It’s always night or we wouldn’t need light.
Thelonious Monk, quoted in Time magazine.
How does one make sense of this crisis of European culture, which long since already had started at various ends and which now is reaching its limit of outward expression? Modern history, having its conception during the era of the Renaissance, is ending. We are experiencing the end of the Renaissance. At the summits of culture, in creativity, in the realm of art and in the realm of thought long since already has been sensed the draining away of the Renaissance, the ending of an entire world era. The search for new paths of creativity has been also an expression of the end of the Renaissance. But that which occurs on the summits of life has also its own expression down lower. At the lowest levels of social life is being readied the end of the Renaissance. For the Renaissance signified an entire type of world perception and culture, and not merely one area of higher culture. Human life, and the life of peoples represents an entire hierarchical organism, in which are irreparably connected the higher and lower functions..http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1922_17_060_1.html
Arcanum 17
Seventeenth Arcanum of the Tarot: the hieroglyphic of this Arcanum is the Radiant Star and the Eternal Youth. A naked woman appears in this Arcanum; over the earth she is pouring the sap of universal life from two jars, one made of gold and the other made of silver. André Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the Allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Percé Rock—its. impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty—as his central metaphor, Breton considers love and loss, aggression and war, pacifism, feminism and the occult, in a book that is part prose and part poetry, part reality and part dream. In the 17th card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck, a naked woman beneath a sky of stars pours water from two urns into water and onto land. This card represents hope, renewal and resurrection—the themes that permeate Arcanum 17. Breton’s ideas today are prescient, a passionate underlying belief in the indestructibility of life and the freedom of the human spirit.
In these days of betrayal and biological war it seems to me the spirit of humanity is being challenged. We are fed fear. We are told to mask and fear the neighbor. In each epoch generations are challenged by some fresh hell and still generations emerge unbroken. We too will emerge unbroken. Our imaginations will wither fetters and our impatient strength shall shake the dungeon of dismal evil so it shatters into nothing but dust in the noon day sun.
“Thus, far from contradicting, diluting, or diverting our revolutionary attitude toward life, surrealism strengthens it. It nourishes an impatient strength within us, endlessly reinforcing the massive army of refusals.
And I am also thinking of tomorrow.
Millions of black hands will fling their terror across the furious skies of world war. Freed from a long benumbing slumber, the most disinherited of all peoples will rise up from the plains of ashes.
Our surrealism will supply this rising people with a punch from its very depths. Our surrealism will enable us to finally transcend the sordid dichotomies of the present: white/Blacks, Europeans/Africans, civilized/savages – at last rediscovering the magic power of the Mahoulis, drawn directly from living sources. Colonial idiocy will be purfied in the welder’s blue flame. We shall recover our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our unprecedented communions.”
– Suzanne Cesaire 1943 Surrealism and Us
Max Picard wrote the astonishing is always capable of breaking through the bars of any type. He is most well known for his rare book on the human face. Perhaps this is what Picard meant when referring to the anticipation of "the divine surprise"
Max Picard begins his extraordinary meditation on the subject with this observation: "He who looks upon a human face is moved to the very core of his being ... his whole being is plowed up." Picard understands the human face as the image of God and argues, "therein lies the joy that the sight of a face can give: the onlooker feels once more that he is a complete being and to that is added the greater joy of feeling this before God's image. Not until he looked upon God's image did he feel that he had become whole again.” To face the Other is to face our wholeness.
Prior to ours, in his 1930’s era of coarsened sensibilities, Picard reminds us, "we have no wish to be reminded of the whole man, we do not wish wholeness; on the contrary, we wish to be divided, and we are pleased in our state of division and do not wish to be disturbed. For that reason we do not contemplate the human face" (Picard continues-
Today we have ceased to hope for a transformation to show itself in a human face. That is why we dare divide people into distinct types, and hold them there. It has always been so in periods when the astonishing was no longer expected: the people were separated into types. And the people seem to take this way of life for granted.
(Some ideas for this Feuilleton are based on the ideas of Christopher Pramuk, in Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009) 173-74;)
The domain of the Strange, the Marvelous and the Fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucinations and madness.”
Suzanne Cesaire 1941, Tropiques
https://99yearblues.substack.com/p/tarot-arcanum-17-hope