Two cups, two hearts

The Deuce of Cups, together with its Anglo-French alter ego the Deuce of Hearts, recently came up, in "Deuce of Cups, seal of grace." Today I was motorcycling through an unfamiliar part of Taichung and passed a tea shop with this printed on the exterior wall:

The Chinese means "After you drink one cup, you'll go on to have another." However, the character that should mean "go on" has been replaced with a homophone, a noun meaning "order, sequence," which is ungrammatical here but is one of the characters used in the name of the tea shop. That type of pun is common in advertising here. Funnily, a literal translation of the characters used makes sense in English but not Chinese -- "After you drink one cup, you'll 'order' another" -- because our English noun order doubles as a verb which makes sense in the context of having another cup of tea. It's highly unusual to find a Chinese pun that can be so straightforwardly rendered in English.

But what caught my eye was the English: "Two cups are the rhythm." In a split second, my mind had gone from cups to hearts and from rhythm to beat, arriving at the 1983 U2 song "Two Hearts Beat as One."

The lyrics reinforce the Cups/Hearts connection by referencing the Fool -- the only Major Arcanum to appear both in Tarot decks with Cups and in poker decks with Hearts. Correspondences between the Tarot and poker decks, and particularly between Cups and Hearts, are a major theme in the Tim Powers novel Last Call. As explained in "Last Call, the fat man, Lady Luck, and Dyaco," one of the syncs that prompted me to read Last Call was hearing the Post Malone song "Losers," which begins thus:

Last callers, last chancers
Nine-to-fivers, truckers, dancers

The U2 song repeats the following lines, with minor variations, no fewer than seven times:

I said I can't stop the dance
Maybe this is my last chance

In the context of the suit of Cups, "nine-to-fivers" -- those who have gone from the Nine of Cups to the Five -- could certainly be described as "losers." No background in divination is needed here; the images speak for themselves.

What does the poor schlimazel in the Five still have, though? Two cups.