How do they (the cards) do that? The just man justices.

Gerard Manley Hopkins didn’t read tarot cards, but he read the living world. As a young boy at school, he could sometimes be found lying in the mud to look up at the underside of a blade of grass, at the dew on the underside of a blade of grass.

If you can do that, you don’t need cards.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” he wrote, in the year of his ordination as a Jesuit.

Charged. Electrically charged? Or is the world legally charged with looking after the grandeur of God?

Or maybe it’s both.

I’m writing to you all today because in my notes I found this quote: “…all the world is full of inscape, and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose” (Hopkins, 1873, from the Penguin edition of his works).

Inscape is a word Hopkins coined and I’ve only ever heard it used in the context of Hopkins’ poetry. It had to do with the uniqueness of each being, where being is used in the broadest sense, to encompass even sea foam.

Who are we turning to for advice when we pull cards from a tarot deck?

Again, Hopkins didn’t read tarot, but informed by his words, I suggest to you that perhaps we are simply allowing the cards to express the inscape of the moment.

“Chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose.” Read that line after reading his poems and you’ll realize even the chance of Hopkins’ prose words falls into a rhythm much like his poetry. It strikes me as sprung rhythm, his particular rhythm of writing poetry.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;  

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells  

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s  

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;  

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:  

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;  

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,  

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

  

I say móre: the just man justices;  

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;  

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —  

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,  

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his  

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

You don’t have to be Christian, and I’m not, to appreciate the inscape of this. “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Deals out that being indoors each one dwells”–look around you. Or look at yourself. How do you speak and spell yourself?

Sometimes I try to duplicate people’s expressions and body language myself to understand them better. If a person is being interviewed on tv, and they speak and nod, I will try speaking and nodding to suss out what the nodding means. Or the shaking of their heads. I have never figured out how either nodding or shaking your head while you speak is natural. I can’t get it. It’s not my unique expression, it’s theirs. But as I can’t talk and nod they seemingly can’t not do so. (This is a crude example for me to give of inscape, when writing about someone who noticed every detail no matter how subtle!)

If you shuffle cards, if you draw cards, cards have been shuffled and drawn in that moment. If you tossed them out to sea they would float for awhile; if you flung them across the room they would fall in a particular pattern. I think you should treat your cards better than that, but you see my point that they express the present moment. If you believe in the divine, if you agree with Hopkins, then the cards are charged like anything else with that same grandeur.

That’s how they work.

But you could read the clouds or birdsong. Or the traffic patterns on the way to work. The odd bit of litter you found on the ground or the clanging of a gate.

Read it, and ask it what it has to tell you of justice.