The Tower has no chill: when circumstances wake us up—how do we then stay wakeful?

Can we hold onto the insights of crisis when we do not feel the blade of imminent threat against our necks?

My so-called Bedbound Era—“so called” because I’ve been calling it that—is thankfully, mercifully, ending. Up through last year, I was trapped in a kind of a state of living death. At my sickest, each trip a few paces down the hall to the bathroom was an epic quest, and each epic quest required hours of recovery time.

Now, basking in relief wrought by experimental medicine, my body’s innate intelligence, and time, I’ve graduated, I tell my friends from the chronic illness group chat, from bedbound to housebound, and I’m getting stronger every day. ME/CFS is a chronic condition, and I will always live with it in some form. But this period of severe illness seems to be easing. I sit outside in the sunshine in the mornings. I stand at the stove whisking polenta. I gab on the phone with friends. I climb up and down my perilous front stairs, sometimes with the support of my hands, like our four-legged mammalian ancestors, to fetch the mail—and, as the weather gets warm, to see the faces of friends and family in the warm natural light of spring. In the absence of persistent pain, the mundane details of life are pure pleasure.

Meanwhile, the body politic of which I am part is losing a game of chicken with fascism. I sometimes feel this strange sense of doubling, as if collective events are a shimmering heat mirage over the material reality of my daily life. The superimposition of dread and horror over joy. The paradox of collective catastrophe colliding with the concrete details of the mundane world. The echo of existential threat bouncing oddly off the smell of bread browning in the toaster, of tea steeping, of sunbeams casting bright squares on the floors of my apartment under the windowpanes.

Waking up

I like to think that I’m somewhat tuned into the zeitgeist of the larger organism of which I am part. But I didn’t predict the outcome of the American presidential election last November.

In large part, I see this as a reflection of my own privilege, and a kind of sleepy complacency that capitalism reinforces in individuals at every turn. Despite the extreme events that have shaken us awake to the emergency of the times we’re in—catastrophic weather events, the ongoing global pandemic, the rising tide of fascism across the world, genocide televised in real time—many of us manage to shrug off any alarm bells that aren’t blaring in our immediate vicinity, roll over, metaphorically speaking, and go back to sleep.

Now, it is impossible to stay asleep. I am vividly awakened to the fact that the United States is split into two completely different macro realities: the one I inhabit, and the one for which right-wing news functions as both projector and mirror, a portal and a gateway. Like many leftists (and liberals), I stay away from those portals because they freak me the fuck out.

The Tower has no chill

For the past few months, in the course of my regular Tarot card practice, from the blanket fort at the center of my queen-sized bed, I’ve found myself pulling—or noticing when I’ve pulled—The Tower card. That little ping in my brain—oh, you again? Intuition and synchronicity, like a psychic bell.

The Tower is, I think, the card of the Tarot’s major arcana that has the least amount of chill.

Art by Pamela Coleman Smith.

A jagged bolt of lightning bursts out of the sky, blowing a stylized crown off the top of a tall, narrow building with a kind of brutalist prison vibe in a burst of red and yellow fire. Flames also pour from the tower’s windows as grandly dressed figures, also crowned, careen, upside-down and flailing, through darkened cloudy skies toward bare jutting rock. The air itself is full of flames fashioned in the shape of the Hebrew letter yod (which Anglicans Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Coleman Smith seemed to think were okay to just throw in there with no cultural context, but whatever).

The Tower has been associated with the Biblical Tower of Babel. It is human hubris breaking against reality. Often when the Tower shows up it indicates that something that was already structurally unsound—a relationship, an actual building, tectonic plates, an unsustainable way of life—is collapsing spectacularly and completely. The Tower is a good archetype for the loss of a job that was never a good fit, or for a bursting “bubble” in a financial market, or for the shocking reveal of a truth that was there all along.

In classical Tarot interpretation, the The Tower can ultimately serve the greater good: it is a wake-up call and a corrective, cleaning up the lag between delusion and reality, adjusting for overreach. A mighty punctuation mark to a sentence that was already functionally over, a necessary culling, the cutting away interior rot or gangrenous flesh, the clearing of the old for the construction of something new.

But that isn’t much solace when we’re in the chaos of the adjustment itself, like the figures falling through the air. The most vulnerable among us may not survive the chaos and violence of a fall.

Gifts of the Tower

The last Trump presidency, combined with the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, were a powerful collective Tower moment. As the infrastructure of modernity faltered and life as we knew it ground to a stop, as we watched white supremacist and misogynist violence in action from the isolation of lockdown, a lot of people were shaken awake: some white people rallied for Black lives in a way that they hadn’t, collectively, for many years; the #metoo movement ignited and gained momentum. On a local level, mutual aid networks and mask blocs spontaneously organized; protesters and attorneys joined together to stop deportations; and there was an outpouring of support for medical workers and those on the front lines. These were the actions of a collective shaken awake.

And when the alarm bell quieted, the collective kind of drifted back to sleep. Capitalism swirled back up from the depths to grab most people and pull us back under.

Metaphors from my Bedbound Era

At the height of my Bedbound Era, my nervous system buzzing with caustic static as my immune system surged and flailed and sicc’d mast cell mediators—substances that power the immune system’s cascading aggressive actions—at my connective tissue and nervous system. I picture a mad battlefield, berserk war machines firing off into the sky, scarring the landscape, tearing great gouges into each other’s flanks, machine guns spinning like tops on squat tanks, helicopter blades colliding in space, smoke curling, mud flying, rockets splitting the sky. At such times, the apparatus of my awareness sputtered as if with shorts, but remained ruthlessly, mercilessly online. Buzzing with stress chemicals, unable to rest, unable to think, unable to process even gentle sensoria, I would lie in the quiet dark for hours or days, more bored than I have ever been in my life, carried to the very edge of my capacity to endure, and dropped over that edge—only to find that somehow, impossibly, I was still enduring. Not to be dramatic or anything.

These were, no exaggeration, the hardest times of my life. And they’re not even very satisfying to write about, in the way that some kinds of ordeals can be, because, as I’ve said before, the physical suffering of chronic illness is fucking senseless. There’s no narrative from which to draw meaning, no lesson, no story, no catharsis for reader or writer. I think about the great initiations of epic fiction and fantasy: Odysseus conning and scheming his way home through mythic Mediterranean oceans; Frodo and Sam crossing vast swathes of hostile country on their sturdy hobbit feet to cast the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom; and how, in their aftermath, these quests took on shape and meaning; they became the scaffolding for songs and stories that inspired generations of readers.

In contrast, the suffering of chronic illness is bullshit.

Suffering wakes us up

However, during this time of terrible suffering, something happened to the quality of my consciousness—and subsequently, to the way I created and worked. As I emerged from the depths of my illness, I felt wide awake, fully, deeply, unambivalently connected to my own values and desires, the vital life-force that Audre Lorde terms the erotic. My awareness was sharp and clear. I felt animated by a sense of urgency and purpose. It was as if my personality had streamlined, aligned, as if extraneous vanities, ego-distractions, worries about how I may come off or about what others may think, about whether I have the right to say thus and such or who the hell do I think I am, had been burned away. Leaving me free to just…create.

Like many of us, I struggle with insecurity and imposter syndrome, and the attendant deadweight of writers block. And suddenly, following this period of extreme restriction, I was free. I gave literally no fucks. And for the first time in my life, my writing practice flowed. Consistently and cleanly. I felt like a clear, open channel. The work was fire, and as my body began to gain strength, I had only the offer space and oxygen and for it to burn a clean swathe across the page. My vain and fretful ego finally just got out of the way, and in the space work began to emerge, as if by magic. The fraughtness, the procrastination, the preciousness and handwringing and indulgent fuckery that clung to the good ship creativity like barnacles, slowing her down to the point where she was often functionally grounded, seemed to have fallen away. I began work on a memoir. I wrote feverishly, publishing essays to my Substack, without fail, every other week. And there was a kind of rhythm and easy grace to the way I worked.

But, as my strength returned, that feeling of streamlined clarity began to fade, and the fraughtness and fuckery and mental blocks started to creep back in. As if my traumas and insecurities are swirling up from the deep waters of my unconscious to grab hold of me. I found myself writing less and worrying more. Watching more bad TV. Texting my bad-news ex for the dopamine hits. Wasting precious life-energy on trivia in a way that would horrify my sick self.

“We meet death fully alive”: integrating the gifts of The Tower

Last year, during my early convalescence, I met with a grief group on Zoom every Sunday morning. We were six former strangers who gathered to read Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow together, using the book as a kind of an anchor for what essentially became a process group, in which we collectively held compassionate space for each member to speak about our personal experiences navigating grief and trauma, healing and relationship, integration and letting go.

The title of this section is lifted from chapter seven on Weller’s book, in which he speaks to something that’s very close to the kind of streamlining and clarity that I’m talking about as a consequence of fully comprehending the reality of death. Weller sees this profound realignment with our most basic values and priorities as a gift of death—as an upside and after effect of a brushes with mortality.

As I get further out from the depths of my health crisis and find myself struggling with writers block again, feeling the friction of petty, everyday irritations—restlessness and torpor, craving and annoyance, insecurity and doubt—what the Buddha called the Five Hindrances that stand between the human mind and its enlightened nature, fwiw—I struggled to hold onto the sharp clarity, focus, and vivid aliveness that I brought back with me from my underworld journey.

So here’s my question: How can we integrate the clarity and urgency, the alignment with our deepest values, that emerges during those times when everything is falling apart? Can we—as individuals, as a collective—hold onto insights that Tower moments offer when we do not feel the blade of imminent threat against our necks? Can we use these insights to inform the world we are building and rebuilding without maintaining a constant state of emergency? How do you remember clarifying moments in times that are calm?

As my personal crisis quiets, and the collective crisis escalates, I sit with this question. I don’t know the answer.

Meet me in the comments!

I would love to hear your thoughts on Tower moments and waking up, on the senselessness (or backhanded gifts) of chronic illness, or anything else this brought up for you.