Pick Seven Cards
Chay Newman
God can be a myth in the same way faeries and ghosts and witches and vampires are, and you shouldn’t feel guilt for thinking so.
God can be a myth in the same way faeries and ghosts and witches and vampires are, and you shouldn’t feel guilt for thinking so.
Installation view of nightshifts, Buxton Contemporary, the University of Melbourne, 2023. Featuring Mikala Dwyer, Untitled 2011. Michael Buxton Collection, the University of Melbourne Art Collection. Photography by Christian Capurro.
All of them are here. Seven light points, seven corners. Paper ash geometry and pockets of sacred lights; bound together through something otherworldly, something supernatural and, among them, are these. Here are your a-thousand love-me-not lives tied together by nooses and red string, and this lamp—glass, marker, way finder thing—is telling you a story. Seven stories.
You’ve died seven times. Seven deaths. Seven aspects of your body and yourself from an array of a million that seem to make up who you are. It’s witchcraft, so don’t question it.
These deaths you’ve died will be made of overly complicated words and stupid juxtaposition; sentences that never end and too many abstract metaphors that you aren’t even sure you understand yourself. You’ll use words like gospilic and evlusivity and euphemerialism and they aren’t words yet, but they will be. Everything is a concept made of the things that have come before it. You are everything you have ever touched and how stupid, how wonderful, how unfair, how awful it is that the ‘Untitled’ sacred geometry light knows this.
What does sacred geometry even mean?
Um, rude. Don’t question it. It’s sacred. That’s enough and enough and enough, and maybe art changes shape and light and spacetime once it’s looked at.
This is your lamp and these are your cards, laid out in front of you like the days of the week, like finite pieces of spacetime and religion. Pick a card, tear its paper, make it an anomaly from its deck. Ask it not if they love you but if you love them. I’ll read you prose instead. This is your epilogue.
i. DEATH
ii. JUDGEMENT
iii. STRENGTH:
iv. THE DEVIL
v. THE FOOL & THE LOVERS
vi. THE WORLD:
Death
What do you think of the sculpture? Well. It’s a light. Actually, fuck you, it’s not. It’s a light that is not a light. Maybe that doesn’t make it anything at all, or maybe that is what makes it everything.
“You’ve died seven times. Seven deaths. Seven aspects of your body and yourself from an array of a million that seem to make up who you are. It’s witchcraft, so don’t question it.”
You’ll look at this thing, here against a wall, beyond a second storey staircase, in the city of Southbank. According to the plaque, this is a spiritual object. It’s an occult artifact, something of supernaturality, of sexuality, a tribute to her connection to witchcraft and magic and—
Woah. That’s so fucking cool, you’ll think.
A piece that doesn’t even have a title gets to be here, exploring an invisible force that grounds itself to the space, time, and place. And that you, by chance or by fate or by witchcraft or by the no. 19 tram line, somehow also exist within. You found your way to this wayfinding marker, but how did it find you?
Well, let me tell you a story:
Judgement
God hates you.
Just kidding! Don’t worry, he doesn’t.
You really did think he did for a while though. How could you not? You’ve spent fifteen years in primary, secondary and tertiary education, and thirteen of them have been in Catholic schools.
In the beginning, or whatever, Mrs Harvey read you nonsense of Jabberwockies, of words that weren’t, and then she read you the gospel. It was all on you, you seven-year-old child, to have to make it make sense; you would be punished if you didn’t.
In Catholic school, you tore out pages of your health textbook because it contained education on sexuality and gender. In Catholic school, you made a purity promise when you weren’t yet old enough to understand what purity was. In Catholic school, they told you it is your fault your grandmother died of dementia because you declared yourself an atheist, and therefore did not pray hard enough.
So, don’t question why eternal sacraments are made at twelve-years old. Don’t forget why mourning a God you couldn’t make yourself believe in tasted of graveyards and metal at the fault of yourself. They told you that you do not know what you are made for if not for this, and you will trust them until you don’t.
Because there are other things you can believe in, and there are other things you can not. God can be a myth in the same way faeries and ghosts and witches and vampires are, and you shouldn’t feel guilt for thinking so.
Strength
Someday, you will be thirteen years old, and will want to become something else. Something different and, oh, how unique! How never-been-done-before! How condemningly different! You won’t find it all that odd at the time, and perhaps it’s the fault of the uniform nonconformity of teenager adolescence, or perhaps it’s something else; but you’ll decide that you’ll become a writer. You will learn that becoming a faerie would have been easier.
You didn’t realise how absurd it is at the time to become what you will become. And you won’t realise how fucking easy it is. You weren’t good at it, not then, not at all, but it was so easy just to simply do. You could write every day for hours, you could upload multiple times a week, you could write small novels, you could write the most you will ever write in your life. You were the faerie queen!
And then you got older.
Suddenly (or not so suddenly) everything needed to be perfect, each word, each sentence. Everything you wrote had to be the best thing you had ever written. Writing is writing. It is infrequent paragraphs, never being able to start with a blank page, always having to cannibalise from yourself because you could never write as perfectly as the time before.
This story isn’t a fairy tale, but the act of writing it is.
It’s different now.
It took you however many years to write in second person, and when you did, you didn’t stop. It was agonizingly intimate, it was a conversation, and you suddenly wrote up every thought you deemed good enough for the pages, making printed scripture into one long life story.
The Devil
You’ve never met a vampire, but I have. You’ve never seen someone become a monster, but I have. You will, and then you will walk away without blinking. Maybe not in the bedroom, in the gallery, maybe not all at once—but you’ll look at your hands on his mattress and see all your skin for all the years it took to love something like that.
He was too human, but also never enough—not in any way that mattered. You didn’t know this when you were seventeen, in his bedroom where your skin turned to rainbows of beautiful watercolours. Lucifer did not look like Lucifer when you loved him.
But there had to come a time where the light had to break, the talismans brought you back, and you realised that this is purgatory. It was time to leave.
You’ll question if this memoir is supernatural horror or if it is gospel. You’ll question if ‘Untitled’ is a satanic artifact or if it is a wayfinder.
It’s 2018 and it’s always raining outside, but here you are, always, always inside. You watch him as he bleeds from inside the bathroom. He’s left you on the bed and you want to stay there.
Blood as dark as the charcoal he sketches with is now coating his mouth, tainted black scarlet running from his lips and chin and mixing with the awful concoction of this bloodied bathroom and rotten teeth in the sink and a pseudo word for love. Perfectly porcelain white, fangs took place where teeth should be, and they look like fucking knives.
And whether it is the shock of it all or the pain of everything else, he doesn’t seem to notice, hardly moves besides panting and gripping the edge of the basin until it cracks underneath his grip the way your bones do.
“Love, are you—?”
“I’m okay," he says, voice strange. He takes his hands away from the sink and refuses to look anywhere else but the mirror. You can’t see his reflection from beside the broken door frame, but in front of you, his skin is void of colour, looking like the china dolls your sister once played with. His blood is no longer blood. It’s creating its own awful black hole in the place of your bathroom. His crazed panting has died completely by now, and the incredibly human movement of breathing has ceased along with it, shattered like the lock on the door, like the teeth in the sink that you once used to kiss. Whatever he is looking at in the mirror, you don’t think that it is something you can love. “I’m sorry I got mad for a moment. But we’re okay, right? Come here. I feel good now.”
Fuck this, you’ll come to realise, only just a little later. The next time he transforms and loves you with fangs, you’ll decide that the only blood you’ll donate wouldn’t ever be for something like him.
Pick a better monster next time.
The Lovers & The Fool
Do you believe in ghosts? Don’t answer that. I will.
You’re an adult now. Barely. You have a car and rent and a phone bill and Centrelink and adult friends and a bed. You’re done with love and vampires and teeth. You’ll tell yourself that was just all high school bullshit anyway.
There’s two people, two lovers, and they are your people. Together, you are three beautiful, awful, undying friends under a house of glass, and the world is so, so neon. You name them because you want to, naming things makes you human.
You are the Fool, and they, the Lovers. They weren’t always like that, but they are now. The Lovers fit together; they do. They fit together like identically scarred upturned hands, or eternally broken pieces of shattered brain matter that had fused together after existing apart for so very, very long. They’ve morphed without you, they let you go. The lovers have the same mouth, each belonging to the other as if they share the same taste of each other’s lips, and you wonder if they’re eyes see the same shades of neon.
It’s agonisingly intimate. You don’t want to look anymore. Two ghosts, laid out in front of you like pieces of stardust and bone marrow and glass, don’t look like friends anymore. You realise this at night-time, fallen asleep in a bed not built for three. Your bed. Your two friends. Two ghosts. They make you leave.
Oh. Okay. They love each other so much that there isn’t room for you.
So the Fool will write. She will write poetry in all lowercase letters, in condemning words with unforgivable syllables, and she will write about how Fools cannot be loved despite sharing her bed; how Lovers were somehow, agonizingly, always destined to fit together like bone. Destined together in the same way light engraves space.
The Lovers don’t want to talk anymore. There isn’t room for you, there isn’t room for you, there isn’t—
“I’ll text you ‘happy birthday’ in December, but we need space for just us two now. Lover Ghost Number 1 and I are in a relationship, so …” Lover Ghost Number 2 says.
You blink. “My birthday’s in March.”
“No, it’s not,” she says, and yeah well—
“I know. I just don’t know what to say to that.”
So, ghosts, right? You don’t them at all since you’ve known them for all your life. They had different names before they become one flesh, but they don’t remember them and you won’t ever change their mind. They look like strangers most of all only because they aren’t ones. Remember when she kissed you first? You know the way they taste, it’s seared into your organs. The two Lovers’ souls are all teeth and graveyards and meadowsweet. You’ve carried their mouths around with you since you’ve existed, since whatever supernatural force had constructed the fragmented pieces of your bodies together and you realised that you and they were made of the same paper.
And then they decided no. Your bed isn’t made for you. You are not made for them. Ghosts are people who’ve stolen your bed but never quite leave you well enough alone. This writing isn’t for the Lovers, because the words don’t exist yet. I don’t know what to say. Maybe you will make the words up, in time, but for now, you will pick your cards.
The World
Stop playing cards. Stop thinking of arcana.
Look back to the ‘Untitled’ piece that brought you here. I brought you here.
Every aspect of this piece is a crossroad, a journey. There are seven points, seven corners, seven paths, seven tarot cards, seven mythic beasts; and here they sit: inside of a weird-looking, crackling-grey glass not-a-light light. It is mirrors, trinkets, fabric, a porcelain black cat, clay, glass, wood, paint and lights; but not all of it. The rest is made of ghosts, faeries, vampires and paper playing cards, and looking into the centre of this sculpture, you will realise, that so are you. You are made of the same smithereens, the same dirt, the same devils. You’ve never understood the science of the supernatural, but maybe you can.
Maybe, you’ll find, you do.