Page of Wands
What separates man from the animals? A consciousness of death? A facility with language. A cognitive dexterity, a frontal lobe the size of a continent. Sure. But something else that stands out from our biology like a rock in a swamp. We humans aspire. Food and water and shelter, even for the little ones under our purview, are not quite enough. Are necessary but not sufficient. So, we chase after something else, most of us. We dreamt a little dream unbeckoned in our youth and while it morphs and reduces, expands if our soul is hardy enough, that dream stays dreamt no matter the horse-stall in which we are forced to sleep.
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The Page studies longingly the end of his wand pointed to the sky. Imagines what could be done with such an implement. Thinks of the figure he’ll cut against this landscape—a desert, really, a blankness to be filled with his potential—once he’s mastered this tool. And a wand is the reified emblem of the creative intuition, the generative instinct, located in the spinal cord and the gut as much as the heart and the skull. And the Tarot tells us that those who elect to wield it must, as the salamanders on on his tunic suggest, be willing to withstand the fire—their own, the world’s. Our Page believes himself ready. Envisions the grandeur of the throne where he’ll one day rest—as though there is such a thing and he’d know it when it was time. Like the Fool, he has no idea what it will require.
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We’re teaching our machines how to see. Not just to record, but to understand, to make decisions based on what it sees. Forget the consequences. A generation back, further, we thought the camera was the hard part. Copy the visual field and all else is detail. But the computer struggles to determine relevance. It cannot tell what is an 8 and what is a B and it stubbornly refuses to consider whether the adjacent characters are numbers or letters. It cannot tell the difference between a face and a picture of a face. It knows a low-light condition but not that the sun is setting. And how different that is than it rising.
Humans understand relevance. For now, this separates us from the machines. A little less than it did yesterday. We do this, in part, because we have a goal—whether we’ve chosen it or it has chosen us. Consider the beauty of a sweating glass of water when your throat is dry, the indelible soft-hardiness of bread when starved. The shape of your lover after long days untouched. The Page looks to the future with these sort of hungry eyes. Though what he wants is not so simple. Nothing is so simple as it seems.
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They ask you time and again what you want to be when you grow up and there seems some perverse cruelty in expecting a child to have any idea. What do they know? From what experience can they draw? It doesn’t matter, so much, how the child responds. The point is to be pointed. To get the kid on some sort of track that can convey them into the future, and should they get distracted along the way—become an accountant instead of a theoretical physicist—the only heart broken might be their own. But it pulled them along, that aspiration. What bear-traps and pitfalls were avoided along the way. . .
A lot of my friends died before they turned thirty, forty. One or two would be a lot in peacetime and my count’s higher than that. And some others survived by the skin of teeth, lost their minds and their livelihood. Some could only be saved by Jesus—atheists take note. Opiates are a demon if we’ve ever known one. And it’s only a fool who calls falling under its spell stupidity. Trust me, you’re nowhere near smart enough to outwit it. But maybe—I pray it’s true—there is some catapult in your intuition that will fling you free of the confusion. An arrow in your gut that points out past the horizon. Because I was dissolute as any of them. I had all their anger and disappointment, maybe the only defect I missed was their boredom. I had the Word, its own kind of faith.
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Take your time. Hold it to the light, note where it sprouts and where its gone hard as stone. Learn its heft and its length. Wear it smooth with your hands. And note that it will bear your weight when all else sinks into the mud. That you might pull yourself from pits on its strength, might fend off attackers with the sharpest of fangs and claws.
The human is alone on this planet because her instincts can be purposely trained. Some urge older than you, an artifact in the blood, to make honeycomb and over the years you make those octagons into a spiraling mandala, into a portrait of your lover’s face, into a map of the sky. The place you stand whatever it is that calls to you from beyond and don’t fail to notice that a Wand makes the best lever. And it can bludgeon or cast spells, it can pole your boat across the turbulent waters, be used to build the house or pry one loose from its fittings. It can be used to climb the mountain. In emergency, it can be burned to keep off the deadly cold.