The Rider–Waite Magician stands at a table with four objects on it: a cup, a
coin, a sword, a wand. One hand points at the ground and the other at the sky, and the whole
card is a sentence about channelling something from one into the other.
Somebody redrew it in olive drab. The table now carries a knife, two grenades and a
disassembled rifle. The wand in the raised hand is a carbine. The figure wears a ghillie
suit, and the roses still grow at the bottom of the frame because whoever made it did not
have the nerve to remove them, which is the best decision in the picture.
It should be stupid. It is not stupid. The card format is doing something the equipment
cannot do for itself: it insists that these objects mean, that they sit in a
sequence, that there is a card before this one and a card after it. A rifle in a catalogue
is a specification. A rifle in a tarot deck is a fate.
Which is the same move, exactly, as painting Saint George onto the underside of a
fighter. Nobody believes the saint improves the turn rate. The saint is there to say that
the aircraft is in a story — and the moment you accept that, you have accepted the
story's ending too.
Continued p.36 →
