Ten of Pentacles
The number matters. The first inkling of meaning comes when a second thing is placed next to the first and with the third some yet other text is transcribed. A pattern emerges. Ten—the fingers of a healthy set of hands—suggests a fullness and a completion. And all completions are indistinguishable from beginnings.
A parable about a lazy fisherman and an insane businessman. And neither one is right. . .it is a long life, each moment a contingency and each contingency a pearl on the string. Note the way it catches the light when he you hold it just so.
In the end, I just want to sit on my porch while the sun goes down, untroubled by the worries that plagued my preceding years. The taxes all paid and the land all mine. A friendly ghost in the thoughts of the people I care about. The sky etched with some last vision that welcomes me home. Who can guess what it is their father wanted?
+ + +
A resplendent courtyard. The end in sight, perhaps, and the next scene beginning. Notice that the coins—talismans of the inscrutable, tangible world—lay superimposed on the scene. The figures in the background seem not to notice that their world is held together by this scaffolding. This comfort and abundance is no accidental byproduct, but of the long, long years in which those gone before us planted the trees in whose shade they will never sit. The roadways and electrical lines and sewer systems. The companies started in desperate faith that we work for now, stodgy and claustrophobic as their offices might be. Tools invented by people whose names we’ll never know. A certain bravery in the face of menacing weather.
+ + +
The fates of an old man. To watch his legacy squabble amongst itself, no calluses on no hands. To be loved by dogs for the crumbs that fall from his beard. To sit creaking and arthritic in the courtyard he built almost-by-hand. And the human story goes that there were times when the old man of the tribe would be set upon an ice floe and pushed gently out from land. I imagine a small fire there at his feet as he drifts, the final moments of peace looking up at that star-marbled sky. Or his nomadic tribe leaves him in a clearing of the jungle. Where he sits and waits for the jaguar to drop from the tree and take its first bite. And we think, now, that this is some kind of horror and disrespect, a blaspheming of the value of life.
+ + +
But here: most men want to be used up. To be of value and service, to be the sturdy caster on which all the world leans and rolls. And if we have not been cowed by the rabbit-fear of dying, we want to be given our last bread and water and we want our peace as we slip on. And so, push us out into the icy ether from which we first came, let the animals have our bones.
Far worse is the madogiwa. “By the window.” In Japan, a culture of indefatigable work, of work itself prized over its ends, an old man will sometimes be moved to the outer edges of the office plan to while away his remaining years. He is not useful, he is not even interesting. And yet he cannot let go. In America, there is a commandment that no miracle is too extravagant to keep one’s heart beating. May it cost a million dollars for another week of life. May it make that final week an intubated and antiseptic bore.
What an honor it was to be fed to the beast. To face the void head-on.
+ + +
There’s a father I know. A man older now than he is in his memory. And it’s been years since he had to work for a living and longer still since his children truly needed him. And so he sat down and he waited and the gears he’d set in motion decades prior clicked tooth to the tooth—you could almost hear them like a grandfather clock in a quiet room. He’d done okay. All the faults and foibles, everything he didn’t understand and didn’t even try, and you could still etch “A Good Man” on that stone they’ll put over his remains. And yet . . .and yet . . . there was nothing for him to do. The story ran into a cul-de-sac, it just turned and turned. And you could see something atrophying within him, like a muscle in a cast. And you started to understand how it was that people simply faded from life like a pile of sand eroded by even the gentlest of breezes.
And then what? And then what could happen. A grandchild. A beautiful and pure grandchild. And a means to redeem all that he’d wronged over the years and years. See, what the card says, too, among all the rest—this is why the little boy pets the dog, and why the dogs preen at the old man—is if you can perfect this next cycle, then all those in those past are worth-it curriculum. All your sins can be forgiven; there is a kind of eternal redemption hidden in every moment. But you must be willing to start again from the faintest of scratches in the long-living dirt.