The original version of The Eyelash Tarot Experiment was well overlength, mainly because of my chronic prolixity habit and tendency to over-associate, over-write, prevaricate, complicate and generally bollock on. That the draft was nearly twice as long as the specification has everything to do with me and nothing to do with Eyglo.
We did manage to reduce the wordcount by being ruthless with the text, cutting any extraneous gristle and removing a lot of descriptions of cards and packs.
We did, though, have to make some other tougher decisions. One was the removal of an account of how tarot got me into trouble for ‘messing with dark forces’ when I was at university, something I had presented as a creative writing prompt (curses are best shared after all).
To celebrate the publication of The Eyelash Tarot Experiment, available to order now from Calque Press, just for you I’ve cut and pasted Messing with Dark Forces, below. It initially appeared in the deck of cards at the end of the essay as The High Priestess.
‘Messing with dark forces’: In 1990, when I was a second-year undergraduate at St Anne’s College, Oxford, a friend (codename, Captain Bullshit) confessed to me he was being haunted by a poltergeist. It had moved a chair, etc. I read his Tarot. We decided to try and contact the spirits. What followed was a black week, known forever in the annuls of the ancient university as the Black Week.
This involved two séances in the grottiest, dingiest terraced house in Jude the Obscure north Oxford; the Ouija glass moving and talking in English and Hindi; us telling the moving glass to ‘give us a sign’ and a for-sale sign we’d nicked and propped up in the kitchen falling over right that moment; being too sacred to go upstairs, hair on my arms going full porcupine; the builder next-door who looked like Ross Kemp in Ultimate Force breaking in and trying to kill us; hearing him smash bottles down in the kitchen as we pushed a wooden-framed settee up against the bedroom door and we were on our knees, shouldering the settee and his fists were exploding through the panels above us like he’s Jack out of The Shining and the splinters and paint-chippings that raining over us until his partner appeared and made him stop; the extremely hostile police officers who came after the break-in and tried to arrest us for having nicked signage in our house; an Australian-Transylvanian librarian called Zoltan who led us to the Oxford Parapsychology Unit; the Oxford Parapsychology Unit and their Addams Family mansion on Banbury Road; a tall glass that kinked in the middle as Roderick from the OPU, who looked like Shaggy out of Scooby Doo was talking about his only paranormal experience was when water had jumped up at him out of the toilet bowl in a house in Glastonbury when actual voices in the walls had convinced Ross Kemp to kick our front door in and try to kill us; the stones thrown at my window and the man out there at the gate; another of our group reliving a ghost encounter in Ireland; social contagion, mass Salem-style hysteria at St Anne’s, and being reported for unsettling the student body (kids were dreaming of Captain Bullshit talking bullshit in their dreams) and told by higher authority to stop messing with dark forces (or, my dad, remembering a Dennis Wheatley novel, said ‘Don’t mess with dark forces’, when he came up to fix the door that was kicked off during the Assault on 42 Kingston Road by Ross Kemp); the sky appearing to be made of glass; some moments during first love, last rites, the songs The Same Deep Water as You and Homesick by The Cure …
This is your creative writing prompt of the day. Please rummage. I don’t want it in my head anymore.
The Eyelash Tarot Experiment: available now from Calque Press.
