First a bit of personal drama. Pseudo-John Cleese intones gravely: “Tonight on ‘Too Much Information,’ we explore the frontiers of stomach flu.” In the wee hours I woke up with a mild fever that went downhill to the point that I began to feel that glottal “Barfish” (not “Bar-fish,” you’re thinking of Douglas Adams’ “Babel-Fish;” move the hyphen to make it look like “Dwarf-ish”) was my native tongue (the emphasis was clearly on “getting the tongue out of the way”), with its intense, visceral, comic-book-style death-rattle “Arrrrgh!” (or more precisely “Blarrrrgh!”) followed by a weak hiccup or two: “urk . . . urk . . .” with nary a pause for breath. After five rather profound episodes I was able to go back to sleep. This morning my stomach is empty and I’m somewhat dehydrated, but I can sit up with a glass of water, hence this addendum; no coffee though, which is a fatal blow to my vitality. Fortunately I wrote this essay yesterday before the “visit from ralph.” On to the (undigested) meat (if you can “stomach” it after the above)!

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In her book, Holistic Tarot, Benebell Wen presents a lengthy argument for recording all useful aspects of one’s tarot experience, both significant and routine, in a written journal, and she includes an exhaustive litany of justifications and recommendations for doing so. My purpose here is to gently take issue with that excessively anal approach, since I have a great deal of respect for Benebell. She’s a Facebook friend and, as Ferdy Mayne of Fearless Vampire Killers fame would have put it in his best faux-Transylvanian accent (he was German), “we commoonicate” on occasion.

One of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits is the one in which a waitress takes an order for decaffeinated coffee from a customer, scowls disapprovingly, and shouts to the counterman “Joe! Another cuppa “why-bother!” Some of the rituals we attach to our practice of tarot reading amount to just so much “why-bother.” Many I consider to be fanciful trifles in a “theater of tarot” sense, while others are plainly a waste of time.

While journaling doesn’t quite ascend to the status of inane pursuit, it can be a case of far too much effort expended for too little benefit received. In the past I’ve made a couple of false starts at it but soon found that I tended to write way too much and never revisited any of it for future reference. Modern computer apps make it more convenient to keep an economical running history of our personal discoveries, and for beginners this can be a way to organize their thoughts without having to constantly dip into tarot books. But it can become entirely too iterative (not to mention boring in the extreme). While journaling may sound reasonable, in practice it can be a crushing time-sink and a “royal pita.”

By way of full disclosure, I should mention that I’ve always possessed a powerful faculty of recollection (although age is starting to erode it), so I’ve never had to write things down to remember them (well, except for grocery lists longer than three items). I’ve accumulated a broad and deep inventory of tarot-related information that I keep at the tip of my tongue (even though that tongue tends to wag as effusively as my writing expounds, at least when it comes to all things divinatory).

But in thinking about it, I recognize that the content of this blog, which has been piling up for more than seven years, really constitutes my private tarot journal, one that I’ve exposed to public scrutiny, and its preparation has been inspiring and rewarding (at least for me) rather than irksome. In writing for publication, I’ve had to seek out topics that are hopefully of interest to online readers, and I have to do it on a daily basis to keep up my regular output. The scope has included everything that Wen mentions and then some, from book-learning to practical experience; from personal observations and opinions to intuitive flashes of insight; from deck and book reviews to spread creation and documented example readings.

The digital camera makes it a snap (pun mercifully ignored) to keep a visual record of our efforts, letting us avoid the agony of writing down the minute and tedious details of every deck and spread used, every card pulled and every scrap of descriptive text for each reading. I don’t have to chronicle anything beyond the written narrative for the querent’s benefit. This is tremendously liberating, and to be accurate, I have gone back and looked at much of this material, particularly when I’m writing a new essay or performing another reading on the same subject.

I love to write, but emphatically not in the service of rote learning about concepts that should come naturally to anyone who has a calling for working with the tarot. It should “feel right” without having to drive home every point by nailing it down so it won’t get away. Memorizing keywords may feel stifling when imaginative free-association beckons us, but having to keep a record of everything is the “kiss of death.” There should be a middle-ground (as I’ve found in blogging) that lets us take pleasure in such creative exertion and doesn’t force us to undergo learning as a form of torture. Most of us had our fill of that in school.