AUTHOR’S NOTE: All too often, the cards pulled for a tarot reading amount to little more than “visual noise” when we first try to relate them to the question or topic of interest.

Readers must employ noise reduction (typically some kind of selective seeing) in coaxing the more significant insights to poke their heads above the static so we can transfix them with our predictive techniques (envision, if you will, “tarot whack-a-mole”). Seasoned practitioners have their own ways of separating the wheat from the chaff and don’t need any coaching about getting to the heart of the matter. Here I’m proposing that we “stun it into submission.”

I recently encountered the scientific concept of statistical “crud,” which posits that everything in the Universe is connected with everything else, but to such a negligible degree of commonality in some cases that efforts to draw meaningful parallels between the motes of data are prone to gross error and ultimately doomed to failure. (You can’t analyze what you can’t detect and faith is a poor substitute for measurement, hence “crud.”) The expression is useful shorthand for what I’ve always called “getting down to the bug-dust” (or minuscule details) when performing divination. I don’t believe this fugitive source of knowledge is riddled with error, it is just minutely granular, requiring a great deal of finesse to extract its testimony.

I once wrote an essay that addressed the surface tension that must be overcome when trying to rise above the prosaic dimensions of the matter at hand into a more rarefied region of mystical speculation. In the present instance, the awareness is not hovering above but is instead percolating up from below and we must unearth it in any way we can. The sweet spot of the title often presents itself when we apply a little force of will in digging it out of the minutiae. It can be the proverbial “tough nut to crack” but it is always worth the effort to wrestle it into giving up its secrets.

That content won’t necessarily yield to the gentle persuasions of intuition because it’s made of sterner stuff that demands analytical diligence to get at the sequestered evidence. Traditional definitions are a reasonable place to start, but more must be made of them than a simple stack of keywords. Think of it as a “bricks-and-mortar” proposition: established wisdom supplies the bricks while inspiration, imagination and ingenuity furnish the mortar that binds the symbolic structure together. In this way the storyteller can move right in and feel at home without having to decorate extensively with intuitive supposition.

I’m after a taut narrative and not a Dickensian excursion into the excesses that can attend too much creative extemporizing. I’m also no fan of the squishy “marshmallow mode” of tarot reading: sticky-sweet and all good. When I’m not being entirely pragmatic in a fortune-telling way, I’m philosophical in my approach. I’m more aligned with the old Gary Larson cartoon that showed two grizzly bears. One was chomping on the head and shoulders of a hunter and said to the other “I love these things, soft on the outside, crunchy in the middle.”

In my estimation, the best readings are agreeably approachable in external appearance (in other words, the cards hang together and make anecdotal sense) but reveal strong internal character when subjected to the “X-ray vision” of a perceptive analysis. That’s my lean-and-mean style, at least in part; the rest of the time I’m a footloose wanderer in the wilds of prognostication, constantly turning over rocks to see what crawls out from underneath, mole-whacking mallet at the ready.