MISSIVE 52

The Hermit, Swords, and Cephalopods

One matter I’ve always found fascinating about cuttlefish is that despite their near-perfect camouflage, they themselves are colorblind. To say this, however, is relatively meaningless for reasons I will outline. While recent research suggests that they are uniquely capable of wavelength discernment due to the shape of their eyes’ pupils, there is no solution to the mystery of how this information translates so accurately to their skin patterning. It is just one curiosity among the many biological wonders outlining how alien the idea of being a cephalopod is to humanity at large.

I once wrote fiction on this subject, facetiously postulating that cuttlefish uses their ink to paint themselves into existence, and thus, that our own approach to understanding their nature is ontologically flawed. Similarly, Flusser and Bec’s book Vampyroteuthis Infernalis explores the (presently) absurd question of cephalopod philosophy, and how it would vary from human philosophy due to our primordial differences. Because we do not understand the distributed minds and radial geometry of these creatures, we can only conjecture about what it would mean to exist as one. Flusser uses this playful mode of “paranaturalistic” study to critique human philosophy altogether, an exercise which results in some interesting observations:

“Reflection is the process by which reason penetrates behind appearances in order to be able to think about them. Reflection is thus preliminary to thinking. Thee role of reason in this process is that of a scalpel: it dissects phenomena into discernible rations. This rationalizing allows us to look through phenomena, to look through the gaps between the rations: this is ‘Theory.’

[…]

“We trace our fingers along the dissected rations of phenomena in order to comprehend and define their contours. With a theoretical gaze, we then dissociate these defined contours from the dissected phenomenon, at which point we are holding an empty husk. We call this empty husk a “concept,” and we use it to collect other rations of phenomena that have not yet been fully defined. We use concepts as models. In doing so, we create a melee between dissected appearances and empty concepts— between phenomena and models. The unfortunate outcome of this conflict is that we can no longer discern any phenomena for which we have not already established a model. Since we can no longer apprehend model-less phenomena, we therefore brandish the scalpel of reason simply to tailor phenomena to our models. Human reflection, in other words, is the act of constricting the feedback loop between models and phenomena.

This is a better description of my interpretation of the suit of Swords than I articulated in Missive 50: the perpetual difference between our strategies of dealing with the world and the outcomes of our actions. Though we are adjusting slightly when speaking of knives and scalpels and swords, we are speaking of the same apparatus:

“Swords are about strategy and problem solving, but they are not necessarily rational, even though they are often described as such. Their scope also includes our self-justifications, defense mechanisms, and coping methods; all the weapons the mind uses to shape reality around it.”

Though the fact of cephalopods being colorblind is shocking at first, the reality is that to even assume the idea of colorblindness applies is a Ten of Swords modeling failure. We cannot comprehend how the cuttlefish blends into its environment because we assume that what we think of as ‘vision’ is its ‘vision,’ or that it would map visual information onto itself the way we would map an image onto a canvas, choosing colors and approximating curves. As far as we’re concerned, the cuttlefish could as well be painting itself into the world with its ink; the machinery we use to understand its nature is made obsolete and absurd simply by observing its behavior.

Given this, let us return to Flusser’s reimagining:

The vampyrotheuthis, on the other hand, has no knife, no need for human reason. Its chromatophores emit cones of light that delineate the darkness into rations before they are conceived. Its reason is therefore preconceptual. It perceives things rationally in order to comprehend them; its tentacles follow these cones of light only to comprehend what this light-reason has already rationalized.”

Flusser imagines that these creatures might receive objective conceptions of phenomena from observation due to the nature of their senses, a proposition altogether unimaginable to humans, whose thought-forms are always separate from observed reality. While this is entirely and wildly speculative, it is this sort of alienation that makes the thought experiment useful: getting outside ourselves gives us the opportunity to conceive of the boundaries of our nature.

When we use Tarot, the suit of Swords is inherently critical of us: what are the limits of the ways in which we intellectualize our reality? When and where are the strategies we use to deal with problems no longer effective? This is where we look to the structure of the deck itself and see that its limitations are explicitly human. The suits are tools that we use to navigate our very human four element model, the courts are our social hierarchies thrust upon the cosmos, and the majors are built upon our shared stories and legends. Tarot’s language is a shorthand for describing shared human experience. Its images would mean less than nothing to a cuttlefish or vampire squid.

This is why I love the Anima Mundi deck’s Hermit, choosing to embrace the image of the common octopus, whose scientific name dates back to Lamarck:

The Hermit is the ultimate outsider, the keeper of wisdom which is permanently in the periphery. And Octopus vulgaris is the ur-example of the cephalopod in marine biology, the most well-known form of those whose intellects lie orthogonal to our own.

Our water is their air. A cephalopod Tarot might only have three suits as a result, or it might have scores of them. What would the four elements be to a being that never experiences air or fire? Certainly such a “deck” would not have Coins, or Wands, or anything of the sort. A combinatoric shorthand for submarine existence, especially theirs, is beyond us to imagine. In the company of the Hermit, it is simply best to listen, observe, and entertain the possibility that your fundamental assumptions about the nature of your surroundings are flawed. After all, why wouldn’t they be? The act of being you is an extremely specific matter.

The Hermit sidesteps our minds and asks us to step away from precedent, whether in the form of Zarathustra coming down from the Holy Mountain, or as a little octopus crawling forth from a recently-flooded tide pool. Even if they, too, are wrong, they can show you how to abstract beyond yourself, and interrogate reality in a way that broadens what you know to be possible.