The connection of sex and death is what The Death Card is all about. We westerners see "Death" as a frightening card because we often see Death as an end, and we hate for things to come to an end. However, in other traditions, Death is just a natural and important, if sad part of an on-going cycle. In a karmic sense, you die so that you may be reborn. Winter comes so that there can be a spring, and we can only appreciate what we have when we know that there is loss. The Death card signals such things. This is a time of change. Time for something to end; but time also for something new to begin.
Another movie memory, "Ode to Billy Joe", the film poster is the background for the card. I was older, maybe 10-12ish?, old enough to understand the film by a bit more than half. The movie seemed like a love story about kids too young to be thinking about love, which I could get into and understand. The boy in the film was Robbie Benson, and I remember being very taken with his dark hair and blue eyes. The setting was rural, girls seething beneath modest cotton dresses, trapped in harsh lives . . . It right up my alley. My dad was zonked out behind me on the couch, which is usually how I got to watch late-night movies over my head, I'd sneak in and change the channel, hunker down in front of the screen, my mom always a bit too afraid of my dad to enter rooms he'd be in thus she'd not catch me.
At a certain point in the film, something happens. My mind groped to understand it, out on a limb. My mom was an artist who was always taking classes and for models she used Playboy mags, which were readily laying around the house through my entire early childhood. She assumed, I guess, that I'd not be interested in what I was too young for - like leaving loaded guns aroud, hahahaha, my mother's parental instincts were akimbo to say the least. And I'd played plenty of "doctor" with that Eric kid across the street up in his willow tree so I had all the basic anatomic principles, suffice to say. But watching this movie was my first exposure to the thoughts "boys doing stuff . . . with other boys? and paid women? or?". I remember a shot of fear right under my ribcage, and I twisted around an odd sad fierce protective jealousy, identifying with girl in the film, who wanted to touch that boy, but someone else got to touch him instead, and it hurt him somehow. She should have touched him first, so maybe he wouldn't have been drunk and some kind of lonely ("horny" was the word I didn't have yet) that night, but she wasn't up to it (yet). She tried to touch him afterwards, but it was too late. Too late for him, he killed himself. But she just walked right out of town and out of her crappy life then, freedom just another word for nothing left to lose.
Collaged in is corpse of smitten kitten, who had to die (cz who ever heard of a cat wearing sexy spankin underwear?). And the ghost word "Joe", for the boy I knew who killed himself when we were 16. He was very beautiful, and a gentle shy that was odd in a footballing teen. I remember my first thought when I heard of his death was, Maybe I should have touched him first. First before what though? I couldn't guess; Too late anyway. So for his dead self I wrote my first prize-winning essay, the piece of writing that would get me to college and thus save my life just in the nick of time.
Bobbie Gentry - Ode to Billie Joe. The song came first, a folk ballad that was popular in the late 60's, and was subsequently covered half to death, oddly by jazz musicians mostly, like Oscar Peterson and Louis Prima, and by Ike & Tina Turner. The movie screenplay was basically another cover of the song. I love the part where the mother asks Why aren't you eating?, that always slays me for some reason.
VIRGO There's something marvelous forming in your life -- a realization that you are an integral part of the flow. If you take action, everyone will adjust. If you don't take action, nothing will change.
