This is a piece I originally wrote in April 2020.

My friend Heath writes beautiful emails. They write many beautiful things but there's something about these words of theirs, just for me, between us. The style we've built together. We stick our tongues in our cheeks as we type in reference to our correspondence. We often get mystical. We always get angry. A month ago, they told me about their most recent tarot spread in a way that made me want to share it with you. "The first [card I pulled] was The Tower. My least favorite card. It truly means destruction. Usually of the earth-shattering, life-altering variety." So far, so 2020. 

Tarot does not predict the future. It does, however, use archetypes and symbols that are found across various cultures to encourage and stimulate reflection in the seeker. An aid to shake them out of whatever stagnancy they find themselves in. It's not fatalistic to recognise patterns. It's the first step to being able to change them. Interpretation is key. Whether I'm reading a spread for myself or someone else, The Tower immediately brings the tower of Babel to mind. A Bible story that serves as explanation for why humans speak different languages, blaming the hubris of the species instead of God's fragile ego. If you're not familiar with it, back in the day, everyone spoke the same language because there was only one. In the city of Babel - also known as Babylon - the population decided to build a tower. To get closer to God, I guess? They nearly managed it, too. But God wasn't keen, destroyed the tower, made it so no one could understand each other to even think about rebuilding the tower, French is suddenly a thing, chaos reigned, then it was now. 

But speaking the same language doesn't guarantee comprehension. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that. I'm just grouchy. Work isn't hitting the spot the way it used to. Of course, I don't mean jobs that pay. Even in my line of precarious artistic endeavour, with my fluctuating moods and self-esteem best measured by a seismograph, I felt I was building towards something. Wait, no, scratch that. I was just starting to let myself believe I was building towards something. As event after event was cancelled, my grand plans were exposed as the wet sandcastles they were, falling back into the sea. I watched videos of elaborate make-up tutorials, animations of Korean extraction facials and pasta machines slicing shapes on repeat. Ordered, rhythmic, expunging, beautifying, patterns. Cause and effect. Neato.

If I had a more reliable concentration span, I'd read The Decameron, as we seem to be in a live-action remake. I am spending so much time online, just as I was starting to wean myself off the dopamine. Internet patter is getting me down. Worst is that I keep using it myself. I'm tired, I justify, but, really, I'm confused and want to be part of the conversation. Treading water while I have nothing to say. Stressed, despite my heaving privilege. I'd planned - and paid - to be in Prague this weekend. I've not been there before. I was meant to go with the person I love. I'm not above sulking about that. But my life is, ostensibly, fine. 

I'm nostalgic for the oddest things. Southern England, which I couldn't wait to leave while I was there. An open mic where I was on the bill with a right-wing psychiatrist with material to match. A patient of his came to watch, said he'd been invited in a session. He talked at me and gave me cigarettes. I made my excuses and left. They both sent me Facebook messages the next day. I didn't reply. Rushing to get the train to work. Rushing to get the last train home. Being annoyed by people in stations. Huh, I really have spent so much of my life on trains.

Some things just can't be substituted. The rapid increase in Instagram Live shows enable me, in theory, to see comedians and artists I've admired from afar. But I'm just going to be doing the same thing, squinting through my screen and receiving notifications during things that really depend on being given complete focus. Theatre and stand-up were respite from my phone, if nothing else, and they were always something else. I've never been more mindful than being an audience member at a Fringe show and I paid handsomely to be trained in Transcendental Meditation Trade Mark. And I was never alone when I was part of an audience. We didn't have to talk to each other to reach an understanding.

I'm constantly negotiating between my calm and my ambition. The threat they pose to each other. I think it comes from being privately educated. No satisfaction with what's been done. No sense of achievement. No, "Well done for getting an A," but, "Why didn't you get an A*?"  Which makes rest feel like weakness. Which is a direct route out of the present moment to ingratitude. Which frames life as a race to win, that it's possible to overtake and get ahead. But though I'm critical of productivity and the neo-liberal narratives around it, I do want to produce good creative work. Art, as it's often known. Want to be an artist? Do an art. And, yes, there's this urge that to do it isn't enough, that I must be... exceptional. When what you've been taught makes it difficult to learn, what's the point of that? Tear it all down.

But my art form, in its true form, is on hold, indefinitely. I miss stand-up something fierce. What's the opposite of stage fright? I feel numb without it. I admire those who are trying. Satire is needed more and more but what is anyone doing beyond gawping and repeating what's already been said and done? The people who are supposed to be most qualified? There's a few exceptions, yes. But on the whole, I'm with Seth Simons when he wrote in his article Time, Delayed, "Am I calling for late night to stop being funny and start doing journalism? No, but I am suggesting, maybe, gently, that an across-the-board deemphasis of goofs and bits is more urgent than it may seem. We are marching into the unknown, yet no one can honestly describe where we are now."

The pressure is on artists to create beauty, resuscitate our collective wills, imagine ways out. That's... a lot to ask. It is anyway. Add the context of a pandemic? Surefire burnout. Give them a break. Find your own reasons to live. Fortunately, there's enough of us types to take shifts. We just need a rota. I'm furloughed from my temp job, on sabbatical from my real work. That's not to say I've become wildly undisciplined. I've ordered a beginner's acrylic paint set. Make something for its own sake. An end in itself. A private view.

Maybe this is all in my head just because I heard Babylon, the early Noughties chart topper from indie ethereal soft boy David Gray, for the first time in actual decades the other day. It's a beautiful song about disorientation. It's also about being alone, taking drugs, channel hopping and finally saying something true, amongst other things. The lyrics are simple but evocative. He knew what he was doing when he gave it that title. It was played a lot when I was starting at secondary school. Things that are popular are sometimes good, who knew?! I had the album White Ladder on CD, what a format that was. Because it was approved by my mum as suitable for car journeys, it got a fair few spins. If I shut my eyes hard enough, I can almost feel myself in the passenger seat, hear her singing, getting the lyrics wrong but the enthusiasm right.

But I can't travel back in time without bringing this all with me. It's not me at ten years old in that seat. She was sad and scared, like I am now, but she had such a set, rigid plan for her life, believed it was all to come. And that was true, then, because she hadn't done much yet. So much was coming. And it still is. But I can't undo it. I can't destroy that tower. 

Heath is very dear to me and lives very far away. We haven't been with each other in person since 2016, when we first met. But as I read their words, I feel closer to them than anyone. Maybe that's why I'm going to try to keep writing, even if it's a bit wrong or doesn't come out how I want it to, namely, elegant and precise. Just because it's the closest way to be close where we are now. 

I re-read Heath's email. I'd overlooked their next sentence about The Tower. "It's a card where you want to pay attention to the others that are pulled alongside."

That's the other thing about tarot. Each card has its own meaning but it really is all about the context. Like a word in a sentence. Like a brick in a tower. Because that's the funny thing.

Destruction and deconstruction look the same until you start putting things back together.