SUMMER CITADEL

It’s summertime for real, right now. Here in the northeast US there are heat advisories and warnings and there is some noticeable discomfort if, like me, you live a life without air-conditioning—and work at home. But it’s the work that distracts from the heat—if you let it.

Today, making breakfast, I recalled the song by The Rolling Stones—from their 1967 psychedelic LP Their Satanic Majesties Request—called “Citadel.” Like many a psychedelic paean to the joys of the Inner Man, “Citadel” takes up an exotic theme (citadel as a castle with classical or biblical overtones because the word finds use in many such texts, whereas “castle” seems more deliberately medieval and European) as a metaphor for the “trip” mentality. The fantasy in the lyrics, initially, is of crusaders “armed with bibles,” then we get glimpses of flags and dollar bills (the U.S. market, of course), then “peasants” crawling (the fans, the press, etc.) to hear their numbers called, and finally the “woods of steel and glass” of a busy urban scene—all the things these citadel-dwellers are avoiding by staying in their indwelling universe, fixing a hole where the rain gets in, and all that. And always that child’s rhyme chorus: “Candy and Taffy, hope you both are well / Please come see me in the citadel,” where Candy—a playful plaything’s name at the time—gets stretched into confection by palling around with Taffy (these girls are sweet!) and both are invited to the citadel, where no doubt our singer reclines in utter decadence, plump grapes poised upon plump lips.*

Well! My sense of a working citadel is nothing like that! More like what I imagine Keef might be up to in the studio with Brian, layering all those sounds onto tape. For me, it’s layering colors and I’m concluding The Empress and a few days into Temperance. But the song was suggested by my subconscious (or something), due no doubt to a fleeting thought that painting while listening to my many mixtapes compiled in the summers (starting in 1978 and reaching to the present—I made the tape side for Temperance just last week) is about as withdrawn as I can be from the world at large.

Left to my own devices in the house of Eros on my painting tour of the 22 cards of the Major Arcana of the Tarot. The section Eros, as just became definite to me early in June before my visit to the shore in Maryland for two weeks, consists of: VI The Lovers (center), XVII The Star (above), III The Empress (left), XIV Temperance (below), XIII Strength (right). This configuration is pleasing as a departure from what I had considered the sequence to be, up to that point. I had thought I would be moving on to do The Emperor after The Empress. The change came about because, in searching for images to composite into the Emperor, I was struck by the pathos of the figure. And so that card will be the third panel in Pathos, corresponding to the place The Empress holds in Eros. And that’s fitting because The Empress represents the fully empowered female—mother, queen, the ruler of the roost, both sexual and maternal, all that. Whereas The Emperor—following the old idea that the son, come to manhood, is the king/father’s replacement—is a figure for decline, for the old that is passing away. Pathos, in other words.

In the four overlays, the center panels have been definite for some time: The Fool for Ethos, The Lovers for Eros, and Justice for Logos (all obvious to me). The first major change came in shifting The Wheel of Fortune from the center of Pathos (a good figure for all the changes that cause our sense of time passing toward the grave) to its place as the outcome of the first series, thus matching perfectly with The World (the idea of the eternal that supersedes that transient wheel) as the outcome of the second series. Which is a way of noting that Ethos (the Bildung) and Eros (the reign of desire) bring us to a sense of the Wheel (how all things do change and love fades and mentors die and nothing lasts) which must be endured through Pathos (the struggle to assert something that lasts at least a generation or two), aided by Logos (the idea of the eternal, as suggested by religion—for some—art, for others, and, well, at least by the systems of signs by which we make sense of the world as something to be made intelligible, for ever and ever anon). The new center figure for Pathos is The Hanged Man, a figure for the suffering body itself, and of “the sacrifice for the sake of”—wisdom (Odin), the sins of man (Christ) and so forth. So then, The Fool (my spirit guide, let’s say), The Lovers (my youthful ideal, late teens through twenties), The Hanged Man (upon the rood of time), Justice (you decide if he was wise). The circling we’re into now, around those lovers, takes in The Star—as a figure for the ingenue, the sweet thing (Candy and Taffy), but also all those forbidding maidens never manned, à la Cohen’s “Came So Far For Beauty”—The Empress (see above, here figured as an Empress of India who is in fact Indian), and, now, Temperance as the Angel who mixes duality into unity while also, like a horse of many colors, radiates all we project upon them (the Angel, being neither male nor female, is a perfect instance of the need for a “multi” pronoun as designation—particularly as, in a sense, any Angel is every angel, no?). Anyway, I’m having a wonderful time on this one just now.

But then, I have a wonderful time on each of them—the panels, that is—until I reach the limits of my ability and wish I could do something different. In any case, they are what they are, cartoon approximations of concepts that have to take the form of pictures since words don’t really convey what they are either. There are only tales told, rhymes rhymed, songs sung, and abstruse and recondite interpretations to approximate what these figures actually figure. The wonderful time, for me, is seeing what the paint does while I engage in that slippery pursuit of Image. A word I’ve always viewed with a certain awe as I understand it to be vision arrested by the mind—which some call “a vision” but which I’d rather call “an Image.” Keeping alive the relation to ‘imagine/imagination’ as well as recalling hoary old usages such as “made in his own image” and “the very image of a modern major general.” And maybe it’s just fanciful on my part to relate “Image” to “i mage, or I magus,” with “Magus,” card number I.

I guess this has gone on long enough. And what I really meant to talk about was the experience of listening to all those summer tapes. I arrange them by month—June, July, August—and, where possible, by the day I made them, rather than by year. So I’m not moving chronologically through the years in this trip through time, but through the months, after a fashion. June dropped away because I was away and I’m making it up as best I can. May found me listening through the series of May tapes my daughter Kajsa and I made. It became a tradition to make them at the end of each school year, beginning with the end of twelfth grade, and stretched into a few years after she graduated college. The summer tapes, though, make me tour through a variety of times. There is at least one summer tape for every year up through 1999 (when I turned 40). After that, tape-making for myself falls off, but, generally, a tape in summer and in fall continues for another decade give or take (I’ll have to tabulate them some time).

Are they all relevant to Eros? More or less, I’d say, though some are more tinged by Pathos than others, doubtless. And that’s fitting because we’re in the “bottom” of Eros, with one last turn to go. And I hope that I'll be through the circle—with at least a start on that Wheel—ere this summer is past.

*: note: In Andy Warhol's Popism, which I just finished reading, 7/3/22, Andy says that Candy is Candy Darling the person who Andy respects as the most successful drag queen he ever knew, and Taffy is one of Candy's drag friends, and that once, while the song was playing, Candy pointed out the lyrics to Andy as Mick inviting the girls to visit and mentions the hotel the Stones were staying in which becomes, by that reckoning, the citadel. According to Andy, though, Candy was a bit embarrassed because she could never tell the Stones apart and wasn't sure "which one is Mick."