Because the World is Round

Forgive my long hiatus (again). Work must take precedence.

I'm very pleased to share an "elemental" interview with me on the SacredMoonGrove site,
and also "Sylvia Plath's 1957 Poems", most recently published in Plath Profiles 8.

A friend asked me the other day what the Solstice means to me. Well, even as a tarot card reader, I'm no astrologer, nor am I Pagan or Wiccan. I tend to look at the Solstice from the perspective of being a writer--the written language being my true religion--and so this time is a lovely metaphor for turning inward, facing and then rising up and out of the darkness.

Whether you believe in anything or not, the end of the year is traditionally a time to look over the past twelve months, the period in which the Earth has traveled all the way around the sun, and see where you yourself have metaphorically traveled and what has come to fruition. Our Christmas season of course aligns with the Solstice, and that is no coincidence. The end of the year is sort of a micro-version of the macro Apocalypse theories. The Apocalypse, which some believe we are in now, is about breaking down of the institutions and structures that don't work for us anymore (the economy, the environment, politics, war). The idea is that the foundations upon which we have built are faulty, and they need to be torn down and replaced. We do this on the personal (micro) level with our end-of-the-year resolutions.

I went into a quiet time this year with regard to media and promotion. This might seem odd at a time my book had just been released, but I have a lot more work ahead (three different books in the works: FSGL vol. 2, Sylvia Plath's Early Poems, and The Magician's Girl, a biography). I have had some strange battles with scholars who've based their arguments on what they think my work is about without having read it. One wrote that I am wrong, having never read my book (it would not be released for another year, I had not shared any early drafts with her, and she was going merely on assumptions and guesses). When the book did come out, another scholar called it "a tarot book", missing the point completely. It is of course a Plath book.

It isn't just them. It's our world. Today, decisions are made and accepted as truths either with old research, no research, or with narrow agendas. We have closed our minds to possibility that exists outside our paradigms. Everyone decides they know the facts without looking. The Earth is flat! they say, more or less, because of course, they go with what we have always thought, and they are far too  invested in their professional reputations to risk exploration and the (gasp) chance of being called wrong. The way we do it, and maybe have always done it, is to blindly rotate along this globe with the herds who spout the most entertaining message (in the case of my field of interest, that Plath's work reflects only her personal drama), because God forbid we take the time to open our eyes and read something. The status quo counts on our laziness and disdain in thinking for ourselves, as well as reactive emotion against anything uncomfortable. Donald Trump knows how to work this attitude pretty well. This is scholarship? No, this is Ego.

One of the editors for my book, Tom Reynolds, says FSGL creates "cognitive dissonance". This condition is the upset and confusion that arises when a person holds on to two or more contradictory beliefs. When this happens, a person will often automatically avoid the source of the information causing the stress, as well as to avoid all ways of causing more of this stress.

It is a fascinating thing to see: One scholar reviewed The Letters of Ted Hughes (Ted Hughes was Sylvia Plath's husband). In a public blog forum, I posted that Hughes' Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being section essentially spelled out the Qabalistic system I believe Hughes taught Plath. "I skipped over those parts," the reviewer posted. Cognitive dissonance in action.

I could get frustrated over the attachment to the status quo, and I have, but it is so much more pleasant to let it go. I have had some beautiful support at the same time, coming from unexpected places, and from people outside the demographics to whom I had intended to market. I have had the most wonderful support from Lindenwood University, who allows me to teach to my own text. I have had some incredible students who have taken my Plath message and run with it, expanding upon it in their own scholarship. I continue to be invited to speak at conferences and symposiums, where younger, less-programmed minds open to other possibilities. My reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and elsewhere have been great. Such a feeling!

As I grow older, I am learning to let go of my attachment to how I think a thing is supposed to go. Believe me, it can be tough to do this. Whether in my personal or professional life, I am continually surprised at life's other plans. Today, it's my choice to just stay in the joy of the work and let the details figure themselves out. It is my job to uncover and reveal the details, and who wants to be open to reading them will do so when the time is right. It's all right there, for anyone who wants to read it. Sylvia Plath has made the most beautiful, poetic miracle of history, art, alchemy, myth, the stars and more.

There will always be some people who prefer to stay in the dark and not transition to the lighter, brighter season, the new thinking, a new age. They'll dig in their heels and spout their platitudes. They'll choose the dark like the prisoners in Plato's Cave.They'll ignore me. They'll get angry with me. But that won't stop things from changing. It won't stop my findings from getting out, because they will eventually. Truth always wins, just as the world keeps turning, the sun rises again and again, and spring returns after a long, dark winter. I'm enjoying the ride.

Released! Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, vol. one

Well, my friends, the book is out.

As I've been doing my first readings, interviews, discussions and presentations around Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, it has really been a revelation about the preconceptions and assumptions made around me as a tarot card reader, about what my book pertains to, and also about what tarot is. I tend to forget that people outside of my world have often times never even heard of my world, much less visited.

People make the assumption that I am a witch, a Wiccan, and/or a Pagan (I am officially none of those things, although I do respect some of their ideas). It is widely and incorrectly assumed that I conjure spirits and talk to the dead. Some think I can read minds, or perform miraculous healings, and almost as many presume that I think I am Plath reincarnated. No, no, no, no, and no. I am seeing and hearing these incorrect assumptions more and more from interviewers. I have seen embarrassing comparisons to tarot and grade school "cootie catchers," and I have had first memories and childhood recollections inflated into forced analogies that leave me wanting to run screaming.

In some cases, I have been fortunate enough to be granted permission to review the interviews before they're published (oh, bless those reporters!). In other reviews I am not so lucky, and just pray that people don't read/believe it. Sometimes I am able to write a post-published comment, and wag my head and try to clarify the key points. I'll do it here again, just to save the next potential reviewers time:

FIXED STARS GOVERN A LIFE is not a book about tarot. It's not even a book about Qabalah! Nor is it fiction or poetry. It is a book about how to read Sylvia Plath's poetry collection Ariel (the Restored Edition, in the order Plath intended), with the keys to understand the many different levels on which Plath was working. Those levels are Qabalah/Tarot, Alchemy, Mythology, History and the World, Astrology and Astronomy, and the Arts and Humanities. Each Plath poem works on at least all six of these levels, if not more. My work is backed up with years of archival evidence.

The tarot is not a religion.
The tarot is a set of cards, designed to touch upon some ancient mystical systems such as Kabbalah (I'm using the K-spelling here, the Jewish brand, because the Jews used it first. In my book I explain that Plath and Hughes mostly embraced the Hermetic version, spelled with a Q. Christians have their own kind, spelled with a C). The tarot is a psychological tool to reflect the subconscious and give a person direction. The idea is that we know a lot more than we think we know, and the cards help bring that to consciousness. No ghoulies, no ghosties, no chanting or blood sacrifices. Sorry to disappoint. Tarot is just pure psychology, which is why the famous psychologist Carl Jung used the cards for himself and for patients.

Qabalah is not a religion either, although it encompasses some occult systems that people adopt as religion, or that may conflict with some religions. Qabalah is an umbrella term that speaks for all the occult sciences as reflections of a universal force, or one God. This is why I call the facets of Plath's poems "mirrors" in my book--and it's probably why Plath herself liked the mirror metaphor.


In other news, I am planning some events around the book in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. Watch this blog in the next couple days for locations as they are nailed down.

To buy Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, go here. 

Recent and Future Events

Other tarot card readers know that a tarot reader doesn't usually read for him or herself. We all have too much bias about our own lives, too many fears for what could go wrong, and too many wants for how we think it ought to go. And so, as a rule, we don't throw cards down for ourselves. I have had several other reader friends look at my book, and everyone sees it as a success at the end. It is just the painful journey getting there that I can't seem to avoid, no matter how hard I try.

Sigh. Many of you know that the third Amazon-posted release date for Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath has now been missed. I know, I know. I can't believe it either. I can't tell you how excruciating this is. Beyond the embarrassment of the eternal promise that it's coming, it has been expensive for me as I have done so much marketing over these years, and of course with each missed release date I lose preorders who will not take the time and effort to preorder again, and again, and again. I can't blame them. It appears that Amazon has given up on my publisher too, because preordering FSGL is now no longer possible either.

If what I was told is true, my book has been sitting at the printer for over a month. The nature of a university press, of course, is that it is run by a teacher and manned by students. They will not resume classes until January 20th, and so I am not expecting much until probably a couple weeks after then.

I have to just try and press on (I wish I could laugh at that pun). I can say that this experience has dashed my impressions of academia being some kind of cred-feather in one's mortarboard cap.

If you're out there, if you are one of those beautiful people who preordered and keeps telling Amazon, "Yes, I still want it!" please let me know. I want to do something nice for you one day when all this is said and done.

In the meantime, I'm working on volume two, and finishing The Magician's Girl biography and the Early Poems book. I'm also having fun revising my old Night Times memoir, returning it to experimentations in literary form. Thanks to encouragement from my own favorite magician, Zulfikar Ghose, I am returning to what Night Times was, not the first draft of the memoir which was completed in 2005, but the actual magazine. NT was always an irreverent, playful experiment in form and parody. For some reason, I let people tell me what a memoir should look like. I let agents push me to add this, take that out. I got lost inside it all, listening to them. My voice became theirs: flattened and everyday. Now, I am back, and I am really excited about what I see happening.

Also, Class Plans to complement volume one of FSGL will soon be released FOR FREE, for a limited time, and I am rather excited about this because there is information in them that did not make FSGL before it went to print. These will help professors from high school through graduate school levels teach Sylvia Plath with my text. There are lots of discussion questions, in-class exercises, teaching tips, creative writing workshop activities, and more. One does not have to be an instructor to be able to download the plans.

Please note the following calendar events I see in my own crystal ball, if you'd like to be a part of it:

Monday, January 12th-- ALL tarot $ earned this day via phone, email and Skype readings will benefit Tenth Life Cat Rescue. Please make your appointment ASAP--you do not need to be in St. Louis to get a reading. Call me at 314.517.0158 or email tarot@nighttimes.com.

Monday, January 26th--As far as I know, we are still on for the rescheduled November poetry reading at Chance Operations. I haven't done a reading in a year or more, and I am looking forward to it.

Saturday, February 14th--Valentine's Day is also Mardi Gras down in Festus, and beginning at 2 pm I'll be back at Taytro's Bistro for their pull-out-all-the-stops celebration. Last time, there were fire eaters, hula dancers, live bands of all kinds, and probably a hundred other things I didn't notice, because I was busy reading tarot cards to the mobs of people in attendance. Owner and proprietor Luke Taytro is originally from New Orleans, and could not stand the idea of leaving Mardi Gras behind, you see. He promises me that this year will be even bigger. One does not have to be a soothsayer to say there is NO DOUBT.

Saturday, February 21 and Sunday, February 22nd--I'll be presenting two free seminars at the Working Women's Survival Show. Catch me on Saturday at 3:30 - 4:30 pm for "You Are Psychic," and on Sunday at 3 pm for "Tarot Toward Self-Actualization," a repeat of the seminar I did for them in 2013. I will likely have some free tickets to give away beforehand, so write me if you're interested.

Thanks, friends. Watch for more news here, on my Twitter @jgordonbramer or @fixedstarsgov, at www.fixedstarsgovernalife.com, or on my tarot website.

Gifts and Timing

I wanted to have something worthy to say for my New Year's post, which is why I am writing it five days into the New Year. There was too much commotion in finishing up holiday events to write sooner.

2014 has been both a very hard year, and a very wonderful year. On the hard side, I watched three friends lose their sons, all three young men in the 24-25 year range, all due to different causes. To add to this pain, my younger son lost a peer his age in 2014, a friend of one of the aforementioned friends. The grief has been huge. As I have two boys of my own around this age, it shook me to the core. We want to believe that this could never really happen. We realize that a parent never raises a child to "safety." That there is no safety, ever, and that every day of life and time spent with our loved ones is precious. It really makes me clear on what is truly important. It was a most painful gift to learn.

One can't deny, especially in St. Louis, that 2014's political climate has been the test of all tests. I have written here before that I am not an astrologer. That said, that whole End-of-Age 2012 Apocalypse business is actually only supposed to begin then, and I have heard astrologers say it lasts for a number of years. To look at all the wars, the recession, the uprisings and inner and outer revolutions, I'd say that I am becoming a believer.

Those of you close to me, and regular readers, know that my book, Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath had its release held up not once, but twice. It has been entirely stressful and you can read the details in earlier blog entries here. This has been a huge spiritual lesson for me regarding attachment, and being too attached to how I think something should go. In the end, everything truly does seem to happen for a reason. I can look back on these 51 years of life (Gasp! Am I really that old? I can't believe it) and truly see that this "everything happens for a reason" cliche is true in every aspect of my life--the blessings and tragedies have all been essential in forming me to this person today. My little sister pointed out to me that there is just no way anything wrong is happening. I am in my eighth year of the Plath work and miracles continue to happen; new information rises from the most unlikely places supporting my earlier findings; and new people enter my life lending their love and support.

This leads me to the blessings of 2014: How could Sylvia have not been pulling the strings to essentially deliver a friend of hers and Ted Hughes' to me, to give me this treasure who has been in my everyday life since June, Zulfikar Ghose? Far beyond the Plath-Hughes connection, he has become the dearest of friends and such an important person in my creative life. He is a brilliant poet and prose writer, a man who refuses to pander to the trends, a true magician-visionary and great teacher. If only every serious writer could one day find a Zulfi of their own. As for now, he is mine and I refuse to share. ;-) I am trying to read all 25 of his books and review them on Amazon.com and elsewhere, as I get the chance. I encourage you to find his books, read them, and do the same. You will not be disappointed. You can find my reviews searching his name on Amazon.

Other blessings: As I write this, our feral cat, Hermann is asleep on the mat, INSIDE of our house on this bitterly cold January day. Our three years of work taming him is paying off. My husband Tom and I had the most magical two-weeks in the Hawaiian Islands, and I cannot say enough about the magic of the Big Island, especially. Kilauea calls me back (how lucky to see it during its eruption time!), and I'll be glad to get some more Kona coffee. Oh sure, the beaches of Oahu are lovely, and Kauai is a gorgeous rainforest, but the Big Island is truly mystical. There is honestly nothing like it. I need to finish posting my photographs on Facebook. I also count among my blessings meeting and working with the gang at Circus Kaput; finding the best hair stylist in the world, Rosemarie Palazzolo (Drury Salon, Chesterfield), making some great new friends, reconnecting with old friends dear to me, and most especially to getting to know my son Ross' lovely girlfriend, whom we plan to keep forever.

Out in the world, I think our local Prince Ea is a huge gift. I feel so fortunate to be so popular on Academia.edu. I had the time of my life at the 2014 Colgate Writer's Conference and joint Association for Studies in Esotericism Conference, where I presented on Plath. I loved also presenting for Case-Western University and the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. I have felt so incredibly welcomed. It's been delightful to have my moments on television and radio, and to see my tarot business grow the way it has. I truly do feel on-path.

I decided not to make any formal New Year's Resolutions. I have resolutions every day, and I get the majority of them done. I resolve to keep going toward my dreams, always, and to give everything I do my best effort. Every day, I resolve to try and be my best, whatever that is and however I might occasionally stumble, and to try to live from a place of peace and love.

The next couple months of 2015 are already filling up, and I will soon have some separate posts with all the details. Ahead, I'll be doing some tarot fundraisers for cats and dogs; I'll be a featured guest reading poetry with Chance Operations, and doing another reading in April with Lindenwood U; I'm holding two seminars at the Working Women's Survival Show in February; planning more radio and TV appearances; and, fingers crossed, releasing Fixed Stars Govern a Life.  That is, if the time is right.