I. THE MAGICIAN: Shakespeare

I am the quintessential actor, the quintessential playwright.

I distill. I synthesize the pieces into a masterpiece.

I do have magician images in my stash. I am fascinated by the traditional adept imagery of the Magician. I particularly am drawn to the turn-of-the-century magicians (so beautifully captured in movies like The Prestige and The Illusionist), and that combination of occultism and mass entertainment. Which brings me to this Community card for William Shakespeare. Whether you think he was a man or a committee, he earns this placement for his knowledge of alchemy and use of alchemical language, while keeping the groundlings amused with spectacle and broad comedy. Scholars love to see magician Prospero in The Tempest as Shakespeare's stand-in. At the end of this, Shakespeare’s last play, Prospero throws his grimoire into the ocean, and that is supposed to symbolize the playwright giving up the theatre. I always thought that bit was a little too pat and opportunistic. I seem to remember that literary criticism is similar to tarot, about pattern making and association :)

Rachel Pollack in 78 Degrees of Wisdom sees the Magician as a channel or conduit, drawing power from above to below. Which also is a good way of looking at Shakespeare. None of the stories he told were new, he was just really good at taking popular culture and transforming it into something deep, and vice versa. Highly mysterious, a genius in his socioeconomic class, he defied all the expectations of his education. There are plenty of people who think he couldn’t possibly be one person or that brilliant, that the canon is the work of several people, or a pseudonym for some upper-class twit. Possibly it’s a case of educated people not giving credit to genius when it strikes without prejudice in a generation.

I have invoked the Magician in my theatre directing, particularly. Directing is kind of like juggling, which is another name for this card.

Robert: I Am the One Who...

I am the Boy with the Blue Eyes.
I am the One who has haunted you for twenty years.
I am the One who inspired you to write long fiction and attempt a novel.
I am the One who like Prometheus brought fire to the human race and paid for it.
I am the One who made you read all of Proust.
I am the One who opened again your multifaceted intellect.
I am the One who was raised to do great things in my society.
I am the One who nearly committed suicide at twenty-one, from the sheer pain of becoming.
I am the One who learned to see individual genius in a group and became a great administrator.
I am the One you fell in love with, despite my deadly legacy, which I could not control.

What do you have to give me?

I give you confidence in your intellect, that you are smart enough to write about physics.
I give you the joy of mastering things, disciplines, art forms for their own sake.
I give you the joy of eternal learning and knowledge.
I give you knowledge of your contribution as an individual.

What do you want from me?

I want you to tell the multifacetness of my story.
I want you to remind others that what we think of as evil sometimes has a genesis in great humanity and care for humanity.
I want you to remind others of the greatness of the Manhattan Project story, and how we can use our intellect and technology to enhance mankind, to overcome greed, anger, war and deadness.
I want you to remind others of the importance more than ever of an open society of ideas for the betterment of all life.
I want you to finish my story.

Is there anything else you want to tell me?

Remember that the Atomic Age was ushered in on sacred ground.
Remember to ground yourself in horses and the mountains and the sea…
Remember to pick flowers to make it an occasion.
Remember to love your younger siblings and meet people where they are.
Remember to guard against the seduction of power and intellectual arrogance.
Remember humility, which politicians easily forget. It is not a weakness.
Remember there are scientists and people out there who look for the truth, who love life and are trying to preserve it.
Remember death, the dark silent companion, has always been present; live life while you can.

How will I remember?

When you see the mountains and sacred places, when you smell pinon and hear the sea.
When you see “thunderstorms and sunsets comparison the sky.”
When you hear the distinctive cadence of my voice in your head.
When you read Baudelaire and the Bhagavad Gita.
Don’t worry. You will know.

Character/Community Suit: Robert

There are four card suits for SoulCollage--Committee, Companion, Council and Community. These roughly correspond to inner personas, animal totems, archetypes and significant people in your life. Hope I have that right. In addition you can make your own suits. I started gathering images for what I call my Character suit--these are people from my fiction. If you write a work of some length, your characters have a tendency to take over part of your psyche. I was initially confused where to put them. Are they parts of my personality? Are they embodiments of archetypes? Are they as real as any people I've known? Yes to all three. Hence a new suit.

This is Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, as a young man, and the subject of my first novel.

More on what he has to say later...