Twenty-Two
Rooms
The Art of Reading Your Own Life
A memoir, told through the twenty-two tarot cards I drew in dots.
Current statusThe drawings are finished. I’m still revising the book. There’s no release date yet.
Not to interrupt anyone.
I had built a life in which I was the person people called, for health questions, a hard stretch, help finding the feeling under the explanation.
When it was my turn, I ordered a car.
During that year, and for a long while on either side of it, I was drawing a deck of tarot cards, twenty-two pictures made entirely of dots. A card took weeks, and I could leave the table, but when I came back the same unfinished image was waiting, and I had to spend another afternoon with it.
Each card in this book is a room, and the rooms aren’t a staircase. I spent most of my life assuming growth meant climbing, that somewhere above me lived a version of me who had finally stopped needing anything. What I found was closer to weather. I’ve been in the Tower and the Star in the same afternoon, and I’ve left the Devil’s room and walked back into it before dinner. Most of us live in two or three of these rooms and visit the rest.
Three of the twenty-two rooms
0 · The FoolA beginning can also be an escape.
XVI · The TowerSometimes the way out is a small door, not a collapse.
XXI · The WorldA finished drawing isn’t a finished person.
Contents
Twenty-two rooms.
When you reach a drawing, give it a minute before you read what I say about it. The images hold more than I point at, and whatever pulls your eye first is worth more to you than my reading of it.
0The FoolThe small bag
My Fool is blindfolded. He stands barefoot at the lip of a dark rock with a small bag over his shoulder and a coyote leaping at his heel, painted head to tail in festival patterns.
IThe MagicianThe fourth leg
He stands barefoot at a table. One arm is raised with a dark wand in his fist, lifted toward a serpent that arcs across the whole sky swallowing its own tail.
IIThe High PriestessThe quiet after the singing
The High Priestess holds a book open with her eyes closed. She’s veiled in layer over layer of white, a crescent riding her crown, and behind her the moon appears in every phase at once, ringed around a disk of night.
IIIThe EmpressThe bowl
In her lap, where you’d hold a baby, she holds a shield with a falcon on it, loosely, the way you carry something you love rather than something you’re afraid of.
IVThe EmperorLightly
Order that has matured doesn’t wear its armor to dinner.
VThe High PriestThe pendant
Between the book and their lifted hands there is empty space, and I keep returning to that space.
VIThe LoversSeptember
The young man in my Lovers stands between two women, one in white and one in black, each with a hand on him. His own hands aren’t on either of them.
VIIThe ChariotThe finished wall
Two armored horses draw it, one facing left and one facing right, and he has no reins.
VIIIJusticeThe real number
The cats are the truest thing in the card about consequences. They don’t chase, and they don’t need to, because they’re already seated along the route you’re walking.
IXThe HermitA hillside of nobody
In my Hermit, the lantern travels beside the man instead of hanging from his hand. It floats in its own small blaze of geometry, and inside it is a tiny mountain range, a whole landscape carried in a light.
XThe Wheel of FortuneSmall birds
The sphinx has a sword, but I can’t read a verdict on either rider’s face.
XIThe ForceThe question disappears
I don’t think she has conquered the lion. He’s walking, not kneeling, and her hand is close enough that she’d know if he turned, and he’d know she was there.
XIIThe Hanged ManAnother way
What holds him matters to me. It isn’t rope or chain, and rope doesn’t reconsider.
XIIIDeathThe mask
The skeleton in my Death card is dancing.
XIVTemperanceThe bad patient
Near the top of the card, under a white star, a hummingbird hovers, drawn with its wings in many positions at once, so from across the room the bird is still, and up close it’s all motion.
XVThe DevilBehind a door
By the end I understood I hadn’t been drawing a monster. I’d been drawing a mirror with horns.
XVIThe TowerThe cheap room
The Tower was easy to recognize in retrospect. Everything else in the picture is round.
XVIIThe StarEight feet of Christmas
The rose on her belly stays closed. I drew it that way and I won’t open it, and when I placed those dots I couldn’t have told you what the bud would come to mean to me.
XVIIIThe MoonThe horses were real
My Moon has a sleeping face, a crescent in profile with its eyes closed, and around it opens an enormous pattern of teardrops, ring upon ring, like a rose window made of weeping.
XIXThe SunEleven in the morning
In the Sun, two people stand embracing, naked, in full daylight, cheek against cheek, so that if you soften your eyes their two profiles become one face.
XXJudgementWhere are you?
The man at the center, seen from behind, has his hands at his ears. I can’t tell from his posture whether he’s opening them or covering them, and I drew the posture and still can’t settle it for him.
XXIThe WorldThe last dot
The dancer in my World moves inside an almond-shaped opening framed by two living fronds of leaf, green and uncut, still growing.
The deck places Justice at VIII and the Force at XI. The Force is the card many decks call Strength. The High Priest and the High Priestess are the figures other decks call the Hierophant and the Popess.
From the book
In the shower you can resign beautifully, and the shampoo bottle never asks what you’ll do about rent.
Intelligence in service of avoidance is still avoidance. It just has footnotes.
I have composed some very moving sentences about stillness, in stillness, for no one. It was embarrassing to catch myself at it, and there was nobody on the hillside to be embarrassed in front of. I had brought the audience.
I learned to notice the walk toward the old room, sometimes on the way there, more often afterward. I haven’t moved out. I visit.
How the book moves.
The chapters follow the cards, not the calendar. You meet the Fool first, a man at the edge of a cliff with a bag too small for a life. The hardest day in the story comes much later, in the room where it belongs.
Scenes come back.
A moment from one room can return in another, seen from a different side. What looked like freedom early on can look a lot like hiding a few cards later.
The drawings answer each other.
The Fool wears a single feather in his hat. The dancer in the World wears a whole crown of them.
Each room ends at the drawing.
After the story, every chapter turns to the card itself. My readings are one man’s, made from one distance at one time.
The notebook
A few questions for each room.
These questions are here for a second visit, a few for each room, in the order you met them. Take the ones that give you something to work with, and leave the rest.
0 · The Fool
Name a beginning you keep postponing. What would it ask you to finish or give up? Then ask whether the new beginning is another way of leaving the same difficulty.
Watch which questions you want to skip. That’s usually the room you live in.
Meet the rooms before the book is finished.
Julia reads with these twenty-two drawings. Find the room you’re in, or bring her a question.