A last lingering moment

Hi friends! It’s been a little while since I’ve settled down enough to write one of these. “Settled down” feels funny to say in this moment, as I’ve just wrapped up my winter quarter of classes, wrote two 20-page papers, and will soon be on a plane to Copenhagen, for a lovely, much-anticipated vacation with Elise. Before the moment escapes me, I wanted to write a few words about a a recent trip to New York, in particular the significance of getting to go upstate to visit the house of Rachel Pollack, whose writing on the Tarot, science fiction, and goddess religions have proven tremendously meaningful to me in the last few years. If you keep reading my work, you’ll hear much more about Rachel soon enough. For now, here’s a brief reflection on this recent busy stretch, and the small gifts of lingering in the moment that I found while on my trip.
I learned something new as I wrote a letter to Rachel, staying in the village of Rhinebeck, not far from her house in the woods, watching my meditation candles burn down as the hours of writing slipped away: the flame can outlive the candle that first gave it life. As I enjoyed my first ever-taste of sherry, a drink Rachel loved, now sitting on my hotel room table, compliments of the house, I poured two glasses and toasted a woman I’ll never meet, at least not in any straightforward manner. Already, I was inclined to write my journal entry that night to Rachel, pen in hand and with a piece of her jewelry, effectively a long beaded turquoise scarf with a baby-blue semicircle pendant affixed to the middle, draped around my neck. I allowed myself to pull one card from the Burning Serpent Oracle deck that she co-created with her friend Robert Place, and that’s all I needed: I drew The Letter, featuring a drawing of a pigeon with a note sent to Box 1110, my birthday numbers, fixed in its beak. Within moments of sitting down to write, I knew Rachel was there, listening and sending along guidance, a recurrent presence who has made these last few years far more meaningful, if not always more explicable, at least in any manner that I know how to rationally explain.

After one hour of writing, then another, I watched two candles disappear. Yet in those final few, lingering moments, the flame danced in air, too stubborn to dissipate the moment the final bit of wax had melted away. The last dying embers curled around the screw that my dad had suspended in resin inside a small clay pot, a perfect way to keep my meditation candles held in place. In these closing moments, the last few flecks of orange nibbled and corkscrewed around the metal’s spiraling body, a faint glow falling back into the darkness.

The next day, I bid farewell, at least for now, to Zoe and Franny, the tuxedo cat she’d rescued from a kill shelter last fall, now chatty and curious at a distance, like my own April Fool baby Margie back in Chicago. It was my last chance to linger in their home before the bulk of Rachel’s affairs—her library and papers, the original versions of the Tarot cards that have taught me how to read images on many levels at once—are picked up by the archivists at Harvard. Without question, I could have found myself in that room forever, content to thumb through the books that helped Rachel answer some of her most burning questions, then pick up one of the hundreds of Tarot decks off the wall in Zoe’s alcove, each with their own language I might study the rest of my life without exhausting, bouncing interpretations off of Zoe and through the many books Rachel wrote.

Rachel passed away on April 7, 2023, at the age of 77, a year less than the Tarot’s traditional 78, making Rachel the Fool, off on her own journey into some other realm. Near the end of her life, Zoe told me, she kept dreaming up new projects. If we’ve talked anytime in the past two months, you’ve undoubtedly heard me describe something I’ve been working on, perhaps one of the passing ideas that Rachel herself never was able to materialize: a Tarot deck based on the ways that light passes through the course of the day, 24 cards for each of the four suits, one for every hour. There’s a lot more to say about the rest of the dream in which these instructions came my way; trust me when I say I’ll have the fuller story to share down the line, as I’m currently deep inside my own decoding process, still making sense of all that I learned from the second prophetic Rachel dream visit I’ve had in the last year and change. Writing in the final few months before she passed, Rachel wrote that “the Tarot is all story,” understanding that she’d never make her way to the end of it, that the cards would unfold indefinitely into the future. Now, several years deep in conversation with the Shining Tribe deck that she designed, agog at just how many other decks seem ready to teach me another way of reading the world anew, I understand just what she meant.
Yet if this inexhaustible vision of the cards stretches out into an unknowable future, one we’re been ever more scared to face as we pile up the evidence of our inevitable doom, I remember another reminder that Rachel left behind. Contemplating her childhood, and the ways that she read about bans on cross dressing and castration in the Torah, Rachel took these admonitions not as a warning, but instead understood a deeper truth: “You do not forbid what doesn’t exist.” In that childhood moment of uncertainty, it took a similarly impossible glance into the ancient past for her to understand that the innermost parts of herself, not yet obvious to the rest of the world, would become realized in this lifetime. In the same essay, Rachel argued that being trans means “both completely new and unknowably ancient” at once, which she made real by uncovering the buried mysteries of Goddess religions in Greek caves where Persephone descended into the underworld, and at the same time dreamed up worlds inconceivable without the elastic permissiveness of speculative writing, describing the year she began hormones, found the Tarot, and moved to London as her “science fiction year.” In these gestures, I see how Rachel let herself be distributed widely in space and time, precious molecules of dust that endure throughout the eons, carrying traces of this physical body she only recently left behind.

Rachel’s words return me to this present moment only, trusting in the ancient past and speculative future as motivating abstractions, available to us only through the body, which she defined as “anything real, and present, in our lives.” I take a few deep breaths anytime I know the moment at hand must transform again, to better appreciate how I might let things linger just a moment longer before they’re gone for good. I sensed that on the train ride back to the city, sensing from deep within a reminder that many of Rachel’s most essential wisdom first poured forth in this liminal space between the metropolis and her quiet rural home, the currents of the Hudson there to help the emotions flow into focus. The next day, first without total awareness and later with increasing gratitude, I let myself stay inside the fast-changing present that is a brief stay in New York City, taking just a beat longer to appreciate how lucky I was for all of it. I took my time at Ariyan and Yen’s dining room table, delighted as their orange and gray, half-moon faced cat Foxy took to batting around the ball made from leftover garlic bagel aluminum foil. I only left close to noon, far later than I’d intended, but because of the slowness, I was able to get to Troubled Sleep, one of Brooklyn’s best bookstores, just a few minutes off the 7th Ave Q stop.
There, I couldn’t stop myself from browsing and chatting at length, imploring two kind fellow customers to learn about Rachel, giving them each one of her business cards with the image of the Shining Woman imprinted upon its facade. Without lingering there as long as I did, and without animatedly discussing Tarot and science fiction and Samuel Delany, I’d never have been let in on a secret by the woman selling books, behind the counter in an image of Rachel, dressed in a flowing patterned dress, chunky necklace, and boxy glasses frames. She revealed a New York City Tarot deck, made in the 70s and 80s, featuring Delany as the Hanged Man and plenty of other luminaries of a bygone city I’ll never stop chasing behind, the decks now living in a garage on Long Island and soon, with any luck, making their way to Chicago to teach me untold stories once more. What other magic lies just beneath the surface of experience, waiting patiently for someone willing to stick around just a few moments more, curious what might come next?
I soon found out.
I ate lunch at Lovely Day in SoHo, a spot that Grant first took me to sometime soon after we’d finished college, always good for a reasonably-priced, tasty Thai meal in a room that’s held many loving conversations with friends, today with the Delany book I’d just bought. From there, I leisured my way a few blocks south down Elizabeth Street to Participant Inc., the gallery that held the Chloe Dzubilo show I wrote about last summer, its founder Lia having become a welcome interlocutor anytime I find myself in the area. I stayed to chat as long as I knew how, eager to share the mysteries I’d uncovered on the trip so far, describing the progress on my book. As I rose to leave, I realized I hadn’t taken the time to appreciate the show on view, a brilliant collection of mixed-medium artworks by Palestinian artists, with one in particular holding me in place: apparations of two faces, eyes painted white, demanding I meet their unflinching gaze before I returned outside. Just a few moments in their company, standing alongside the show’s curator, Ridikkiluz, was enough to imprint their haunting presence into some deeper layer of my memory, to return again without warning.

There were many more intervening adventures, just a few spare hours in New York enough to mark countless fleeting impressions upon me. That night, I shared my revelations on the gift of lingering with Ariyan, Ramin, and Mari, reading a draft poem and almost making us miss our bus as we left Hart Bar in Bed-Stuy. I first met Ariyan and Ramin nine years ago at a long-gone DIY venue called the Glove just a few blocks away, needing a bottle opener for a Trader Joes lemon beer I’d brought from the nearby brownstone I called home for those few lively months. The two of them became fast companions to countless concerts and protests in the opening months of Trump’s first term, when it felt like the whole city was ready to fight back. My last night in the city that year was the first time the two hosted TechNowruz, a Persian New Year’s party, a chance to gather and dance in defiance of cruelties like Trump’s Iranian travel ban, to celebrate a rich and beautiful culture I’ve been lucky to learn (and write) more about through their influence. I stayed as late as I knew how that night, sad to say goodbye to my new friends, and to the city that had given me so much.
Strange, then, to be here nine years later, hanging out just as the US began its attack on the country, grateful in a sad sort of way to at least get to be with my friends as they tried to begin processing these events. Tomorrow night, the two will host the eighth iteration of the event, a little less festive than in years past, but no less important. While I won’t be there to celebrate and mourn with them, I hope that those gathered will let themselves stay just a moment longer, letting the spark of connection alight between them, knowing, in the end, that we’re here to carry on together, while we still can, through light and shadows both.
PS: One other beautiful conversation that could have carried on far beyond itself is an interview that I hosted with Kelly Hayes and Eman Abdelhadi on my City Dreams radio show a few weeks back! Kelly recently edited (and Eman contributed to) Read This When Things Fall Apart, a lovely collection of letters to activists in crisis. If you aren’t familiar with their work, check out the book, the radio show, and consider going to Pilsen Community Books on March 28 for the launch party for Project 2052, building upon the beautiful speculative world of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. I hope to see you there!