Suits

pique coeur carreau trèfle

Children have a high capacity for focus, but they do it like cats who are about to fight: looking askance and acting uninterested while furiously studying the object. I remember as a child perceiving this as entirely passive. The thing focused on me, not the opposite. One of the problems of contemplative types is that we boggle, like a horse stopped by a white handkerchief blown across his path. A detail seems to carry more meaning than the rest, and then you’re lost to the world.

I’ve always had trouble with card games for this reason, because I find playing cards such numinous objects in themselves that I lose interest in whatever combinatorial thing has been devised to do with them. The cards are luxuriously stiff and slick, their rounded corners reminiscent of gilt-edged books with ribbon bookmarks. The backs are frequently printed in a mute pattern like you find in a book’s end pages, with designs that cannot be placed in time to the nearest century. That is the overcoat of the card when it is fully dressed. Turning it face up strips it naked, always with an element of surprise.

For me, over the years, the four suits gradually filled with half-submerged meanings, gravitating towards types of people with specific powers. I am not in the cards. I suspect the suits are a subset of a larger range that would cover all human types. Diamonds are a handsome redhead with laugh lines around his eyes, lithe and light on its feet, wearing green felt. I find it attractive but I’ve always felt diamonds wouldn’t like me. Spades are an allegory of eyebrows, the sort that look angry even in repose, like those on a female Italian or Greek film star of the fifties, beautiful yet always tragically angry. Hearts are a kind, mild relative of short stature, blandly well-disposed. Clubs are a manifestation of the idea that hair expresses intelligence by abundance, direction of growth and trajectory. A person with clubs hair would look like a mad scientist, vivid, unruly and capable of heartless honesty. If you ever ask me to play cards, I would first have to get used to these disquieting visitors.