Eight of Swords, Black Adam, twirling girls in green costumes, and attentional invisibility

Three weeks ago, on September 1, I went to where I’d parked my motorcycle and found that someone had left a single playing card, the Eight of Spades, face up on the pavement next to the bike.

When I saw it, I immediately identified it with its Tarot equivalent, the Eight of Swords. (The English suit name comes from the Italian word for “swords,” which is spade.) This is not exactly a card of good omen.

After Black Adam came up in yesterday’s post, “Eggers and Red Sons,” I watched some trailers for the Dwayne Johnson movie Black Adam on YouTube.

This one caught my eye because of a scene where Adam is standing there, and lots of long rods fly through the air and embed themselves in the ground all around him, much like the swords on the Tarot card.

It turns out that the one who makes this happen is a superheroine called Cyclone, who wears a green costume, spins around like a tornado, and can control the wind.

This twirling girl in a green costume led me back to my November 2023 post “Giant slugs, twirling girls in green costumes, pools in the west of Ireland, frenzied dancing, renovated megaliths, invisibles among us — you name it, we’ve got it!” One of that post’s two twirling girls in green is from an Iris Murdoch novel, and the passage I quote from that novel also mentions a character named Adam.

That post also discusses attentional invisibility — the idea that you can be effectively “invisible” if you can cause others not to notice you or pay attention to you. Less than an hour after rereading that post, I read this in Words of the Faithful:

[T]he evil [ones] that hunted them [were] distracted by their own vanity, as ever is their kind, sick and blind to what is good.

Let this be as cunning-magic to you – all readers hereof! – that in good – being, doing, contemplating – invisible you become, to workers of dark-malice in spirit or flesh, thus you may confound all your enemies, so the mystery of Tom Bombadil’s mastery may in part be revealed, for he is good; and has been since the founding of Arda-in-land.

According to Pengolodh, you can be invisible to your enemies by being, doing, and contemplating that which does not interest them (that is, good), thereby striking them with attentional blindness with respect to yourself.

This reminds me of a “joke” Claire told me on July 6 about one of my online acquaintances. The joke was expressed non-verbally (though it was identified verbally as a “joke”), but this is how I explained it in an email to the person it was about:

The joke is that you have boring tastes (like Bert from Sesame Street) but that this is secretly a strength rather than a weakness. Presented with a blooming buzzing confusion of competing stimuli, you instinctively focus your attention on the least flashy and often end up discovering something others would have missed. You pick up a boring rock for no particular reason and take it home. It turns out to be a geode.

This guy’s enemies will never be invisible to him.