Sometimes I do things to please myself. Creative things, they call it, when you use your hands and imagination in order to give form to an idea. As it happens, for all my sitting all day long with words, I like to make things.

Some fifteen years ago I designed pretty much all my clothes, created paper patterns for them, and did all the stitching. My living room looked like a clothes factory, what with the many sawing machines I own, ironing boards, and cutting tables.

Once I made a paper coat. Literally. Since I have an obsession with paper, I thought, why not make a whole coat out of it? I tried to imagine what Karl Lagerfeld would make of that, as I also had an obsession with this fashion genius.

I created the coat, paired it with a mini felted wool and silk dress that I also concocted, and went to work. I had a literature class to teach at Roskilde University, where I was a tenured professor of American Studies. I made a point about poetry and paper. I told the students that I had just created the paper coat I was wearing. They wanted to come close to me in order to inspect it. Some asked me: ‘can we write something on it?’ I said, ‘no, words ruin everything.’ We left it at that, with my paper coat untainted, now hiding at the back of my closet alongside with a slew of Japanese kimonos.

I stopped stitching, as I don’t have much time for it any longer, or else it’s because I decided that I have enough clothes. But if it’s not that kind of thing that I use my hands for these days, then it’s something else: analog photography that requires developing film and fiddling with chemicals in the darkroom, calligraphy, or drawing in different styles, one more ‘dubious’ than the other. I always think about the art of touching something, and how the thing I touch responds to my gesture. This reflection keeps me entertained.

Having started teaching how to read cards under the signature of Read like the Devil – also some fifteen years ago – I created a few decks of cards. The latest, Baka Tarot, was almost intended as a flash display, similar to my paper coat.

First I made this deck of cards for my own pleasure. Then I flashed a few images in public. Others said, ‘we want it.’ I made a set of talismanic copies. They all went in a flash. ‘Is there more?’ people asked, and I said ‘no, but there could be. Not the special kind, but a fine standard edition.’ Then the words. While waiting for the production team to present me with their prototype, I entered a writing frenzy. A whole book was ready when the standard Baka Tarot was ready – alongside with re-editions of two others, Arcades Tarot, and Red Tarot.

I thought, this is what being relentless means. The cards, that is, for as far as I was concerned when I flung it all to the public, I was not in any opportunistic mode. I work with occasion, not opportunity. I prefer to make this distinction. Just as my writing is always occasioned by an event, so with my art, or, as I prefer to think of it, my making things. If I make things, it’s because I like it, not because there’s an opportunity for it.

I cast a 6-card pyramid with the Arcades Tarot, and the first thing that befell me is this thought: what the mind creates, the mind must destroy, echoing the words of a master, Nisargadatta Maharaj. As a counter to this radical position, perhaps what the hands create needs no destruction, for it will dismantle itself by default with time.

I read my pyramid of cards below in this way: there is a World of things that we can touch, using our Magician’s finger for it, even when it may seem Foolish. If a decision can’t be made for what we Love, then we can make a royal robe for ourselves instead, and like an Empress, ascend to a throne to sit on, and from there issue commands. For, if Death comes along to take some heads, whether heads of rulers, lovers, magicians, or fools, who can stop it?

We might as well pay attention to what occasions our moves. There’s always desire, my Red Tarot tells me, to make and to be, the Lovers in between Magic and Star brilliance, and hence and as such, desire can only be killed by death, but if it becomes a habit, then yes, our abracadabra can redirect the light, and present us with an occasion to do more magic, and embody more the eloquence of the stars in perfectly new ways.

I started out by saying that it takes a certain relentlessness to create something. Or at least I suggested it by pointing to how a visual text can participate in creating a certain kind of relentlessness, when you find yourself making things, not because there’s an opportunity for it, but because you have an occasion for it; an occasion that defies even a great love whose horizon doesn’t rise, but whose touch makes a mark in a book you can write about it, and then toast to its publication.

The cards from Baka Tarot below, although cast for a different occasion, can speak here of the very thing, thus reminding us all of the beauty that goes into alchemizing a process that involves having your fingers all over it. There’s nothing that beats the complicity of touch. I think I make cards for that.

Cards: the newly released standard editions Baka Tarot, Arcades Tarot, Red Tarot, now all available in unlimited form.

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