Gaga
21 January 2010
I happened to talk to Joanna just now, and she said she was (still) watching many Lady Gaga videos, so I thought I would watch these videos again myself. Here are Bad Romance and Paparazzi; they are good, particularly if you want to look at many exotic images very quickly with no possibility of understanding why. There is something frightening to me about these videos. Of course there are many good reasons why they should be frightening: the grotesque and uncanny moments are too numerous and too obvious to mention. But there is a particular kind of frightening that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I thought it over while stir-frying, and then I had it: it is the devil.
I used to spend a certain amount of time looking at tarot cards. I never was interested in divination, because who cares about what’s going to happen; but I found them useful as expressions of ideas or movements or states of mind that we don’t have easy words for. Here is the devil from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. 
This deck was made by and for occultists in the twentieth century, and is perhaps not absolutely the best, but it tends to be obvious with the symbolism and so is easy to read. There are many other decks.
Now, about the devil. Do not by any means consider me an expert, but to me he is about rich creation (fecundity, procreation, aggressive creation), perhaps uncontrolled or overreaching. He is not a bad card, necessarily, but troubling. Compare him to the magician. 
The magician is also a creative type: he channels the energy of the heavens. He receives this energy via his wand (you can see it is pointing towards the heavens) and then articulates it into the substance of the material world (all the junk on the table in front of him). The devil, you will note, also has a wand of sorts, but his wand is a flaming torch, and he holds it in his left hand, and it is pointed down, towards the earth. The things the devil creates do not come from the heavens. They come from below; perhaps they come from people.
Is it bad that things can be created by people instead of by the heavens? I’ve always had difficulty with that. The people on the card are in chains, but maybe that is the ordinary condition of people. The card after the devil is the tower (this time from the Marseilles deck). 
That’s what happens to the creative works of people. Well, maybe it can be rebuilt.
Do you see the fear in the devil card? It’s not that he’s trying to get you; it has to do with the way you like him, the part of you that likes him most. I don’t know any more than that. I wonder if I am in a devil phase and will soon suffer the fate of the tower. Or I wonder whether the civilization around me is in this phase, perhaps since the sixties … or since the twenties … or since the Industrial Revolution. Maybe these phases last a long time. Anyway it is frightening, and the fear tastes the same to me as the fear in Lady Gaga.
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