What holy image are we attacking?

I feel so forsaken I orient my instinct for perfection on any sacred image...

--What can I do? I know work; and science is too slow. How prayer gallops, how light rumbles...

Take heed, soul. Don't fall prey to sudden salvation.

No hymns now. Don't lose the ground that's gained...

The moment we surround an image, a person or an idea with an air of inviolable sanctity is the moment we obstruct the very release that worship is thought to engender. To even attach oneself to an image, subscribe wholesale to a prepackaged movement or philosophy, or search in the eyes of another for our reflection eliminates any hope of transformation; we don't need inquisitors or zealots to kill us by gradual amputation, we do it to ourselves.

The human heart finds comfort in numbers, clear and concise rules, a grid the mind may fit itself and what it encounters into, a patch of ground where one is sure of where they stand and where there are few shadows and fewer choices. There is great comfort in belonging, faith and the light of logic. None of us are beyond the pull of the heart, there are no buddhas or saints walking among us. What there is no lack of are institutions, categories, tribes and authorities promising us that in a few easy steps, we too can be on the fast track to enlightenment, popularity and a spotless soul, if only we choose to follow the correct path.

So we have a cup surrounded by identical cups and embraced by climbing vines; we have a heart within a system, but the circuit is interrupted, the arteries that are essential to its functioning never reach the mind. Pursuing those comforts of the heart without questioning why and blind faith in someone else's answers are a kind of brain-death; too often we're suffering from a sort of intellectual hypoxia, starving for a belief that will take our lives out of our own hands, euphoric with illusions that seem to lead to the promised land but instead lure us farther into ignorance.

Or we may see an individual nestled into the cushion of society, a church, a worldview built by someone else and controlled by a few, always at a remove from those they lead, always higher up the ladder. The cups arrange themselves into a grid, each indistinguishable from the other, vanishing into sameness.

The wall behind the couple on the Sun card is another grid, and the man on the left seems almost to be in the process of merging with it, his leg turned to stone, frozen in an odd angular gesture like a figure carved in bas-relief. The woman appeals to him, but what is it that she wants? This could be a moment of choice; will he follow her, is following the only means of action he has? They regard each other warily, the way animals sniff out a stranger, each looking into the eyes of the other to see themselves. When we cultivate a pleasing image or act only according to someone else's whims and expectations, we're in danger of trapping ourselves within it, dancing in lockstep with no room for improvisation.

We're so desperate to inject our lives and our actions with meaning. If we can't find one we're happy to surrender our own will completely, if only someone will give us an answer and light up all the corners we can't see. It's not a question of rebellion purely for the sake of rebellion; any disenchanted teenager, clothed in the correct partisan uniform, worshipping at the altar of their various pop- and counter-culture idols can fail to accomplish anything with that. It's a matter of being constantly in the act of revision, reappearing to ourselves the way the Star reappears, never finished unburdening herself, emptying in order to fill.

Words aren't sacred, not our own, not anyone's. Rimbaud understood this when he dismantled his own work in "Alchemy of the Word", old poems he resurrected but appearing, as Graham Robb says, "curiously hobbled: syllables have dropped out like stones from an old wall.". And in the holes he pried open he saw through to a space where "From human praise, / From common urges / You free yourself / And fly off accordingly.".