foot.

Pentacles — Earth. What remains. Stone, bread, the earth after rain, at the bottom of a pocket, a wooden handle worn by use. The pentacle is matter that people have worked and to which they have given a price: earth that is worth something. Seasons, years. Nothing that Earth carries arrives quickly, everything in it has already been arriving for a long time. In a body: tiredness, hunger, the warmth of a roof. It weighs and it holds. It is the ground beneath the other three: without it, Fire has nothing to burn, Water nowhere to run, Air nothing to separate. In its light, the builder, the foundation; in its shadow, the miser, the earth that smothers.

Ace of Pentacles — Pentacles — the same run.

Page of Pentacles — Pentacles — the same run.

And the fifth — fate. The four suits are matter; the major is not. It has no element, no time, no body. It is what crosses the four: the way out that did not exist a second before, the door in the bare wall. Where Fire burns and Earth holds, the major befalls: it is no longer the color of the world speaking, it is what weighs on it. (What it does, just below.)

◆ When a major falls in the everyday

A seated woman in a dark robe, an open book on her knees, before a pale disc that haloes her; to her right, a glass sphere on its column.

A major can fall mid-scene, on an ordinary draw. Where a minor answers a question then fades, a major does not answer: it names. A force, a face that will return, a turning point that commits what follows. The minor tints and passes; the major and remains.

So it is not questioned in the same way. Not “what is happening?”, but “who is there, and what do they want?”, for every major carries a desire. Do not look for its meaning in a table: pull it toward a wanting. The Tower wants to bring down what stands on falsehood; Death wants to carry off what has to end. If the fiction asks for it, it can crystallize into someone. A face, an you enter on the (parts 7 and 8).

Outside the opening, it does not bring fate in: fate has only that one door (part 3). It weighs, that is all. Play it large, without its putting fate on your hands. (What it does when you take it at the opening, and what fate commits: part 6.)

Wheel of Fortune — Five majors. Ask each of them what it wants.

Death — Five majors. Ask each of them what it wants.

◆ Draws for and draws against

Sometimes you know the thing is good, or that it is bad, and you only do not know which one: what this place offers, what a sleepless night is paid for with. Then draw a card and read it in that direction, for or against. It no longer says whether, it says what. And when the image resists — a Sun you have to make sinister — do not refuse it: take it from behind. The light that exposes, that blinds, that leaves nowhere to hide. The Sun is intact; it is you who took it by the other edge. If your gives every card a reversed meaning (most Rider-Waite-Smiths do), it will serve you here, and only here: it is a shortcut to the other slope of the image. Nothing is played upright or reversed on the table for all that: the card falls as it falls, and it is your reading, and it alone, that turns it over.

One condition, and it is not negotiable: the side must be true before the draw. If you still do not know which way the thing leans, this is not that draw, it is the coin or an action. Giving yourself the favorable side would be deciding the outcome and pretending to draw it.

I come out of the charterer’s office, my cargo stowed and his signature at the foot of the manifest. What this arrangement is going to cost me, I do not yet know; that it will cost me, that I know already.

The side is therefore true before the card falls — against. What remains is to know what.

Temperance — two cups, and the water passing from one to the other without a drop falling; one foot in the river, one foot on the bank. Upright: measure, patience, what mixes well and does not spill. I do not refuse the image, I take it from behind: what mixes dilutes. The charterer has tied my freight to his. My name sits next to his on the manifest, his routes become mine, and nothing I carry is quite mine any more. No threat, no debt: lukewarmness. Nothing will be taken from me, I will be mixed in — a little on every voyage, until the day I can no longer say what belongs to me.

Note what the major does here that a minor would not have done: it does not only say what it costs, it names: a slow mixing has entered this life, and it will stay in it. It opens no trial for all that: fate passes only through the opening. It weighs, and it goes to the standing page.