Salvador Dalí's Tarot Deck

Apropos of a past post about my collection of Tarot cards here, I am excited that just yesterday, German art book publisher Taschen began selling Salvador Dalí's legendary Tarot deck.

Taschen says:
"Legend has it that when preparing props for the James Bond film Live and Let Die, producer Albert Broccoli commissioned Surrealist maestro Salvador Dalí to create a custom deck of tarot cards. Inspired by his wife Gala, who nurtured his interest in mysticism, Dalí eagerly got to work, and continued the project of his own accord when the contractual deal fell through.

The work was published in a limited art edition in 1984 that has since long sold out, making Dalí the first renowned painter to create a completely new set of cards. Drawing on Western masterpieces from antiquity to modernity (including some of his own), Dalí seamlessly combined his knowledge of the arcane with his unmistakable wit. The result is a surreal kaleidoscope of European art history."

Along with the cards themselves (in both Spanish and English, of course), Taschen includes a booklet by renowned German tarot author Johannes Fiebig which features an introduction to Dalí’s life and the project’s making-of, a comprehensive explanation of each card’s composition and its meaning, and step-by-step instructions on how to perform readings.

https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/art/all/44640/facts.dali_tarot.htm

"In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See..." by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

In honor of National Poetry Month, I will be presenting special works by selected poets each Monday in April.

And let's start this month with a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, legendary poet, artist, publisher, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, who just celebrated his 100th birthday on March 24, 2019!

In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See...
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’
They writhe upon the page
in a veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
bent statues bats wings and beaks
slippery gibbets
cadavers and carnivorous cocks
and all the final hollering monsters
of the
‘imagination of disaster’
they are so bloody real
it is as if they really still existed

And they do

Only the landscape is changed

They still are ranged along the roads
plagued by legionnaires
false windmills and demented roosters
They are the same people
only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness

The scene shows fewer tumbrils
but more strung-out citizens
in painted cars
and they have strange license plates
and engines
that devour America