Tarot, archetypes, magic, cut up, music and poltergeists and theft.

Tarot, archetypes, magic, cut up, music and poltergeists and theft.

Forget creative card packs find an old tarot card deck and use them.

There are lots of creative thinking card packs available, often being advertised on Facebook as a Kickstarter campaign. You don’t need to buy these, the best thing to do is to use a pack of tarot cards or just ordinary playing cards, they are easy to read.

You can go into the archetypes if you wish, as the major Arcana are the archetypes, but all you really need to do is to read what you see in the pictures and tell a story as if you are speaking to children. You will be amazed at what will come about in your storytelling, include the colours that the characters are wearing, which direction they’re looking, what they are holding, what the landscape looks like, telling is all relevant because it’s the things that your unconscious is picking up.

Remember the film Jumanji which is based on board game that comes to life? The tarot is like that.

Just read what it says on the cards and make up the story.

Use tarot cards for storylines and new ideas, they are as good as any Kickstarter generated ideas pack  on the market . They have lasted for several hundred years, so following Nasim Taleb’s Lindy effect they are likely to last for several hundred more years.Which is much more than anything made by psychologists will last!

There is always a time and place to cut cards with the devil.

Remember there is always time to cut cards with the devil, all the bright things cast a shadow, turn the meanings of the cards to their dark side, for example with the card, ‘the lovers’ what are the bad experiences of life and love, what is it like to suffer the loss of another that you feel deeply for. And then for the more troublesome cards like ‘the tower’ and ‘death’,  look for new opportunities that come from adversity. When you look back, one often sees that great change and benefit often transpires from an unfortunate incident in ones life. Something that you would have avoided if you knew it was coming, but those things act as a catalyst for something better.

What you notice on the cards is what your unconscious is looking for, so the things that you see are meaningful and your descriptions are meaningful. Tarot cards come with an information booklet and there are lots of books, much of which is based on the interpretation of cards originally written by people such as Crowley, Mathers or Waitte  from the Edwardian period. These are typical of the colonialist thinking, trying to link everything back to Egypt or Ancient Greece. Don’t worry about all of that stuff, just read the pictures it works so much better!

Communicate with the darker side of your nature, your shadow side; it is where all of the interesting stuff is. Remember all things are born from darkness, the seed in the ground, the baby from the womb, and your most interesting thoughts come from the darkest recesses of your own mind. For those of you who are interested in acting, the best characters are the ones who are evil and dark, it is much harder to make a convincing character from somebody who is all goodness and light.

The Fool, the trickster, the musician

In the myth the trickster will move between the worlds passing knowledge to humans and taking payment for it, sometimes to annoy the gods and sometimes to test the humans.

I use and teach the cutup technique for song writing, and for the uninitiated it looks like cheating but this was the technique used by the greatest songwriters in pop music, from Lennon to Bowie, from Bolan to Cobain.

I am interested in the idea of the trickster musicians like Bowie and Bolan, infact many of the great guitar players like Hendrix had techniques that you could look at as some form of trickery. Infact if you look at technology and what it can do, creating an illusion of sound and vision, is itself a form of trickery as it creates an illusion of complexity.

I have pondered that we get trapped by thinking, and that some form of deceit needs to happen to fool us out of our trap into another mode of thinking. Cut up is a good example of this; we often see cutup as a series of phrases taken out of context from magazines and newspapers, put together in a random form which then weirdly makes sense. However, William S Burroughs did more with the technique, using it to predict the future, curse people and businesses that had upset him.

In fact any form of non-linear irrational thinking can be termed as cut up. For instance Burroughs would record the sounds that he heard in the street, taking snippets of conversation and then putting them together, out of time. Also just flipping between TV channels or radio stations, and recording the dialogue will open reel tape player. Taking parts of pictures and putting them together, any of these techniques will be the basis of cutup. A good example of this is the cover of Sgt Pepper which extensively uses the technique, and Burroughs is actually one of the faces in the montage!

When I was explaining this technique once at a Blues Camp Summer School somebody actually made the remark that I had burst his bubble, that the illusion of all these wonderful songs that he had listened to over the years had actually been some form of fraud.

This is one of the elements of the trickster in myth and in reality. Here is a strange phenomenon, when something unusual happens there is often an element of fraud that seems to go with it. Even when it is not necessary, because the event is weird enough in itself. An interesting case in point was the Enfield poltergeist, the event was well documented but the woman involved who lived in the house told some untruths which made the whole event look made up . What is interesting about this is that years later she tried to explain why she had actually lied about certain elements of the story, as if the strangeness of what was happening affected her mind.

This is quite common, infact there is a book written about the trickster effect which states that truth in these situations becomes very malleable. ‘The Trickster and the Paranormal’ by George Hanson looks at these strange effects, and is well worth a read!

Cutup can be looked at as a fraud and not genius, but I think it best mirrors how the mind comes up with ideas in the first place, splicing and dicing ideas from memories to create new things. Could this be how things really are and that our mind creates and curates the world to eliminate the weirdness for most of the time? It is only when the weirdness breaks through the dam wall that we experience things as they really are.

My experience of cutup has been really interesting and creative. I suggest that you try it and see what results you get. When I work with this it does seem to put you in to a dream experience of thinking and maybe because of the way that the unconscious is unlocked, gives rise to some very strange results; like in a number of cases of showing the technique in a festival, I ended up creating a song that seemed to cover a subject covered in a previous talk that I had not attended!

Whether we look at the artists who have used this technique very successfully as being frauds, cheats and tricksters or not, they often lived lives that seem very unreal to us in our mundane world. I think that this is one of the areas of artistic consciousness that we can easily obtain by using this simple technique, that seems to create strange synchronicities and weirdness to our over developed left brain.