Yearn

This is an Inverse Tarot Reading. In an ordinary tarot reading, cards are randomly selected for a particular querent, in the hope they'll be meaningful. This is a particular card shown to randomly selected querents, in the hope that it will be meaningful to one of them.

Autumn of Talons: The Northern Shrike (Lanius borealis)

Northern Shrikes are grey and white songbirds. Like other songbirds, they are small and melodious and lack talons, but unlike other songbirds they are fierce predators. They sit in high places and watch for birds and mice. They skulk through brush. They ambush. They lure other birds by imitating their songs, and they kill birds larger than themselves by driving them into the ground. Because they lack talons to tear open prey, they impale it on thorns or barbed wire instead.

This is a Reverse Tarot Reading. In an ordinary tarot reading, cards are randomly selected for a particular querent, in the hope they'll be meaningful. This is a particular card shown to randomly selected querents, in the hope that it will be meaningful to one of them.

Three of Songs: The Great-Tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus)

Great-Tailed Grackles are medium-sized iridescent black birds with long tails. Both sexes sing. Their songs are strange and unmusical; they sound like electronic buzzers, rusty hinges, squeaky balloons, and hissing cats. But in the dense brushy habitats where they nest, delicate melodic songs would be distorted and absorbed. A grackle's song has evolved to carry across harsh terrain.

This card is about your Art. This card does not say which Art yours is, only that you contain strange and wonderful things, and sometimes you pull those things through the portal of your breath and bone and into the outside world to share.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

In youth I knew nothing of the taste of sorrow I liked to climb high towers, I liked to climb high towers To conjure up a bit of sorrow to make new verse.

Now I know only too well the taste of sorrow. I begin to speak yet pause, I begin to speak yet pause And say instead, “My, what a cool and lovely autumn.”

I finally got around to finishing this doodle? Line art? Madness? After having it taped to my wall for months unfinished.

And progression pics below.