On a turntable of gravity the planet spins, just over halfway through the eagerly-awaited new millennial long-player’s opening ten year track, the critical response as yet divided on the merits of its noisy plane-crash introduction or the strident nature of the vocals; theists and cosmographers in bickering counterpoint. Jehovah is eroded by the tree of knowledge’s alarming exponential growth, by paleontologic scrutiny, resorting to a fortified Creationist denial in result: visitors’ centres serving the Grand Canyon are reported to have concealed references to the chasm’s geologic age or origins in favour of a biblical scenario evoking the deluge of Noah. Carolina legislators argue that authentic rape cannot result in pregnancy based on the two-seed theory of conception popular two thousand years before. Conceptual centuries collide and in the deafening impact are belligerent Zionist assertions, fundamentalist crusades and detonating martyr vests.
Besieged, the secular response is militant, an atheism volubly affirmed that in its dogmas and its certainties approaches the religious, although armed with nothing more substantial than established scientific fact, itself a changed constituency of shifting ground. The classical and quantum models are persistent in rejecting all attempts at reconciliation, with the string by which they might be bound proving thus far elusive. Insufficiently grasped gravity engenders multiplying entities in its support, exotic states and substances, dark energy, dark matter, necessary beasts arisen from mathematics yet escaping observation. Faith and politics ferment, aided by a fast-propagating yeast of theory and device, and all the architecture of the world’s traditions seems erected on an information floodplain, vulnerable to every fresh downpour of data or the bursting banks of ideologies too narrow and slow-moving to accommodate the surge, the inundation of complexity. Despite its evident fatigue, afraid of missing some vital development in this incessant and incendiary pageant, culture dare not close its eyes. Resume interior, night.
Unable to be rid, now, of his sister’s oddly memorable tarot images, Mick finds them strewn all over his cerebral carpeting as the surcease of thought continues to avoid him. Circumspectly levering onto his back he hooks his left foot over his right knee in what he realises belatedly is an unconscious imitation of the deck’s mysterious Hanged Man, a figure signifying an uncomfortable initiation if Mick’s memory serves correct. He doesn’t understand the Hanged Man or the other twenty-something ‘trump’ cards even slightly, not the Chariot or Lust or the High Priestess, none of that lot; can’t imagine any game elaborate enough or of sufficient scale to utilise them all and so discards them from consideration. Nearly all the other pasteboard pictures, though peculiar, are what he thinks of as the ordinary ones, the ones that have an obvious correspondence to the pack with which he’s most familiar. There are four suits with ten numbered cards in each, the suits roughly analogous to the existing quartet but called different names with diamonds become discs and spades now swords, hearts turned to cups and clubs made wands, his sister stubbornly insisting that the tarot suits came first. The court cards, similarly, are almost identical to the more regular monarchical arrangement with the queens unchanged but knights and princes substituted for the kings and jacks respectively, these three joined inexplicably by a fourth flat aristocrat, a princess having no equivalent among the hard-eyed and mistrustful-looking royals of convention. Mick is unsure how this last-named personage is meant to fit into the play, no way of knowing if she beats a prince or what. Like the Hanged Man and his unfathomable pals, Mick finds she functions only as an irritant in an already irritating set-up. Tarot, to be blunt, gets on his nerves. With different occult iconography on every card it would be near impossible to even manage a quick hand of snap, and so for any grown-up purposes the concept is completely useless. Feeling suddenly annoyed at Alma, albeit obscurely, he negotiates the move onto his right side without auditory incident. New angle.
The whole problem with his sibling, he decides, is that she judges her successes by such baffling criteria that she can even claim unutterable disaster as some kind of victory, with everybody too uncertain as to what she’s going on about to challenge her preposterous and yet authoritative-sounding proclamations. The most reasonable objections will be flattened by an insurmountable artillery barrage of quotes from sources no one else has read and which are very possibly invented on the spot. Any debate is a rigged contest held according to a manual much like the Book of Mormon, to which Alma evidently holds sole access. Rules of play change seemingly at random as though one were arguing with the Red Queen from Alice Through the Looking-Glass or possibly Alice in Wonderland. Mick always gets the two of them mixed up. In fact, now that he thinks about it, Lewis Carroll is almost as aggravating as his older sister in the author’s patently deliberate attempts to puzzle and confound the punters. Why else have a Red Queen in both books, both with the same abrasive personality, when they are plainly different characters with one derived from playing cards and one from chess? In fact, with an intended audience of children, why involve chess in the first place if not as a way to intellectually intimidate the spiteful little buggers? It’s a tactic which would definitely work with Mick, who’s always found the very mention of the subject petrifying. Chess — there’s something else that seriously gets on his tits. All of the fancy and entitled pieces with their fussy, idiosyncratic ways of moving are no more than obsessive-compulsive draughts when it comes down to it, the bishops sticking superstitiously to either white or black squares and the knights continually turning corners that aren’t there. Then there’s the game’s neurotic aristocracy, apparently dysfunctional royal couples who are usually the centre of attention; kings restricted in their actions to the point of constipated immobility with queens free to go where they choose and pretty much do anything they want, despite the fact that it’s their powerful husbands about which the wheels of intrigue turn. Mick’s class-based supposition that the chessmen’s quirky movements have their root in mental feebleness resultant from inbreeding notwithstanding, he’ll admit that the distinctive figures have their own mystique, their own minimalist charisma. There’s a sense about them that they stand for something more significant than just a knight, a horse’s head or a game token with a strange waltz-step trajectory. It’s more as if they symbolise big abstract qualities that skirmish and manoeuvre on a higher board, a field of play that’s far into the ultra-violet of Mick’s comprehension. Kings, queens, princes and princesses, whether you’re discussing playing cards or chessmen or real flesh and blood heirs to the throne, it isn’t who they are or what they do that makes them seem important, but the huge and formless thing it feels as if they represent. It’s what they signify. It’s what they mean.
Deciding that a supine strategy might be the answer after all, he’s halfway through the necessary repositioning when it occurs to him that that’s why everybody made such an extraordinary fuss about Princess Diana with Kensington Palace wrapped in cellophane, swaddled by teddy bears. It wasn’t her. It was what people understood by her. Against the bedroom window a soft fusillade announces scattered showers. Cut to panoptical perspective.
Church and State, in bed, share a post-coital cigarette and now the quilt of nations smoulders. The intelligence community’s perpetual shrill alerts begin to seem those of a broken smoke-detector, generally ignored but not without a gradually accreting residue of jitters. Terror-stricken in a war against their own emotional condition, snapping fretfully at shadows they themselves are casting, western powers attempt to colour-code a nightmare. The white rucksack-flash is prism-split into a spectrum of diurnally adjusted dread, a heat map of anxiety that never cools below Guantanamo Bay orange with the icy blue of safety a forgotten hue that’s out of vogue and isn’t coming back.