The Waste Land Tarot - Thesis Proposal Outline Page

(This is the older outline. I'll archive this and post newer one soon)

1. Because “The Waste Land” is an intimidating poem to the novice reader, I would like to create a software toy that allows the reader to engage with the poem in a meaningful and educational way, using the format of a game of Tarot cards.

2. Provide a pedagogical tool to introduce new readers to the symbology of the poem, helping to interpret its meaning through play
3. Why a digital medium?
   1. Cognitive research shows the advantages of using visual elements in addition to words in certain learning contexts, particularly with novices in a subject. In general, the more sense channels involved in a learning environment (text, graphics, sounds, even smells) the better that knowledge is retained.
   2. “Technology is useful not just in language learning but in the study of literature, culture, and film as well. Ten years ago, it would have been difficult to connect the words technology and culture or technology and literature or to find synergy between those fields. Interestingly enough, technology may end up being the medium that binds together the different areas of our departments, namely language, literature, culture, and film. Hypertext and hypermedia grant users access to the many dimensions of a text: linguistic, literary, cultural, historical. Technology then finds itself, as Claire Kramsch says, at the intersection of language, literature, and culture.” writes Gilberte Furstenberg in her 1997 article “Teaching with Technology: What Is at Stake?” at http://www.adfl.org/adfl/bulletin/v28n3/283021.htm
      1. Interactive medium allows students to absorb material at their own pace, in a non-linear fashion.
4. The intended audience. Who will be using this?
5. Software intended for post-secondary students (undergraduates) for introductory literature classes, for example
6. The poem itself, presented in what way?
   1. Some background and context of the poem. Who is Eliot? What is modernism?
   2. Formal elements of poetry that are used in the poem: Allusion, metaphor…
   3. Where do the symbols come from? Exploring the historic and literary sources that Eliot refers to. This aspect of the project would take advantage of the encyclopedic affordances of the digital medium.
      1. Pagan fertility rituals and Frazer’s Golden Bough
      2. The Grail Myth and debt to Weston’s From Ritual to Romance
      3. The Tarot deck itself, some history and background
         1. Traditional Italian suits were Swords, Batons, Coins & Cups
         2. Initially a diversionary game like bridge, which only later became associated with divination
      4. Biblical references
      5. Shakespearean references
      6. Inspiration from Baudelaire and metaphysical poets
      7. References from Ovid and classical texts
      8. References from lesser-known works of literature
      9. References from Eastern religion and philosophy, particularly ideas of asceticsm
      10. [If I use direct quotations from these published sources, do I need explicit permissions from publishers, or does this constitute fair use because of its academic nature? Collecting permissions would be a monumental task considering the number and variety of references contained in the poem]
7. Precedents:
   1. Comic book versions of classic literature, which attempt to be educational in tone, give illustrations which enhance the understanding of the text. (Though much depends on how the artist visually interprets the words, of course)
   2. Edna Coffin created “Talking Poetry,” an interactive piece to teach Hebrew poetry
   3. Dante visualizations (so far haven’t found this reference)
8. How the game works
   1. After the initial establishment of setting, (boardwalk, fortune teller machine), the player is presented with a screen that shows Madame Sosostris at the top. On the left side is a place where drawn cards will go, and to the right of that a space where the interpretation will be displayed. Below this area is a workspace where the player will be able to take elements of the cards and rearrange them.
   2. The text incorporates associations for each of the symbols appearing on the card. The player clicks a button and the next card is presented accordingly. At each stage, the player has the option to 'keep' the card, which moves it into a player 'workspace,' where the symbols become available for reconfiguration. Only a limited number of cards can be taken and rearranged by the player at one time. When the player has designed her amalgamation, she clicks a button to submit it for feedback. Sosostris responds with some variation of hot or cold depending on how close the player has gotten to the game's predetermined combination. Maybe the player is entitled to a certain number of attempts, or maybe the process can go on indefinitely. The end result is that the player slowly becomes familiar with the language of symbols at work in the poem.
      1. A symbolic key is produced at the beginning of each game. The player's goal is to essentially guess that key through trial and error. Something like the game Mastermind or Clue where you enter your guess by choosing a series of colors or symbols, then submitting them to be analyzed. If you have two of the five elements right, say, you get some feedback and you try again until you get the right combination. So for example, the randomly generated key could be the number 4, the lady Belladonna, the suit of pentacles, a dog and a dry riverbed. From the cards the player has seen so far, she has, say, the Voice of Thunder, the ocean, the Fisher King, the number 5 and a parrot. She submits these elements and the machine tells her that none are correct. Maybe next time she combines the parrot with the number 4 and a dry riverbed and she has 2 elements right. The player is trying to achieve the right alchemy to win the game.
      2. Peripherally to this, Sosostris deals cards to the player, alongside which is her interpretation of the card's meaning. Say that the card is the 9 of Cups, which happens to feature Lil, for instance, pictured at a bar, with several empty glasses next to her, and she's slumped like an impressionist painting of an absinthe drinker. Sosostris will give a paragraph or two of text that seems vaguely related to the situation, incorporating interpretation of some of the items in the card. Something like, "Your heart is broken, you do nothing but sit and your hopes are empty." The useable elements of the card are maybe the chair, the cups, the number 9 and Lil herself. Each of these elements have word associations that Sosostris combines to write the interpretation that appears.
      3. The player can then take this card to her workspace and use the 9 and Lil, along with the dry riverbed from a previous card to basically create a new card which is her guess towards the completion of the assigned key. It would be like solving a visual riddle. Maybe there should be a hint at the beginning, offering some of the word associations that are contained in the key. So if the secret key is Belladonna, a dog, the number 4 and the suit of pentacles, the clue would be something like "The lady of the rocks counts her coins, the digger, friend of man buries them again." So the player familiar with the poem will be on the lookout for these elements appearing in Sosostris' cards, but in any case, the interpretations given by the game help the player to figure out the associations of the symbols so that the riddle can be solved.
9. The emphasis in the game is to provide insight into the symbolism that Eliot uses in his poem and show the origins and contexts of the original archetypes he has borrowed
10. The advantage of having a digital representation of the card deck is that feedback can be provided to the player when manipulating the symbolic building blocks. The cards themselves can be dynamic, presenting different combinations of thematic elements, different scenes in which the poem's characters can be juxtaposed. This creates a satisfying user experience that also results in a closer relationship to the themes of the poem.
11. Overview
12. Idea is to tease out and explore archetypal themes occurring in “The Waste Land,” for those who are already somewhat familiar with the poem. Exploring Eliot’s cited inspirations and their relation to the poem. Game as tool for understanding Wasteland or toy based on imagery of poem as source material. Fidelity to Tarot concepts - simple game or esoteric tool?
13. What did Tarot mean originally to the people who first used it as a distraction, a card game? Trumps, Tarocchi, Triumphs. Contrasted with the meaning we find in it now, distantly extracted to suit 21st century purposes.
14. The relationship between the seeker (player) and the reader of the cards (Sosostris). In the poem we have a frustrated seeker (no water).
15. The presumed speaker/observer in the poem is an avatar for all of us who question the lack of meaning in our modern landscape.
16. Themes
    1. Source material for the project comes from:
       1. Elements and figures from the poem itself, including the allusions to other works
       2. Eliot’s themes of :
          1. Death by water
          2. Women’s virtue stolen/lost
          3. Vignettes of failed love.
          4. Resurrection
          5. Religion has lost meaning
          6. Confusion of different languages.
       3. Items that Eliot mentions in his Notes but not directly in the poem
       4. Indirect references to other documents and works of literature
       5. From Frazier
          1. The aging king is responsible for the deterioration of his kingdom.
          2. The passage of seasons.
          3. Growth & decay.
          4. Marriage, death, rebirth.
          5. Reproduction & dissolution.
          6. The merging of primitive magic into later religious theory.
       6. From Jessie Weston
          1. Mystery cults & Christianity
          2. Grail quest, wounded king, kingdom suffers drought.
          3. Hero must somehow restore the land’s fertility. Gawain, nephew of King Arthur.
          4. She connects Tarot to palace of Medinet Abou and sculptural calendar connected to rise and fall of Nile waters.
          5. Also relates to Chinese monument commemorating Yao drying up deluge waters.
          6. Fish as divine life symbol.
17. Visual Aspects
    1. Clip art style line drawings with blown-up Xerox look and various degrees of transparency.
    2. 1900s Sears catalog, advertisement images.
    3. Textures of marble, fur glass, granite paper, stained glass
    4. Collage
    5. Landscapes, cityscapes
    6. Palimpsest
    7. Maybe grisaille color palette. Brownish-gray and Bluish-gray.
    8. Gradients, geometries.
    9. Symmetry allows for juxtaposition. Ambiguity of images - shoe is a car or a bed.
    10. Traditional Italian suits were Swords, Batons, Coins & Cups.
    11. 78 cards in the deck. 0-21 trumps, A-10 and Page, Knight, Queen, King for each suit. 22 + 56.
    12. Problem of imposing meaning upon an image instead of reading the meaning from it.
18. Methods for interpreting meaning
19. Surrealist translation - use Google to translate the foreign passages in the poem multiple times.
    1. Spiritual growth in symbolism of Tarot and Fool’s Journey provides a counterpoint to the death/lack/loss of meaning poem implies.
    2. Surrealist word and image combination techniques offer a chance to revitalize the ‘dead myths’ that Eliot highlights in the poem.
    3. Eliot has borrowed the fool from earlier poets and earlier culture, but he does not own these symbols. The symbols have a life outside of Eliot’s poem. They continue to evolve and whisper to different people and artists in their own way. The purpose of art is to inspire others to create art.
       1. “Automatism, being free of conscious control, offered a way out of the impasse of Dadaism, a return to writing but not to literature, and authentic expression free of aesthetic criteria and from the associations of a language half-dead from habitual usage.” (Gooding, 141)
    4. “The method of automatic writing was suggested by two distinct sources. Breton, a former medical student, was aware of Pierre Janet’s book “L’automatisme Psychologique” which describes automatic writing in a diagnostic context. The other source was the practices of mediums, shorn of any ‘other-worldly’ associations. The first medium to be examined scientifically was Helene Smith in Theodore Flournoy’s “From India to the Planet Mars”; the Surrealists dubbed her ‘The Muse of Automatic Writing’ and her photograph appeared in several of their publications. Helene Smith received communications from Mars in the Martian alphabet (which she was fortunately able to translate into French.)” (Gooding, 141)
    5. “It is not to be despised, in my opinion, if, after gazing fixedly at a spot on the wall, coals in the grate, clouds, a flowing stream, if one remembers some of their aspects; and if you look at them carefully you will discover some quite admissible inventions. Of these the genius of the painter may take full advantage, to compose battles of men and animals, landscapes or monsters, devils and other fantastic things...” Leonardo da Vinci “Treatise on Painting” (cited in Gooding, 48).
    6. “The purpose of surrealist visual techniques is to open a window onto the marvellous that lies concealed behind the everyday. This revelation can be achieved by different means: by manipulating materials, or by play with images, whether given or found.
       The first category of techniques includes those that are essentially automatic; these ‘freeze’ chance events in whatever medium is being used, to create artificially Leonardo’s ‘blots’ and ‘clouds’, and in this way they provoke spontaneous images free of conscious intention. Once these images appear they can be elaborated; in Marcel Jean’s words they provide ‘The point of departure for poetic hallucination.’
       Into the second category fall various methods of directly re-interpreting existing images to produce new, more provocative or beautiful visions, delirious and monstrous amalgamations. (Gooding, 48)
    7. “The found object also has a special sense, as described by Breton, who relates it to dream. Breton extended Freud’s method of dream interpretation to include certain objects which seemed to him to possess a special allure.
       This charged encounter with the external is what Breton refers to as ‘objective chance’, when causality becomes subject to desire. Such objects are the catalytic focus where two chains of events, one internal, the other external, intersect. It is a sort of destiny imposed by the subject on reality, not so much a matter of pre-ordination but rather of recognising the encounter (and subsequently decoding it). Some Surrealist constructed objects are intended to create the possibility for this encounter artificially, to be symbolic representations of unconscious desires and motivations. For similar reasons Breton wished to put objects seen in dreams into circulation, a plan accomplished by Ferdinand Cheval in the building of his ‘Ideal Palace.’” (Gooding, 157-8)
    8. “To some extent the Surrealist project can be seen as a search for, and intervention in, the new myths underlying contemporary history, the unconscious current beneath everyday events. “The Great Transparent Ones” is an eloquent statement of this quest. Part of Breton’s rejection of the position of the ‘artist’ was his belief that personal creativity produced only a personal mythology, the task and importance of collective activities being the creation of collective myths. In “Entretiens” (1954) Breton recalls with approval an observation made by Georges Bataille: that the supposed absence of myth is perhaps the true myth of today.” (Gooding, 161)
    9. Conceptual blending (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_blending)
       Conceptual Blending is a theory of cognition[1]. According to this theory, elements and vital relations from diverse scenarios are "blended" in a subconscious process known as Conceptual Blending, which is assumed to be ubiquitous to everyday thought and language. Insights obtained from these blends constitute the products of creative thinking. The Theory of Conceptual Blending was developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. The development of this theory began in 1993, and is presented in their book The Way We Think (ISBN 0465087868). This theory is based on basic ideas advanced by George Lakoff in his book Women Fire and Dangerous Things. It also related to Cognitive architecture theories like SOAR and ACT-R, and to frame-based theories of Marvin Minsky, Jaime Carbonell and others.
    10. Effects of our choices that contribute (add weight to likelihood) of ‘random’ events. Dynamic of weighted randomization. Weight and number of components affects interpretations
    11. Increase level of generativity
    12. Numerological correspondences 0, 22, 13, 11, etc.
    13. Reassemble the symbol, meaning mapping symbology
    14. Echoing the procedure for reading tea leaves. Pour water, let the particles move, then they settle. Maybe each suit has a different mechanic. Earth air fire water physical mechanics of animated particles. Maybe a grid and calculation of weights produces the interpretation.
    15. In Tarot, the randomness of cards is seen as the dictation of Fate. You pulled this card for a reason and now you must make sense of its message.
    16. Tarot and the Subconscious
        “The symbolism of the Tarot in general, and the Fool's Journey in particular, is seen as describing spiritual progress and growth. Contemplation of the Tarot is believed by some to aid this. It is also common to meditate using a particular card as a focus. Believers in this approach, who include Christian mystics as well as assorted New Agers, sometimes regard divination as a somewhat immature use of the Tarot.” (TheophileEscargot, Kuro5hin.org)
    17. “Let us set aside these shadowy images for now and consider the tarot simply for what it is - a deck of picture cards. The question becomes - what can we do with them?
        “The answer lies with the unconscious - that deep level of memory and awareness that resides within each of us, but outside our everyday experience. Even though we ignore the action of the unconscious most of the time, it profoundly affects everything we do. In his writings, Sigmund Freud stressed the irrational, primitive aspect of the unconscious. He thought that it was the home of our most unacceptable desires and urges. His contemporary Carl Jung emphasized the positive, creative aspect of the unconscious. He tried to show that it has a collective component that touches universal qualities.
        “ We may never know the full range and power of the unconscious, but there are ways to explore its landscape. Many techniques have been developed for this purpose - psychotherapy, dream interpretation, visualization and meditation. The tarot is another such tool.
        “...The point is that of all possible stories, I chose a certain one. Why? Because it is human nature to project unconscious material onto objects in the environment. We always see reality through a lens made up of our own inner state. Therapists have long noted this tendency and have created tools to assist in the process. The famous Rorschach inkblot test is based on such projection.” (Bunning, www.learntarot.com/less1.htm)