Nine of Wands
There were Japanese soldiers who fought the Big One on island enclaves for decades. Given orders to shoot any enemy that crossed their path, and with no radio, with all their platoon dead and the supply lines severed, these men waited peaceful years for the war to come to them. This happened more than once. And so even after the sky erupted out at the horizon, these men stayed hunkered in their fighting stance, a rusty bullet chambered always as their hair went gray and they learned to live on palmfruit and rats. They couldn’t be talked down from their post by any less than the God-emperor himself. And since they’d last heard his decree, he’d become just another bureaucrat. A man who spoke in a voice not unlike their own.
---
The Nine of Pentacles shows a bedraggled warrior, thick in the arms and thighs. Bandaged and battered and his gut instinct in that wand he leans on weak-kneed and hungry. The other Wands in the background may be the remaining wall of his fort, for all their gaps, and note how they grow. Look always for the sprig of new life.
The body knows when trouble is brewing. It will speed the heart in preparation for the action, expand the lungs and shut down the stomach so you stop thinking of your next meal and focus on blood or the horizon. Your liver will release a jolt of reserved glucose for a tooth-breaking scrap or a sprint through the woods. There is a dream of both deep down in you, close your eyes and feel around for it.
---
I grew up among landmines. Tiger traps of the heart, and pit-falls, caltrops, gew-gaws wired to explode and great spiked logs suspended in the rafters that would swing down at me if I stepped foot in the wrong corridor. My father the man in the Nine of Wands and it passed onto me like an inheritance, like the family trade. Anger a family heirloom I’ve been keeping on the mantle though I do not want it and it’s proven to be worth so little. But for generations we had nothing else to brace the door against those who plotted to take what little we had. My dad in Vietnam and in bar brawls prior—his nose still gristly from punch-outs in podunk saloons. And his father before him a security guard at juvie, among other things, and his father before him lost to history save that he broke his hip old running the farm. Sprawled out on the ice and his words to god sculptures of steam.
---
Freud said that you could consider your mind a city. A sprawling hive-like bureaucracy with its churches and its libraries and its functionary offices, its couriers and garbage trucks and industry, its bodegas and traffic jams and flabby sinecures. Its sewers and secret tunnels, its wire buried in the soil.
And you, in this city that is your mind, only control one room in an office tower somewhere. It may be the penthouse suite with a view of the park but it is only one room still and there are important jobs carried out cross-town by people who will never know your name. And you’ve stacked all the furniture against the door. You’ve bashed at the hands reaching through the crack. And they will try to smoke you out if they can, they’ll play obnoxious music and call your phone to feign emergencies. They’ll batter-ram with the flower pot and they’ll zipline through the windows from neighboring buildings.
---
“Better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.” And the trick is, there is no warrior who hasn’t given up a little blood. But they put us in an office and we sit through a bit of traffic to get there. Times to be and places and chores to carry out, their purpose often foggy in our minds except they’re ours to do. A model to follow and the thinnest scarp of time on which to found some other. Some of us hold this so long that when it’s taken from us by age or circumstance, we fall into despair, into boredom at least. We let that door creak on open, and we invite them in. Tell them to just set the paperwork on the desk and we’ll rubberstamp it without a thought. Go ahead and take my desk and my shelf full of books, I’m not using them anymore. Shuffle me down into a corner of the basement if that’s where you think I belong.
No.
The Nine does not say to lay down your arms. It says to be wary of becoming rigid. Of flexing your muscles so hard and long they stay that way. It does not say to give in. It acknowledges your exhaustion. It shows you for the island enclave hold-out that you are—though maybe it’s just one final floor tile of that room you defend. It knows you’ll have to fight for your mind. Fight for land and fight for food, to see the next day’s sunrise and your children laughing within it, to keep Their radio waves out of your head and the fruits of your labor while aswim in the avalanche. For your name and fight for freedom if you know it when you see it.
It is not made, this body, to lie lax in the sun. And the war wasn’t over, not really, until those old men died on their islands. Who is anyone to tell you when ends the fight you’ve chosen.