My metal detector is with me all of the time.

As the attentive reader may have inferred from my frequent references to him in recent posts, I have been rereading John Opsopaus's Pythagorean Tarot. In the early days of the Web, Opsopaus's was one of the very first sites to deal in any detail with the Tarot, and so when a random hunch moved me to google altavista "tarot," Opsopaus's highly idiosyncratic hand-drawn versions, together with the formidably erudite commentary accompanying them, served as my introduction to the cards. Later the content of the site was published as a deck of cards with a 480-page handbook, which I eventually bought a decade or so later, more for old times' sake and as a gesture of appreciation than anything else. The cards themselves are not much to my taste, and that lack of rapport makes actually reading with them out of the question, but I do dip into the book and its parent website from time to time.

Today, while I was reading Opsopoaus's commentary on the sixth Arcanum -- called by him, in accordance with the pre-Marseille tradition of Italy, not "The Lover(s)" but simply "Love" -- a song suddenly came into my head which I hadn't listened to in years, one that was released in the same year that the original Pythagorean Tarot website was published: "Metal Detector" by They Might Be Giants.

The song is about a guy at the beach who is ignoring everything around him -- seashells, seagulls, volleyball games, "bathing beauty dolls" -- because he's completely focused on using his metal detector to find things underground. "I've got something to help you understand," he says, and "then everything on the top will just suddenly stop seeming interesting." And this is his whole life: "My metal detector is with me all of the time."

What made me think of that? Well, here's an excerpt of what Opsopaus has to say about Love:

This is no ordinary marriage, but an alchemical conjunction of brother and sister. Upon its consummation the masculine poles (consciousness, thought, intuition) will be destroyed, dissolved in the subconscious mother sea; this represents the dissolution that must precede the rejuvenation of the masculine elements. The divine child will consume the mother's substance while it grows in her womb, and she will die in birth, thus obliterating the feminine poles (unconsciousness, feeling, sensation). The child, however, will survive, and manifest a well-tempered balance of all oppositions, thus reincarnating both parents.

To paraphrase William Blake: Children of a future age, reading this indignant page, know that in a former time, Love, sweet Love, was thought a metaphor for some sort of abstract Jungian-alchemical rigmarole! The Tarot is, ultimately, a tool for examining and contemplating the human condition in all its various aspects. When such bedrock human realities as Love are being used as fodder for symbolical schemata, we seem to have entered Metal Detector land, where all natural, human meaning is nothing but a distraction from the real business of finding something shiny and inorganic under the surface.

Regular readers will of course be well aware that my metal detector is with me all of the time, too, and the main purpose of this post is to serve as a reminder to myself -- of what has real value, and what will in the end be cast to the moles and to the bats.