Tahir Shah's blog

http://tahir-shah.blogspot.com

The very recent and very visible and audible promotional campaign for David Grann's The Lost City of Z.: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon has had me looking at my copy of Tahir Shah's House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City, but I haven't actually opened it to see if it is the same lost city that sent Percy Fawcett off into the jungle, or another one. (The blog post copied below names his city, which is not the lost city of Z., but I didn't know that until just now, and have been resisting opening House of the Tiger King ever since hearing Grann's interview on NPR a couple of weeks ago.)

Shah doesn't mention Percy Fawcett on his list of explorers who have interested him, but all during February he was handing out practical advice for pursuing your own quest...a topic that he says that "for some reason" he found himself thinking a great deal about. (He began writing weeks before Grann's book tour started.)

As with his useful posts on pursuing a career in freelance writing, his instructions for traveling upcountry are full of useful information. But why do these two posts, extracted from the longer list of instructions, make me feel that I have read this somewhere before?:

"The quest for exploration begins with a goal. And it's something that you have to consider with extreme care. I am a believer in setting goals high. Astronomically so. Because the bigger and more challenging it is, the greater the journey will be. And you don't need to be a brain scientist to understand why. The more impossible to target, the greater the problems, and the more insurmountable the task of drawing your team and yourself forward week after week. I have detailed some of my quests in my books. There have been others, too, that I have never written about. Some quests are best kept to oneself. Equally, I find that a great explorative undertaking begins as a kind of personal crusade. It's something that soaks into your blood and fills you with a crazed and even deranged fervour. So when you are looking for the spark, the catalyst, to get you going, ask yourself if it's something that you'd get up out of a soaking wet sleeping bag after a terrible night's sleep for... are you totally obsessed with it? If you're not, then go back and search for something else. My personal quests have included a search for the great lost city of the Incas, Paititi, in the Madre de Dios jungle, and for the so-called 'Birdmen' of the Upper Amazon, who use the hallucinogen Ayahuasca to give a sense of flight. Those journeys were harsh, and taught me a great deal about running an expedition, about managing people, and pushing myself. I rate them both highly on the steep learning curve scale. The important thing when you are deciding where to go is to look for that hook, that point of passion. But, equally, the other thing that's so extremely vital is not to ask the opinions of others. You'll find that all your sensible friends will frown on you and try to either poke fun, or talk you out of it. So, make a pledge from the beginning that you won't ask advice, but rather broadcast the fact that you are already in preparation. Never breathe a word until you have a non-refundable, non-exchangeable airline ticket to a distant destination in your hands."


"This is how it works. You have your ticket, a massive goal in mind, some second-hand equipment, and a pocket full of cash. In high spirits you go to the airport, board the plane and, at 38,000 feet, you find yourself munching an inflight meal. You wash it down with a passably bad mini bottle of white wine, and you get thinking. Well, rather than thinking, it's worry. The pilot announces that you're beginning the descent, and you feel the air pressure change. Next thing you know, you've had your passport stamped by an enormous official, and you have a baggage trolley full of your stuff... You push out into the waves of unfamiliar faces, everyone and anyone offering to be your taxi driver. And you think to yourself -- 'Oh my God... what have I done?!' At this point it's important NOT to panic. Really... believe me. I've been in that spot a thousand times. I'm going to tell you here what to do... how to join up the dots. The first thing to do is to get yourself to a base camp of some sort. Find a hotel room, but in a reasonably rundown area. Don't go too plush. Go plush and you kill the contact networks off. So you find some dive. It doesn't have to be too cockroach-infested, but a bit of discomfort will ease you into something that's going to get very familiar. Go get your hair cut at some low-end place. Maybe take a few taxis around, short trips... have some coffees, at different places... go to some bars. Check out the local people, get talking to them if you can. Get an idea of how you're going to plug in. It's in these first few hours that your sensors are on hyper-mode and that's a good thing. Use the fact that you have fresh eyes. Let people scoop you up and take you to the next contact. Don't be afraid. Get ready to exploit your greatest weapon... Zigzag travel. By this I mean that everyone will take you to the next step. OK, some might take you three steps backwards, but you'll be all the stronger for it. But the main thing is to keep your head calm, and remember your goal. You may not have any idea at all how to get started, but believe -- really believe -- and everything will begin to configure around you."

Yes, this is how it works. And everyone will take you to the next step, although the three steps backwards may take a decade or two to get over.

for the centenary of the Pamela Colman Smith designs for A. E. Waite's Tarot

Seeing the U.S. paperback of Kate Mosse's Sepulchre prominently displayed at Borders Books yesterday (I had come to buy the Rider Press edition of the Original Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot) reminded me of how much influence the Tarot has had on novelists who frequently didn't know very much about it.

T. S. Eliot, you will recall, made up some cards for the Tarot reading in The Waste Land, and well, all of us know the authors who have made up their own categories altogether. (Mosse's pop novel features a fictitous Tarot deck—for which she commissioned eight endpaper illustrations—in which the characters were designed to resemble the ancestral players in what for Mosse has become a standard plot device—absolutely contemporary individuals who discover parallel narratives in an earlier time period.)

This set me to thinking about Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies and Charles Williams' The Greater Trumps, and Robertson Davies' novels featuring the Tarot, and this led to the inevitable web page that inadequately summarizes (how could it summarize them adequately?) many of these uses of various forms of the Tarot deck: http://www.ata-tarot.com/resource/arts.html

So we have the Visconti deck in Calvino, and author-invented decks by authors who, as with another novel I discussed recently, should not be so much as mentioned in the same paragraph, much less the same sentence. (I wouldn't mind linking Robertson Davies, but if I recall, his cards are the actual ones, not made-up ones.)

John Crowley's use of the Tarot in Little, Big, overlooked by the author of the web page cited (whose tastes run more to Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley), can be found discussed here: http://www.littlebig25.com/PerpetualCrowleyInterview.html

A quick websearch reveals (to my surprise) that Mosse's Sepulchre is the second of her trilogy of "timeslip adventure novels" so we have another excuse for an article at some future date, if nobody picks up on this obvious topic in conjunction with the centenary of the Pamela Colman Smith designs for the Tarot that so influenced Eliot and others. (It would be interesting to investigate who the "others" are, since the illustrations that come to mind from the covers or endpapers of the novels in question all show older versions or involve fictitious decks selectively reproduced—Charles Williams is the obvious example since his membership in Waite's successor organization to the Order of the Golden Dawn would have been an intrinsic link to the Waite-Smith version.)

Somebody could probably make some money writing popular articles about this, but Jerry Cullum will not be that author since these days I seem unable to write anything but two thousand word analytical blog posts. If someone takes the idea and runs with it, I hope they will have the decency to cite their sources. I won't be at all surprised, however, to see a causally unrelated article, because the notion is not all that hard to conceive. In fact, I won't be at all surprised to find articles already in print discussing the question in greater detail than the web page I cited above. It's an obvious topic, as I've told you three times now.