The Knight of Cups
It’s not my compliment to share, but one of the loveliest things I’ve ever heard someone say about a piece of writing was in reaction to A.E. Osworth’s upcoming and fucking outstanding guest post on Knights and the members of The Babysitters’ Club. Prepare yourselves for Wednesday.
She looks right at you and bolts/ As she walks out the door/ Your blood boiling, your stomach in ropes/ And when your friends say what is it/ You look like you've seen a ghost/ And you walk/ Under the streetlights/ And you're too drunk to notice that everyone is staring at you/ And you don’t care what you look like, the world is falling around you/ You just have to see her. The Knight of Cups has written an album about every single time they’ve ever been dumped, and they have a very active Soundcloud. If the Page of Cups is cultivating and protecting a vulnerable heart, the Knight is tearing out their own ribcage and putting a selfie on Instagram. They channel emotion into creativity— a ton of great art comes from Knights of Cups. But the Knight of Cups believes that each of their emotions is a tiny little Tinkerbell. It doesn’t work if only Peter Pan claps— the entire audience has to clap for them to be real. It’s a very clever way of avoiding yourself. The Knight of Cups pushes all of their feelings outwards and is rewarded for it with compliments to their art and/or mental health. But if they tried even for a second to turn that energy inwards they would fall apart.
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I can't make you love me/ If you don’t/ You can't make your heart feel/ Something it won’t/ Here in the dark/ In these final hours/ I will lay down my heart/ And I'll feel the power/ But you won’t. The Knight of Cups is the ultimate Nice Guy. Sensitive, expressive, has a great emotional vocabulary, wants to give a lot of love, really good at clocking other people’s feelings, self-focused to the point of manipulation. Much like the other Knights, the stubbornness and single-mindedness isn’t inherently bad; it’s a matter of if you’re paying attention to and caring about your surroundings. Because they’re so emotionally clever, the Knight of Cups can make it seem like they’re caring when really they’re just gathering information. (I clearly have a Time with this card; a lot of people I love have bad and/or Bad exes who used Knight of Cups style tactics, and, unlike with other cards where I’m able to hold a lot of complexity, I find myself relatively unforgiving with this one.)
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Bet you rue the day you kissed/ A writer in the dark. When I am able to and also interested in pushing further into those possibilities, though, I can recognize the ways that the card gives us permission to let loose in some really necessary and cathartic ways. How often do we really let ourselves feel at, like, Les Mis levels? Not just feel that dramatically, but express it at that scale? I’m talking feelings so big that they cannot be contained by diaries or friendship, ones that have to be felt and witnessed and affirmed by a bunch of people in order to be comprehendible. It’s still the Tinkerbell thing, but a much more generous way of looking at it— these feelings are legitimately too big to make sense of alone. In many ways, the Knight of Cups is moving out of loneliness and into community. Big feelings can be isolating because they can be all-encompassing in a way that can sometimes block the view of anything else. Sharing these feelings creatively in a public forum brings both a togetherness and a not-aloneness. It also gives us songs like these, and we have the Knight of Cups to thank for the absolute blessing of living in the same age as Sometime Around Midnight.
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Sometime Around Midnight, The Airborne Toxic Event
I Can’t Make You Love Me, Bonnie Raitt (link is to the Bon Iver cover because of course it is)
Writer In The Dark, Lorde
I’m currently reading on a sliding scale— get in touch if you want an individual and/or group reading!
Hi pals! Content will continue to be free until we’re not sheltering in place. Also, my money situation is tenuous! Subscribing is $5/ month and $50/ year, and if you have some disposable $$ I would love it if you did (or sent me a Venmo tip @james0ctober). Stay safe, bake bread, watch TV. <3