The Tarot Cure

“The clock in the back of the deserted house (everyone’s sleeping) slowly lets the clear quadruple sound of four o’clock in the morning fall. I still haven’t fallen asleep, and I don’t expect to. There’s nothing on my mind to keep me from sleeping and no physical pain to prevent me from relaxing, but the dull silence of my strange body just lies there in the darkness, made even more desolate by the feeble moonlight of the street lamps. I’m so sleepy I can’t even think, so sleepless I can’t feel.”

This episode begins with a restless nights for two literary alter-egos: Fernando Pessoa's Soares and Richard Matheson's (I Am Legend) Neville.

Pessoa grapples with insomnia, intertwined with alcoholism as well as various existential anxieties in Fragment 31 of The Book of Disquiet, a meditation on sleep, death, and the nature of being.

Neville, the protagonist of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, finds himself seemingly the last human on Earth, haunted by the undead. His struggle for sleep mirrors Pessoa's, hinting at a similar psychological issue: the manifestation in his life of the Death Drive as explored by Freud in his 1922 essay "Beyond The Pleasure Principle".

Also, a fascinating historical footnote: Pessoa's role in crafting early advertising copy for Coca-Cola in Portugal, resulting in a government ban on Coca-Cola imports that lasted for over 50 years.

"Sadly, or perhaps not, I recognize that I have an arid heart. An adjective matters more to me than the real weeping of a human soul. But sometimes I’m different."

-Fernando Pessoa

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Every so often, I sit down and write a letter to Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet and writer.
I not only write but also send each letters to the postal address where Pessoa spent the last fifteen years of his life before dying at the age of 47 with cirrhosis of the liver - most likely due to the alcoholism.

He hasn't written back to me yet, even though I put my own name and address on every missive I send (Steve W., 111 Ruskin Gardens, Kenton, London, HA3 9PY). One day he, or someone very much like him, will perhaps write back. I live in hope.

In the last episode of my Tarot Cure, I take on the Yuri Challenge: “When people die, you've got yer 5-Stage Kübler-Ross model of recovery, right? So how about a 3-Stager for breakups? Breakup Therapy? Breakup Recovery. What are the three stages?” The tricky part is that he then got me to create my three stage model based around three of our favourite Kendrick Lamar songs from Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. United In Grief N95 Die Hard I tried. We also find out how things worked out for conceptual artist Marina Abramović and her partner Ulay as they attempt to cross heaven and earth, (and The Great Wall of China) for each other and their art. And finally (finally!) Madame Kalathaki delivers her enlightenment KO in our quest to understand what’s inside that fricken fourth cup on the Tarot card she drew for me!

Before falling in love with the Enneagram, I had a thing for Tarot. 

And so I decided to put this thing into a podcast called The Tarot Cure. 

Here's an Omnibus edition of those episodes, spanning the length and breadth of my 50th year. 

It was a good year :)

What my friends Jackie and Guy (circa 1987) taught me about Eros.